Don’t Direct On The Page? Nonsense.

It’s easy to get bad advice about screenwriting. I recently started writing features and pilots again after a 15-year break, and I keep hearing bad advice all over the place. A big part of the problem is that people quoting the rules don’t understand why the rules are the rules.

Just tell the story.

A “rule” you’ll hear quoted quite often and find in the older books about screenwriting is “Don’t direct on the page.”

What does that mean? We’re not writing a stage play, we’re not telling the actors to stand downstage left, we’re telling a story as text which will be transposed to a very different visual medium, so logically it seems like every bit of visual information you can efficiently convey should be made available to the production team, right? This should be you writing down how you “see” the movie, right? This rule seems absurd, right? However, if you were a screenwriting student in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s, the answer would be “no,” and here is why: Setups cost money.

This Used To Be A Bigger Production

The equipment used in filmmaking has changed radically in the last twenty-five years. The main difference is the cameras. They’re lighter, they’re more maneuverable, and they require so much less light.