Now that’s a gunfight
I’m busy working on Preacher, and it’s no spoiler to say that it features a gunfight or two. Last night, I twittered to ask what people’s favorite gunfights were, Western or otherwise.
I got a lot of replies, but one name that kept coming up was Michael Mann. He consistently finds ways to send thousands of bullets flying while acknowledging the rules of physics.1
I haven’t seen Public Enemies yet, but this clip shows the feeling he creates:
But when you’re talking about Michael Mann gunfights, you really have to discuss Heat. Here’s the showstopper:
I looked up Mann’s screenplay for Heat, to see what that looked like on the page.
Mann uses a lot of sluglines and short sentences to create the tempo of the fight. It’s chaos, and that’s reflected in the writing. He’s inconsistent with scene headers, and not especially concerned with establishing geography.
It doesn’t matter: action writing needs to create the feeling of an action sequence, not choreograph each bullet.
Bosko’s moving 90 degrees to the right, crossing the street. There would be no, there was no, and there never is any, warning. Neil Hanna and Schwartz with 12- gauges OPEN FIRE. World War III ERUPTS. Now we hear distant POLICE SIRENS.
CHRIS
is hit in the neck.
NEIL’S
FIRING 3-SHOT BURSTS that blow up Schwartz and a lamppost and hit a woman who falls over her shopping cart, shrieking. Hanna’s behind the lamppost.
BOSKO
across the street with his AR-180, opens up on the station wagon which takes HITS. A BLACK AND WHITE slides sideways and COP #1 with a shotgun runs across the street hollering at kids who stop and stare and drop school books.
COP # 1
Drop! Drop down!
CERRITO
over the station wagon roof FIRES a BURST at Bosko, then swings onto Cop #1 and fires, killing him. Cerrito jumps into the wagon.
THE STREET – WIDE: A BUS
The driver panics and slams on his brakes and his bus full of people stalls in the combat zone between Bosko and the wagon.
BOSKO (O.S.)
(screams)
Get the bus out of here...
NEIL
shielded by the green bag of money which has taken hits, FIRES at Hanna and backs to Chris.
HANNA
pulls Schwartz to cover.
CHRIS
dazed – holding his bleeding neck while Neil FIRES into the parking lot...
PARKING LOT
...hitting Casals getting out of his car. Casals sits down as if stunned.
MAN
pulling his car out of the lot ducks behind the wheel and crashes it into a parked car.
EXT. BANK – CERRITO
CERRITO
(to Neil)
C’mon! C’mon! C’mon!
Neil can’t rake it through the incoming FIRE from Hanna and Cop #2 to the station wagon and Cerrito and knows it.
NEIL
(to Breedan and Cerrito)
Go!! Go!!
ON STATION WAGON
Breedan floors it.
HANNA
re-emerges, kneels and PUMPS SHOTS into the station wagon.
BOSKO
rounds the bus with the AR-180 and OPENS UP
STATION WAGON
draws everyone’s FIRE. Breedan ducks and pilots it through the gauntlet.
NEIL
has taken off down the sidewalk, supporting Chris. TIGHTEN. He runs in among crowds of civilians. He knocks over a man, breaks through. People are screaming, staring, shocked.
INT. STATION WAGON – BREEDAN
getting BLOWN APART by Hanna, Bosko, and Cop #2 falls over the wheel and then is thrown back.
EXT. STREET – STATION WAGON
tires are BLOWN OUT.
It spins across the street on steel rims and crashes sideways into a parked car on the east side of Hawthorne.
INT. STATION WAGON – CERRITO
shot three times, holds his abdomen and bails, returning FIRE. Breedan, like a rag doll is half over into the rear seat and still being hit by more rounds. We HOLD on David Breedan. He’s dead.
CUT TO:
EXT. SIDE STREET – CERRITO
east up a side street past people who stand on their lawns and stare – traumatized.
