Script To Screen: “The Deer Hunter”

The end scene in the 1978 movie The Deer Hunter.

Setup: Fellow soldiers and friends gather to commemorate the death of one of their own Nick.

Here is the scene from the movie:

In contrast to the script, there is only one side of dialogue before the singing of “God Bless America”, a line from Steven’s wife Angela. She says, “It’s been such a gray day.” It’s an awkward line, both a mundane comment compared to the serious matter of burying Nick and a description of the group’s somber mood. All of the dialogue from the script? Gone. Instead, the focus is on — first — humming the song, then the group joining together singing it in unison. It’s a bittersweet and ironic moment considering how America’s involvement in the Vietnam War has impacted this small community of people.

The movie ends with a toast to Nick and the raising of glasses, so in effect what the movie does is invert the scripted scene, drop most of the dialogue and allow the actors to play the scene primarily through the looks they exchange or avoid catching.

Sometimes in movies, less is more, and I find this is especially true about dialogue. There’s nothing more than need be said, indeed, can be said about the tragedy of Nick’s death. His descent into madness and eventual suicide by Russian roulette is incomprehensible to the point of being unspeakable.

I’ll see you in comments for a discussion of this terrific scene from The Deer Hunter.

One of the single best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a Go Into The Story series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

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