How the idea behind a character becomes dialogue in a script.

When I first started out writing scripts, I didn't like doing anything except writing in screenplay format. Why waste my time when I just want to get pages of a screenplay done so I can go and sell it? How naive I was.

Today, I won't sit down and write pages unless I have a road map of where I'm going(I hate the term outline). I strongly prefer the beat sheet, which I learned from TV writing and now use for film scripts. I know I need to get in the habit of writing a prose treatment, but I'll save those thoughts for a later post.

So, while structurally I'm very happy with beating out the story and having that to go on, I'm still struggling with what work to do on my characters before the page writing begins. At school, my professors have typically assigned doing character biographies. This is sometimes a sheet of questions about the character(age, height, sex, education, job, etc.), which I hate and think is utterly stupid, or it could be writing a page similar to a diary entry that gets more into the psychology of the character, this I like a little better.

Still the best process I've come across, but still don't know how to formalize, is just thinking about who the character is like and comparing them to either people in my real life or others characters in film and television. If I say about one of my characters: this is a Don Draper type, then I know exactly the things to inform my writing when it comes to the character.

What really hit that home for my was finding the transcript of a Raiders of the Lost Ark story conference between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan. As someone who is admittedly more plot focused, I've always known I needed to work harder on making multi-dimensional characters, but I couldn't see how this character work was actually being put to use in my script. The Raiders story conference really opened my eyes to it. So here goes a brief lesson in taking your character work and turning it into great dialogue that serves all the purposes that character work is needed for.

Story excerpt taken from Raiders of the Lost Ark story conference transcript spoken by George Lucas and discussing the villain of the movie:

“He’s the corrupt version of our guy. He’s the one that really goes in and rapes the temples and steals all that stuff and sends it off to private collectors, and takes antiquities and breaks them into small pieces and sells each piece for the price of the original. He’s a real corrupt guy. Maybe he’s the head of his own museum or something. He’s sort of legitimate, only he’s a real corrupt person, and our guy knows that...So it becomes a personal grudge thing.”

Now, the dialogue by the "corrupt guy" spoken to Indiana Jones written by Kasdan:

BELLOQ

You and I are very much alike. 

Archeology is our religion, yet 

we have both fallen from the pure 

faith. Our methods have not differed 

as much as you pretend. I am but a 

shadowy reflection of you. It would 

take only a nudge to make you like 

me. To push you out of the light.

Three great minds together making story magic. 

I love the approach taken in developing characters and I'm still attempting to adopt it to my process.

How do you develop your characters?