WIDER
Bosko and Cop #3 chase Cerrito. Cerrito FIRES a long BURST. They can’t fire back because of the people.
CUT TO:
EXT. SAFEWAY – TRACKING NEIL + CHRIS – DAY
and the money – running, skipping and dodging past all manner of pedestrians, newspaper coin boxes, fruit vendors and parking meters. People dodge, scream and fall down. It’s chaos.
TRACKING HANNA
a half block behind, chasing Neil – pushing through the same people.
HANNA
(shouts at pedestrians)
Get down! Get down!
EXT. SAFEWAY PARKING LOT – NEIL + CHRIS
Neil – supporting Chris – throws a lady, who was getting out, back into her Olds Cutlass. He dumps Chris and the money in the back seat and turns on Hanna.
NEIL
extends the collapsible stock braces on the roof for accuracy and FIRES over the roof of other cars and through people at Hanna closing in 5o yards away.
CUT TO:
EXT. SAFEWAY – HANNA + CIVILIANS
who panic. SHOOTING. Windows EXPLODE. A lady holds her ears and shrieks. A newspaper coin box SHATTERS. A man’s bag of groceries explode milk and eggs everywhere. He goes down.
HANNA
doesn’t have a clear shot and drops, dragging people down with him.
NEIL
behind the wheel – burns rubber pulling out of the lot over curbstones and through a fence into the alley.
For another example of scripting a gunfight, I’d point you back to the Alaska pilot. You can see the gunfight here, and read the script in the Library.
- I have nothing against impossible gunfights like in The Matrix, Equilibrium or Wanted, but I’m trying to keep to keep this one a bit more grounded. ↩
Articles
July 14th, 2009 at 9:46 am
How about Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita or Leon?
July 14th, 2009 at 9:48 am
what does mann shoot his films with? i don’t know if it’s just me, but sometimes the shots look like crappy “unsolved mysteries” reenactments
July 14th, 2009 at 9:51 am
I foresee next week’s scene challenge:
“Write a gunfight. Involving a main character named …Pastor. Do not include any identifying information.”
:D
July 14th, 2009 at 10:04 am
The shootout in Heat is exciting and meticulously shot, but it’s odd that barely anyone is actually shot with about 1,000 rounds going off. Maybe this is how shootouts actually are, though. I know Mann based it on an actual shootout in LA during a bank heist, with heavily-armed criminals.
For war movies, it’s hard to argue with the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan, or the ending battle scene in the town. Both masterpieces.
A modern, realistic shootout over a great distance and time is featured in The Hurt Locker. It’s excellent, featuring two different elements in shootouts: patience and endurance.
For westerns, Open Range features a very underrated extended shootout, incorporating different styles and experience-levels with the gunfighters, and also the reliability of their weapons.
For a very different (comic) effect, the shootout at the end of Grosse Pointe Blank was outstanding. It balanced comedy, specificity and suspense while not losing any of the great banter between the bullets.
I think the key to a good movie shootout is knowing where the combatants are; the distances, relationship to each other, etc. If that is made clear to the audience, they feel the inherent threat of the shootout. Quick cutting certainly doesn’t automatically add the the excitement of a movie shootout.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:24 am
@ryan — I think he’s shooting more and more on the Sony f23.
Sound is a huge element to all the gunfights in Mann’s late body of work — he kept the original sound recorded during the actual shooting on location in HEAT. That cavernous, echoing cacophony of noise just can’t be replicated in post.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:39 am
A lot of the time what does it for me, is the mini-hero’s acknowledgments of the anti-hero’s Jesus-hood. Like Tombstone… (By: Kevin Jarre) “He’s down by the river…… Walkin’ on water.” — Or anything that changes the SCOPE of the gunfight in the villain’s eyes, in terms of what they’re going to get hit with, as in, “We’re fine… he’s cornered… Oh my… he’s going to hit us with a house now.”
