Dune: Exposition Is Killing Your Screenplay
Dune: Exposition Is Killing Your Screenplay Dune is a film adaptation that has brought some of the greatest filmmakers ever to their knees. So why is it so hard for screenwriters to transcend the challenges of Frank Herbert’s source material? The screenplay for Dune is nearly all exposition–the writers narrate nearly every moment with some kind of voiceover telling the audience what’s happening– so why is everyone still so confused? Why does the audience still not know what’s happening when the writers give them so much exposition? Why does a film that is so incredible to look at feel so boring and hard to connect to? Why does a film that is trying so hard to make a sci-fi for adults, to write about real-world issues, real characters, and real complexity rather than simplistic Hollywood solutions– why does a film that’s trying so hard, with such positive intentions, ultimately seem so predictable? There are a lot of challenges for the writers in adapting Dune, challenges that you’re also going to experience if you’re working on an adaptation of a book into a screenplay. These writers are dealing with all kinds of challenges: complex world building, shifting point of view, a preponderance of characters. But mostly, in adapting Dune into screenplay form, they are trying to take something very big and make it very small. Screenplays are small. A typical screenplay is 105 pages long. Even a two and a half hour movie like Dune is probably around a 150-page screenplay. How do you take a 900 page novel and crush it down into what should probably be no more than a 120-page screenplay or even maybe a 105 page screenplay? How do you take all that information and exposition and squash it down so the novel of Dune will actually work in a screenplay adaptation? How do you adapt a screenplay out of a novel that is sprawling and internal? How do you take the things that novels do really well, which are different from the things that screenplays do really well, and translate them into a form that can work in a movie? How do you stay true to the intentions of the author – whose novel has inspired generations of sci fi movies – when elements that weren’t cliché when the writer wrote them have now become cliché because they’ve inspired and been adapted and used by so many sci fi writers?How do you stay loyal to the intentions of a beloved book while also updating it and making it make sense for today’s audience? How do you make Dune into a 2021 movie? I wish I could say that these three very experienced, very talented writers on Dune had achieved that in their screenplay adaptation, but in my opinion, they did not. Where the writers fell short in their adaptation of Dune, oddly, is not in the difficult elements of screenwriting. They fell short in the simple ones: the same elements you are likely to struggle with if you’re a new screenwriter…like exposition. We sometimes think that if you write 100 screenplays that you’re suddenly going to know how to write great exposition and adapt epic books into amazing scripts because you now have screenwriting experience. The truth is that every screenplay is like a new baby, especially when our writing goals get really lofty. When we set lofty writing goals, we’re not just trying to tell the truth or make an entertaining movie, we’re trying to make a great movie. We’re not just trying to write the best screen adaptation of Dune we can, we’re also trying to do an homage to the 1984 David Lynch adaptation, and we’re also trying to correct all the mistakes made in that adaptation, and we’re also trying to take our adaptation to the next level, and we’re also trying to be the new Star Wars. When our screenwriting goals get this big,