Time in Screenplays (examples: “Young Royals”, “Locke”, “Quantum of Solace”...)
Have you ever watched a movie or TV show and felt that something about it was just…off, but you couldn’t put your finger on it?
It felt as though the pacing was a bit strange. But putting the editing under the microscope didn’t reveal anything unusual, the editing rhythm seemed to be quite normal, just the usual cuts at the appropriate intervals, nothing weird to be seen.
Chances are that what you sensed but couldn’t put into words was a flawed handling of time as a storytelling parameter.
And this doesn’t necessarily have to be caused by bad editing choices (although it can be). More often than not the problem has already occurred at the basic script level, i.e. during the screenwriting process, long before any of the scenes were shot, let alone edited in post production. Which is exactly the kind of flaw I want to discuss today.
Let me give you an example that I’m sure most of you must have encountered in the wild at some point:
Imagine you’re watching some mid-to-lowbrow piece of entertainment that’s set in a high-school or other educational context. At one point, the movie or show in question features a ‘classroom scene’.
The teacher walks into the classroom; the lesson begins. After just two minutes of classroom discussion, this teacher and his or her (unrealistically attentive and never disruptive) students come to that one crucial insight, the one eureka moment that’s needed to propel the overall plot of the show or film forward. The teacher writes that insight down on the blackboard; the bell rings. And then the classroom scene is over.
The whole lesson took about three and a half minutes. Tops.
Anyone with a background in education tends to laugh about scenes like this when they see them on screen. And I guess anyone who’s ever attended any kind of school knows that, in general, lessons don’t take three and a half minutes; they’re typically much longer, and classroom discussions can take fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes or more. They can drag on forever; they can feel like pulling teeth, and there’s no guarantee whatsoever you’ll even arrive at this one crucial insight, this one light bulb going off, in that particular lesson.
In many films and shows, however, the climax of the ‘classroom scene’ (i.e. that one big insight™ that was needed to further the character development of the main protagonist/s and/or move the plot forward) is gained without fail, and crucially it is gained far too quickly. In short, the students in the scene barely have time to unpack their backpacks and open their books before the scene escalates towards the climax necessary for the plot to continue; then the bell rings again, and the lesson is over.
These types of scenes are completely ridiculous. And ‘Young Royals’ did well not to fall into this trap when it comes to its classroom scenes: If you pay close attention to those scenes on (what is undoubtedly) your favourite show, dear reader, you will notice that the filmmakers usually either show us the start of a lesson and then cut away, without ever showing us the end…or give us the end of a lesson, never having shown us the beginning. Sometimes we also get scenes cut out from somewhere in the middle, with no start and no end shown to us at all.
What the show’s creators never do is give us a whole lesson, from beginning to end, that lasts just three and a half minutes. Because that would be ridiculous.
So, at least where the school setting is concerned, the ‘Young Royals’ guys know what they’re doing.
‘Classroom scenes’ aren’t the only scenes that have to deal with time as a storytelling parameter, though.
Think of opera scenes, for example. (Are you an opera fan, dear reader? Yeah, opera…you know…that art form where 55-year-old overweight dramatic tenors pretend to be svelte 18-year-old youths in tights, who are dying of passionate love because they fucked a swan or something, and as they perform their melodramatic stage death for hours on end, they belt out one elaborate aria after the next, then collapse into a puddle of tears and fake blood, clutching their heart or stabbing themselves in the chest with what the prop master thought looked like a dagger but what actually turned out to be a letter opener? Yeah…that. Because I love it. Operas are the best.)
Remember that opera scene in the James Bond movie ‘Quantum of Solace’ (2008) where Bond attends a performance of ‘Tosca’ on that awesome floating opera stage in Austria?
And yes, we can all collectively roll our eyes here at the fact that it’s always ‘Tosca’, ‘Tosca’, ‘Tosca’...Filmmakers just love this particular Puccini opera. But come on, it’s a great, sentimental, ostentatious, nay, bombastic piece of drama. It’s practically dripping in melodramatic camp, and I love it. It’s fantastic 19th-century entertainment.
Look, we’ve just celebrated the 100th anniversary of Puccini’s death in November. And he was really something else. My favourite anecdote about Puccini (who, by the way, was absurdly famous and incredibly popular during his lifetime already) is the one where he once sat in the auditorium during a performance of one of his operas. During the intermission, observers noticed that the composer was discussing something with some random guy. From afar, it was clear that Puccini was gesticulating wildly, passionately talking at the man about something important and apparently very serious. Afterwards journalists hunted down the unknown man to ask him what great insights about his music the maestro had bestowed upon him. The man responded, “I have to disappoint you. Maestro Puccini just explained to me how spaghetti ai frutti di mare are to be prepared properly.”