July 14th, 2009 at 10:56 am
I’ve always like the last gunfight scene in the movie Posse. Black Hawk Down also had a couple really good gunfights.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:09 am
I would think that writing a scene like this knowing you’re going to shoot/direct it yourself would be a little different than writing it for others to produce…or is it? The Little Bohemia shootout sequence in the PE script is written much like the Heat shootout scene. But again, I think MM hand a pretty strong hand in writing it.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:32 am
The best part of both the gunfight sequences in Heat and Public Enemies is that during the height of the action, there is no background music. Just the power of the gun, shell casings falling to the ground, and machine gun fire interspersed with shotgun fire. Most other films have some sort of music to attempt to heighten the mood of the action, but in both films he just lets the gunfire be the mood music. That’s more of a directing thing than a screenwriting thing, but it makes the scene work 1000 times better.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:36 am
John,
When you write an action sequence and use things like (in the case of Mann’s example in the post) “CERRITO” as a slug line, in Final Draft would you use the “Shot” element or the “Scene Heading” element? I ask, curious, if there’s a particular way ADs and such prefer it be done (perhaps because of scene numbering or page “continueds”).
By the way — great post! (And Public Enemies, while not an awe-inspiring movie, does its job: it entertains. Not an oscar winner in sound mixing though, imho).
July 14th, 2009 at 11:46 am
I’ve written murders, more than a couple, but I’d never had to write an actual gunfight until this year. It was far more challenging than I’d anticipated. For me, the difficulty was to keep track of each individual character; where he/she was at any given time; and what his/her goal was in the limited geography of the bank, the adjacent street, the alley behind it.
It took an awful lot of mental computational power to get it ‘right.’ I didn’t actually build a Lego model of the bank block, but did solidly imagine one in my head, as virtual visual aid to keep all the players and their trajectories straight.
Even harder was keeping everyone in character, and trying to prevent the plot, and the character arcs, from coming to a dead and uninteresting stop for five pages while the police and thieves had at each other.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Miller’s Crossing has a great shootout, one man against a group, with Tommy guns and gangsters. While the milieu is similar, and the laws of physics abided by, it couldn’t be more different from the Public Enemies sequence.
I wish I could find the sucker on YouTube.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Sorry for double-posting, but you may also want to check out this gunfight for more insight:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jib7aQBpcAM
July 14th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Remember that with PREACHER’s Saint of Killers, you aren’t dealing with a regular gunfighter; you’re dealing with an immortal, invulnerable killing machine whose each and every bullet delivers an instant one-shot kill. So the rhythm and tempo of your scene should be set by the firing of the Saint’s individual rounds. I can’t imagine the entire battle would require more than the twelve rounds in those twin Walker Colts of his. The cops can open up on him with full-auto rock’n'roll — but the Saint does not not flinch, fire wild or duck for cover. Instead he considers, chooses his target, aims, fires, and kills a man, even as Hell explodes around and across him. And with each round he fires, the cacophony lessens by one gun, until eventually there is silence and he stands alone. Check out James Cameron’s superb TERMINATOR screenplay, specifically the police station battle. The Saint of Killers is the Terminator, as played by Clint Eastwood.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
We Own The Night isn’t the best movie around, but that one shootout during the rain while they’re driving is one of the most chilling shoot outs I’ve ever seen. It really stuck with me.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
The above Anon (comment number 10) took the question right out of my mouth. I’m leaning toward it being a Scene Heading rather than a Shot, since all the characters are in different (albeit close) locations and are not sharing the same set of extras/scenery.
Anyone?
July 14th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
@Jeremy and @Howard Rodman;
I agree with Howard’s point: Beyond geography, what’s crucial is understanding what the characters are trying to do. Yes, they’re avoiding getting shot. But the best scenes have characters moving from A to B, or getting X, while all the bullets are flying.
@awful stink:
You could write that same action if you weren’t directing it — though you might make it a little neater.
@Anonymous:
I’ve never used the “SHOT” setting. It’s just a line of action in uppercase.
