Including subext in your characters’ dialogue might simultaneously be the most difficult and most important thing to do in a screenplay. That might sound like an overstatement, because obviously having solid structure, good character depth and a well-written dramatic arc are all important. All of those elements and more are required to draft a quality screenplay.
But if you want to impress the studio reader who is the first gatekeeper by which your script has to pass, you had better have quallity dialogue.
And one thing that is required for good dialogue is subtext. What is subtext, you ask? Subtext is not saying what you’re saying. Subtext is using the dialogue in the film to make a point that is different from what the words are actually saying.
One of my favorite examples comes from the animated film, “A Bug’s Life”. That was one of PIXAR’s early films, so it doesn’t look as stunning as a lot of their most recent efforts, but it has one of the best stories that they’ve ever done. It’s heavily influenced by “The Magnificent Seven” and “Seven Samurai”, and everything that happens in that script either affects or is affected by something else at a different point in the script. And there is some great subtext in the dialogue.
The example comes when Flick the ant returns to the colony with the circus bugs that he mistakenly thinks are warriors that will help the ant colony defeat the grasshoppers that have been tormenting them forever. Princess Atta knows that Flick is a screw-up and has no faith in him whatsoever, and she knows something is up with “these so-called warriors”. However, Princess Atta’s mother, the Queen thinks that Atta believes in Flick and sent him out to find help becasue she thought it would work. So after the “warriors” give a rally cry in which they tell them that when the grasshoppers arrive, they’re going to “knock them dead”, the Queen says to Atta, “Your instincts on that boy were right on.”
The subtext in that last line is great because the Queen is right, but not the way she thinks she is. She thinks that Atta believed in Flick, and it looks like Flick was successful. Therefore, Atta’s instincts on Flick were right. However in reality, Flick screwed up just as Atta thought she would, therefore her instincts were right. The other example there is that the circus bugs think that the grasshoppers are ctitics, and they say that they’re going to knock them dead in a metaphorical sense, but the ants think that they mean it in a literal sense, so the subtext in the dialogue creates confusion among the characters that will lead to very dramatic moments later in the film.
Subtext is important because it helps to create drama.
Every story needs to have drama. Even in comedies, horror movies or action movies, drama is what pushes the story along. Without it, all you hae is a bunch of jokes, bloody slashes and explosions. Those are all fine for some people, but creating drama in the story is how the most effective films of those genres cross over to mass audiences. An effective way to do that is to make your characters sound like their saying one thing when they’re really saying something else. Subtext in dialogue should also serve the function of either moving the story forward or revealing something about the characters, as the above example does.
If your dialogue feels like it’s too on the nose in the screenplay you’re working on, Monument Script Services can help you find opportunities to add subtext, as well as other ways to help improve the overall quality of your script. Visit the following link to find out how.