How Good Filmmaking Brings a Script to Life

Hi, I'm Michael, this is Lessons from the Screenplay. (intense music playing) The midpoint of Portrait of a Lady on Fire contains some absolutely brilliant filmmaking and I've become obsessed with it.

It's a deceptively simple scene about the evolving power dynamic and a burgeoning romance. It has 10 lines of dialogue, nine cuts, four shots, two camera moves, no music and a conventional structure but every one of these seemingly basic elements dramatically enhances the narrative and themes.

Each character is carefully placed within each frame to bring attention to the theme of observer and observed.

While the camera moves as if pulled by the gravity of the shifting power dynamics and the pacing of the scene dictated by the editing, blocking and performances amplifies the emotions of each beat.

Admittedly, none of these things are particularly related to screenwriting and thus not what we would normally explore on this channel but the filmmaking in this scene is so great that I want to make an exception this one time.

Or at least that's how the video was going to start. As I was finishing up my first draft of the video I made one final attempt to find the screenplay for Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

And as luck would have it, I happened to find a group of amazing people on tumblr who had painstakingly translated the screenplay to English.

Shout out to Anna, Aimee, Graywing, Vittoria and Dina. Their links are in the description below along with the link to their translation of the screenplay.

As I read the script, I was pleasantly surprised to find that every filmmaking technique I wanted to talk about, performance, blocking, editing, sound, camera framing was written into the screenplay.

This reveals the impressive foresight of writer/director Céline Sciamma and confirms she was considering all of these techniques, even during the writing process.

So today I want to do an in-depth breakdown of how Sciamma definitely uses every cinematic tool from the writing to the camera, to the pacing, to capture and convey the emotion in this expertly crafted scene.

One of many in Portrait of a Lady on Fire.