@Andy Diggle:
Again, without revealing too much, there are many other elements involved. I fully grok the Terminator comparison, though. We’ve talked about that a lot.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
The Wild Bunch shootout
Case closed!
July 14th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Jeremy already mentioned OPEN RANGE, so I’ll go with the gunfight at the end of WAY OF THE GUN, which is just brutal. Talk about characterizations (Caan’s bagman fights very differently than Parker and Longbaugh) and motivation (a pile of money, right out in the open) — it does both quite well.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
I found the gunfight in Heat outstanding and the one in Public Enemy tedious. In PE, I had no real understanding of who was in danger except momentarily whereas in Heat, they were audacious, blatant targets. I also found the handheld effect to be distracting as hell. I don’t know if it counts but for gunfights, the Indiana Jones to hell with it shot is pretty great. Great article John and kudos to Jeremy for GPB mention for sure. Kevin
July 14th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Butch & Sundance: edge-of-the-seat action that reveals character and concludes the story.
July 14th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
I always loved the gunfights in El Topo. Especially the duel with the first Gunmaster.
July 14th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Great post John. That was a free action screenwriting class!
July 14th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
THE CROW did a good job of the immortal thing (with the note that simplicity was a goal.)
And I’d say “Last Man Standing” was cool. (Though not everyone else would.)
Carol– when you do a SHOT, the GENERAL setting sets it high. No space. the ACTION setting sets it 1 line lower… And the SHOT setting, sets it two lines down, where its supposed to be. Placed low… as a SCENE HEADING. (Cause that’s what it is.) If you take a SHOT, and you switch it to being ACTION… it will move exactly one line higher on the page. That’s the only diff.
July 14th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
@John,
The advantage of using SHOT instead of ACTION is that SHOT will keep with the next line — so that you don’t have, e.g., “CHRIS” at the bottom of the page and then “dazed –” etc. at the top of the next page.
I think this makes particularly good sense if the shot is something like “ACROSS THE STREET.” “Across the street” is not a complete image; you need the next line to know what the camera sees. Separating those can be messy.
@Ryan — I couldn’t agree more about the “Unsolved Mysteries” analogy. My first thought was that I was watching a video cutaway from an old CD-ROM game.
July 14th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
John, I’ve been doing the following in my new script — I think it’s a pretty good integration of Shot and Action that doesn’t look messy. But does it violate spec format too much?
–
Jack hides behind a dumpster. Peeks out at
A PHONE BOOTH ACROSS THE STREET. Joe is inside, on the phone, waving his free hand angrily. Tommy stands outside the glass door, watching the street.
–
What do you guys think?
July 14th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
@brains (26) — I do exactly that kind of thing all the time… I think it works great, so long as you’re popping back and forth from one “vantage point” or “positions” within a shared SLUGINE — eg, the sub-slugs DUMPSTER and PHONE BOOTH and NEWSPAPER MACHINE are all under the primary-slug EXT. LIBRARY – DAY. Once you cut to another location, it’s a new primary SLUGLINE.
It’s essentially what Mann’s done above… there’s no opening slugline in John’s post but imagine it’s EXT. BANK – DAY — after that, all those CAPPED sub-slugs live under it. ‘Course as John says, he’s pretty sloppy about consistency with them and I’d be (am) neater, as I’m not directing. :)
@Anonymous (10), In FD, I use SCENE HEADING for the primary-slugs and ACTION in all caps for the sub-slugs. That way, in reports, it doesn’t confuse the sub-slugs for new “scenes”.
Curious what others have to say…
July 14th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
@Brains:
Thanks — I didn’t know that about Shot. I may actually start using it.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
John,
The movie gunfights that leave me the biggest impression with me are the ones where I walk out of the theater with a (slight) feeling of PTSD. Michael Mann has mastered realistic gunplay to a tee, ever since Heat, no doubt. But, the only two movies who shook me to the core was Saving Private Ryan (Omaha Beach) and most recently, Children of Men. Children really holds an impression on me. I felt like a sniper’s bullet could hit me any moment walking through the theater parking lot.
