Gilbert Chen
Film noir is a unique type of film known for an overbearing sense of pessimism, elements of German expressionism, stylized dialogue, and the characters of the hard-boiled detective and the femme fatale. When I wrote my screenplay, my filmmaker’s intentions were to capture the dialogue of film noir as accurately as possible.
In preparation, I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. Although the film wasn’t from the film noir era, the dialogue still felt very much the same. After watching Notorious, I understood how to use stylized dialogue without going overboard with similes and metaphors. The film achieved this by having the character speak in a terse fashion, only having a metaphor or simile once every few sentences in order to prevent the dialogue from feeling overloaded, and therefore, cheesy.
To establish my hard-boiled detective as being a hard-boiled detective, I attempted to adhere to the “show, don’t tell” rule as closely as possible. To that end, I showed the detective’s hard-boiledness and disdain for those in power, a staple of film noir detectives, by having him cut a call with his sergeant, which showed that he didn’t respect the authority of those above him, as well as showing that he isn’t scared of consequences, and is therefore unshakeable. In addition, I further developed the detective’s hard-boiled nature by having his friend point a gun at his head without him flinching, showing that he’s able to remain calm, collected, and stoic in any situation.
As for the Sergeant, I had him portrayed as a corrupt, useless person through narration and dialogue. To portray the Sergeant as corrupt, and willing to abuse his power, I had him threaten to fire the detective as a first resort, which made him seem unreasonable, and paired that with a very aggressive tone, making him seem out of control, and therefore willing to abuse power. To get the Sergeant to feel useless, I simply had the detective say that he was unsuccessful in all of his attempted arrests, which made him feel useless. In addition, I had the detective get leads in his case while disobeying the Sergeant’s orders, which made the Sergeant feel as if he didn’t know what he was doing.