The “secret” to Quentin Tarantino’s dialogue
Quentin Tarantino’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s great auteurs didn’t simply arrive out of thin air. The filmmaker’s scripts are the stuff of legend. Dialogue is famously hard to get right, but Tarantino’s pulses with a certain purity, a liveliness that is remarkably hard to come by. Here, the director opens up about writing dialogue and offers some tips for writers looking to create equally immaculate exchanges between characters.
So, why is dialogue so hard to get right? To answer that question, let us turn to American short story writer, novelist and creative writing professor George Saunders, who once recalled conducting a childhood experiment to establish how his characters should talk to one another. Determined in this quest, the young writer bought a dictaphone, hid it beneath his family’s kitchen table and recorded his mother and grandmother talking to one another. “Then I transcribed it,” he told Writer’s Digest, “And you couldn’t make a bit of sense of it. It was all sentence fragments. So, in a story, you transcribe that directly, it makes no sense.”
What Saunders’ experiment demonstrates is that writers shouldn’t seek to replicate natural speech. Instead, they should craft stylised patterns of speech that reflect their characters. That is, after all, what makes Tarantino’s screenplays so good: character always comes first. “I just get the characters talking to each other,” the filmmaker said when asked if he had some secret method for writing good dialogue. “It’s like, me, the writer, is writing it and, yeah, I’m kind of controlling for a while, but the idea is that the conversation catches fire amongst the characters, and then they take it and run with it, and then I’m almost like a court reporter jotting it all down.”
Tarantino continued: “And then, usually, whatever comes out is what comes out. Now, inside of that, there is a rhythm to it. There is a musicality to it. There is a bit of rhyme that happens between some of the words and some of the phrases. And so, it’s not poetry, but it’s not completely divorced from poetry. It’s not rap, but it’s not completely divorced from it. It’s not a stand-up comedy act, but it’s not completely divorced from that either.”
George Saunders would agree. Revealing what he concluded from his dictaphone experiment, he said: “So I think one of the keys, paradoxically, to good dialogue, is for the writer to say to herself: ‘this is poetry, this is not real speech.’ It’s poetry that’s going to make you think it sounds like real speech. it’s going to simulate the rhythms of actual speech.”
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