Can’t wait to see your version Preacher!
Mike
July 14th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
@Brains – Those reasons alone are why I use SHOT for sub-slugs. That and the difference in spacing between ACTION and SHOT lines in FD.
July 14th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
Your post inspired me to think about what some of the common aspects are of good gun fights. I came up with the list below…
Realism
Environment
Guns
Yes, Heat is great. I’ve alway enjoyed reading Shane Black scripts for the action/shoot out sequences. I think it goes without saying that there is a difference between what is written on paper and the final product. One could be great and the other falls short.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Best shootout: Me KICKING Locust Horde ass. Hands down.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
@ Jeremy “The shootout in Heat is exciting and meticulously shot, but it’s odd that barely anyone is actually shot with about 1,000 rounds going off. “
I count more than a dozen police officers, several innocent standbyers and all but one of the bank robbers getting shot. Considering how difficult I imagine it would be to shoot straight while machine guns are blazing, that’s a fair number of people.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Greatest gunfight? Hard to say, there have been many mentioned, but in writing what happens on that highway in “Gone to Texas”… the saints invulnerability to bullets, the slugs hitting him and falling to the ground, the paparazzi like muzzle flashes from the entire sheriffs department… then… the unseen pistol jerk… an out right massacre breaks loose, the realization by the deputy’s that the bullets aren’t working… I cant wait to see how you handle that scene John
I prefer the shot then action one line below although I kinda like brains idea too, but I don’t like always using scenes headings in action sequences I feel like it slows down the reader
July 14th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Strange. I somehow did not/could not see @brains entry (25) before I posted. Cool about the “SHOT” feature. TX for that. Great thread.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
Proof of Life. Can’t say much for the rest of the movie, but the gunfight/rescue near the end was epic.
July 15th, 2009 at 12:29 am
L.A. Confidential motel shootout. Near-perfect sense of geography and rich, detailed sound design, like the twang of close range bullet hits on venetian blinds. There’s also a great shotgun blast (and necktie whip) that is set up in an earlier scene where Bud White (Crowe) tears a hole in the floor in a jealous rage.
Maybe Hanson’s Lucky You needed one or two of these across the poker table.
July 15th, 2009 at 3:29 am
Hey guys
This may be a bit off-topic, but Howard: I found all the exact same problems you cited with writing gunfights applied to writing college basketball games, from the team’s perspective. Keeping track of where your five characters were at any given point, what they were doing, how each one was contributing to the strategy of the game (or not) AND making everything contribute to their character development and the story, instead of just being frenetic b-ball action; was TOUGH.
There’s a lot of great onscreen shootouts that could be cited, but as far as really well-WRITTEN shootouts in script form, I still think Walter Hill and James Cameron are the best. Cameron’s script for Point Break, in particular, co-written with Kathryn Bigelow, has maybe the best action sequences on the page I’ve ever read. (With Cameron’s Terminator 2 and True Lies up there as well.)
July 15th, 2009 at 4:01 am
In terms of sound design, you can’t beat the Ravenwood Bar shootout in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Ben Burtt FTW!
July 15th, 2009 at 6:09 am
Thanks Synthian (and brains and Chip Street)… I’ve used SHOT in some scripts and simply capitalized certain action in others. Mostly because I’ve never really known what was considered “correct” — or if the larger concern was just to keep it consistent within the script.
July 15th, 2009 at 7:11 am
It’s always better when the protag and antag have a real problem with each other because then you’re just praying none of those bullets hits your guy and really hoping he gives that other motherf*cker what’s coming to him.
So I’m going with Die Hard. The one-sided fight where Hans tells the boys to shoot the glass.
July 15th, 2009 at 8:27 am
Battleship Potemkin, the Odessa steps sequence (even though it’s not much of a “fight” it’s still the best).
