Script To Screen: “A Few Good Men”
Perhaps the most memorable scene from the 1992 drama A Few Good Men, screenplay by Aaron Sorkin based on his play.
Here is the screenplay version of the scene:
The movie version of the scene:
The dialogue is almost verbatim in the movie. For you budding directors out there, track the cameras shots, especially the use of close-ups and medium shots.
The interesting thing is a few scenes previous to this one, Kaffee lays out precisely what his goal is:
In effect, Sorkin tells us precisely where the story is head. What he doesn’t reveal is how Kaffee is going to get Jessep there. And that… is good writing.
One of the 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 series on Go Into The Story where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.
Comment Archive
For more articles in the Script To Screen series, go here.