What a champ!
No, seriously…Puccini is the best, guys.
But back to that James Bond scene in ‘Quantum of Solace’…
So, checking my ‘Tosca’ recording with Maria Callas gives me a running time for the whole three-act opera of just under 2 hours (sans intermissions), which means that a movie such as ‘Quantum of Solace’ (runtime: 106 minutes) required some creative cutting and rearranging of the musical material. Because otherwise it wouldn’t fit into a scene that’s just a few minutes long.
And the filmmakers solved this problem by basically skipping the entire first act of the opera. We see Bond arrive, take out a guy and prepare… Then we catch our first glimpse of the stage. But oh! This is already the very end of Act I, when the famous ‘Va Tosca’ (‘Tre sbirri – Te Deum’) is being performed.
Bond can be seen running up some stairs.
What the hell was he doing in the meantime, during the first act? We don’t know. Perhaps he was just sitting somewhere, hidden in the shadows, biding his time. His adversary, it is implied, was sitting in his seat, watching the entire first act, though.
Then something really strange happens that’s probably only noticeable to opera lovers and most likely goes over the head of anyone who’s not into this particular genre of music: After the big confrontation via earpiece, when the shoot-out begins, we skip a huge chunk of Puccini’s famous opera.
We go from the famous ‘Te Deum’ (end of Act I) straight to the equally famous and dramatic instrumental passage after Tosca has killed her would-be rapist Scarpia and uttered the words, “È morto…or gli perdono.” (He's dead…now I forgive him.)
This instrumental passage, however, is from the very end of Act II!
I.e. the creators of ‘Quantum of Solace’ jump from the end of Act I straight to the end of Act II, which doesn’t make any sense in the context of the ‘Tosca’ libretto but helps them cut out the entire second act, as well.
And that’s obviously a clever choice.
What else were they supposed to do? Have Bond sit around for half an hour after that confrontation and watch the entire second act, just so they could get that instrumental soundbite after Scarpia’s murder at the hands of Tosca that they needed for the ‘shoot-out scene’? That would have been ridiculous. So, they went about the whole thing in a creative way and skipped the entire second act, and unless you’re really into opera music (guilty as charged), you won’t even know it.
It sounds great, and the scene is cool; that’s all we need. Who cares about it making any sense in the context of the plot of ‘Tosca’ itself, right?
(Unfortunately, this opera scene from ‘Quantum of Solace’ is also pretty much the only thing that’s great about this movie, which is otherwise pretty meh, to be honest.)
So, classroom scenes, lecture hall scenes, opera scenes…all of these are usually written with the time factor in mind. Sometimes the screenwriters do a great job, such as with that opera scene in ‘Quantum of Solace’ and sometimes…well, sometimes you end up with three-and-a-half-minute long classroom scenes which actual, real-world teachers more or less pee themselves watching because they’re so hilariously wrong.
There are many other types of scenes where time has to be taken into account: Think courtroom scenes, for example. (Do you want to watch a boring real-time trial-documentary type of slog that drags on for about 47 hours or an engaging legal drama with a runtime of about 45-60 minutes per episode?) Or think travelogues. (You know how long an actual, real-life transatlantic flight takes? Or, Heaven forbid, a trip via steamboat? How much shorter is your movie? So, how much of that trip has to be condensed in order to fit into that script that you’re writing?)
And when you think about it: Even simpler scenes that are more vague and (at least at first glance) don’t seem to have any clear boundaries or time constraints still often have a type of internal clock that they follow. Not everything is an explicit courtroom scene, opera scene, exam scene, etc. And yet these other scenes often operate within a hidden time framework, too.
How long does a typical dinner party last in real life? A couple of hours probably. How much shorter is the screen time that you can allot to a ‘dinner party scene’ in your film or show?
Or how about a job interview? Or a typical breakfast or luncheon? How long does it take to park your car or do the shopping? (Should I mention sex here, too?)
In real life, we do actually have an intuitive, vague, but not endlessly flexible idea about how long each and every one of those activities should typically last. And when a story we’re watching unfold on screen breaks those (intuitive) rules and a character, say, keeps sucking on the same cigarette for fifteen minutes straight, we instinctively feel that something is off.
To understand how screenwriters deal with this problem, we need to first define a couple of concepts connected to the idea of narrative time (and yes, we will come back to ‘Young Royals’ season three in a second, I promise):
When talking about fiction, you will often come across the following two terms: Story time and discourse time.