July 15th, 2009 at 9:45 am
I’d give the number one spot to Open Range. It’s got the best start to a gunfight ever and the sound of the guns blasting is visceral.
Also, Way of the Gun has some good gunfights.
July 15th, 2009 at 10:11 am
The HEAT gunfight plays just the way it’s written: messy. There’s not one original idea in it. It’s just loud and long. After a while it feels like watching a Naked Gun movie. And Pacino as the M16-toting cop whose immune to slugs is simply ridicuouls. For a truly great gunfight watch HIGH NOON. What makes a gunfight great is the environment it’s set in. TRUE LIES and DIE HARD are good examples for movies that utilize the setting in their shootouts, creating new and unique action sequences. So is THE MATRIX.
July 15th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Personally, I prefer to use mini-slugs for location just because they keep things a little more heirarchically consistent. Plus, it seems like the kind of thing that makes an AD’s life easier. However, the thing I do like about them is that they force a reader who might be skimming to actually compute chararacter where they might gloss over location.
July 15th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
The opening sequence of ‘Tropa de Elite’
July 15th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Several people already said it, but “Open Range” has one of the most realistic gunfights ever. There are a number of characters involved, so it takes a while to resolve as everyone runs, chases, hides, reloads, falls, etc. Bullets are (realistically) NOT constantly flying, and yet it’s very tense throughout. And it takes a lot to incapacitate someone, not just one shot and you’re dead.
I’ve never written a gunfight for a screenplay, but I did for a Western story. It was a mess until I finally went back and storyboarded the whole thing (which I’d also never done). Once I had mapped out all the positions, characters, trajectories, casualties, limitations, etc., the scenes cleaned themselves up. I found out the finished result didn’t need every single detail, even though I needed to know the details. And as Howard (comment #11) said, keeping track of what each character wanted/needed/feared throughout the scene was what tied it together and kept it interesting.
July 16th, 2009 at 1:40 am
I love the bank shootout in HEAT. People actually reload and aren’t firing from the hip. They leapfrog, giving cover to each other. the low body count is also realistic, during the infamous hollywood-shootout nobody died except for the two robbers and one of them shot himself. the HURT LOCKER has good moments but the realstic atmosphere is destroyed when the .50 sniper keeps shooting from the same position where his buddy was killed. also magazines don’t jam because of blood.
July 16th, 2009 at 11:52 am
I think the bank heist in HEAT is the best I’ve ever seen. While I often find that the training that actors undergo fails to translate meaninglfully to screen, it certainly isn’t the case in HEAT. Those guys were trained how to use those weapons well and it really comes across in the scene.
I think the opening to THE PROPOSITION is a great shootout scene. It’s more about the chaos of being surrounded and outnumbered in a tiny building, but I found myself flinching in the theater.
July 16th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
I like that Mann’s sluglines are mostly just the names of characters. Seems to me keeping track of the characters in an actions sequence can be one of the trickiest things…not just for the director, but for the eventual audience member, who, let’s be honest, ultimately mostly just cares about the characters anyway……or is that just female audience members =)
Regardless, it’s a helpful technique. I can see why he chose to write it that way. For multiple reasons.
July 16th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
“For a very different (comic) effect, the shootout at the end of Grosse Pointe Blank was outstanding. It balanced comedy, specificity and suspense while not losing any of the great banter between the bullets.”
July 16th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
“For a very different (comic) effect, the shootout at the end of Grosse Pointe Blank was outstanding. It balanced comedy, specificity and suspense while not losing any of the great banter between the bullets.”
Sorry for previous unfinished post(bumped the mouse) but meant to reiterate Jeremy’s above recommendation, the physical shootout was good but the whole scene was elevated by the words. Very funny. cheers David.
July 16th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
@John,
Re: SHOT keeping with next — I’m now being told it’s not the case in FD. Definitely IS the case in Movie Magic 6.
