Let The Audience Do The Work

(Yep, it's another Signal vs. Noise-style missive. I'm not sure why these are coming to me; some kind of pent-up frustration, I guess. And it should be noted that, despite the philosophy I'm imparting here, I've done the opposite of what I'm saying time and again, and I continue to do so. In other words, this is just as much for me as anyone else.)

Here's an idea, cribbed from Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest:

Instead of doing so much, why don't you do just a little?

Put another way: do you need all that exposition yer slangin'? How little can you get away with? The human mind -- the audience's mind -- is built to find patterns and make connections. It's always working, even when it seems like it isn't, and it's always looking for clues to make sense of the world -- or your film. Why work so hard to lay out every character, every relationship, every moment of plot, when there are minds out there in the audience who will do that automatically? It's like that NASA project to scan the universe for alien life -- why try to crunch all those numbers (which'll take forever) when you can have millions of people crunch some of the numbers with a screensaver?

An anecdote: My wife and I watched the Michael Mann thriller Collateral last year on DVD. Unbeknownst to either of us, we somehow started the film at chapter two (where we see Tom Cruise enter the office building), completely skipping what we would later discover was nearly 13 minutes of film. Were we confused by what was happening? That was the funny thing -- not in the least. It was completely intelligible. And it was a pretty exciting beginning, to boot: the film started in media res, and before we knew what was going on, Tom Cruise was holding Jamie Foxx hostage. Going back over the beginning after it ended, we were surprised (and grateful) that we skipped having to hear Foxx explain his lifelong dream twice in a row.

Was it perfect? No -- in fact, there was clearly a kind of emotional hole in the narrative, as we missed Foxx making a connection with Jada Pinkett Smith. But it was never in doubt that Foxx cared about Smith, and wanted to save her from Cruise. A little rewriting could have saved a lot of tedium.

How much can you cut from your script? How far can you pare it down before it's unintelligible? Is it possible to go too far? (A: Yes. For all its austere glory, Primer could use just a smeench more exposition.) But again, remember: an audience does not go into a theater tabula rasa. They're bringing their thoughts, memories, feelings... their entire life experience into that theater with them. Let them use that experience to fill in the spaces you've left intentionally blank.

And what, exactly, is the upside of this? If all this exposition is going to be cut out, what's going to take its place?

Simple.

Anything and everything about the characters that has nothing to do with the story.

I'll explain that... next time.