July 17th, 2009 at 12:53 am
@John,
Scratch that last post. I tested it myself and Shot DOES keep with next in FD.
It’s just that when you go to the middle of the document and switch an Action paragraph to Shot, the behavior is pretty unpredictable. It might keep put them together, or it might not. This is sometimes true in MMS as well, though with a little jiggling I can always get it to adjust correctly.
July 17th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Ronin.
July 17th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
The International gunfight at the Guggenheim.
July 18th, 2009 at 11:30 am
The gun fight at the end of Hot Fuzz was great! I think that would be a great one to look at too, considering their spoofing a lot of action movies, I would think it would be a good way to see a lot of the basic principles that go into a lot of the gun fights.
July 19th, 2009 at 12:16 am
There are some great gunfights in The Wire. My favorites were always the ones where they’d all shoot at each other, and they’d all miss, because none of them have really practiced much. It’s almost comical… until a stray bullet goes through a window and kills a kid.
July 20th, 2009 at 3:27 am
Just wanted to point out that if the viewer has no knowledge of whats happening in the action scenes, than all that action first rate money is going down the drain – A.K.A the last poorly action conceived James Bond (is it me or did Daniel Craig killed half of the bad guys by giving them the ‘Magnum’ look from Zoolander?).
July 20th, 2009 at 8:39 am
The Untouchables staircase shootout – it’s got moral dilemmas (baby in the pram), hesitation – underline the stakes of the fight, and the great build-up, racking up the tension as they wait for the banker…
July 20th, 2009 at 11:52 am
The Way of the Gun.
How that movie didn’t become more popular than it was… is beyond me.
July 20th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
The clip from Public Enemies is what I came here to post after reading your headline. The editing, sound design, and use of mobile camera in that scene is fresher than anything I’ve seen in I don’t know how long. I love the absence of music, and the odd, vacant silences around the gunfire when you can hear the guys grunting and running around. Just awesome to see in the theater.
July 20th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
David Webb Peoples’ The William Money Killings: aka UNFORGIVEN has a great shoot out at the end and he pulls no punches as to how he depicts the ruthless act of killing with a gun.
I have a scanned PDF of the original screenplay to THE WILD BUNCH by Walon Green and Sam Peckinpah is you fancy a copy, John..
Get my email from my post, let me know and I’ll send it to you if you’d like to check it out…
Kevan…
July 20th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Public Enemies was great, esp the second time when I’d gotten used to the photography. The shootouts were beautiful and exciting!
July 20th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
Are those muzzle flashes in Public Enemies digitally enhanced? Because I’ve never seen them so big.
Another Mann film: Collateral. The shootout in the nightclub and then in the office building and on the train as Vincent hunts Jamie Foxx. It’s such a great moment when Jamie Foxx finally takes him out.
In the script, Stuart Beattie calls Vincent’s gun his PARA-ORDNANCE, which is quite a clumsy model name, but it’s also BAD-ASS and you get used to it as a Reader and your eye just skims over it.
He also had a phrase from the office building scene: “Vincent is clearing rooms…” which I thought was effective.
And I have to give a shout-out to the final battle scene in the recent “Rambo,” which is ridiculously violent but probably accurate in terms of carnage from the sniper rifle and the .50.
July 22nd, 2009 at 2:12 pm
That scene from Heat is actually just as exciting to read as it is to watch. Now that’s great action writing, even if some folks might claim it violates format.
I also use a similar style to what @brains uses for integrated shot and action. I like that style better for certain scene cadences, though sometimes also use the Mann-style stand-alone line if I want to emphasize the shot change more strongly (the broken cadence makes it read more staccatto, which is why, I suspect, Mann uses it in that scene from Heat).
August 20th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Hey, found this post late–a friend recommended I read the Heat action lines for my current sp.
I second Collateral, it reminds you how powerful a handgun actually is.
I’m surprised that no one mentioned the gun battle at the end of 3:10 to Yuma (the remake). They do a pretty good job of moving the battle across the town.