Check out his original blog post for more. This is the story of how a group of outsiders took on the blue-blood, old-boys club of Wall Street and ended up crashing the world’s largest financial system.

To this day, no one knows who caused it until now.

Ask yourself if you can communicate the same message with a look, a tick, or something non-verbal, because that will allow your audience to become more engaged (and more interested) with your film.Ĭlearly, there could be stuff that Cade left off of his list, but for a 5-minute video, I say that he did a damn good job covering everything that (he thinks) it takes to make a great film. Travel back to October 19, 1987aka Black Monday, the worst stock market crash in the history of Wall Street. If you've got a block of dialogue, cut it down to a line or two and see if you still convey what you need to. Playwright and screenwriter David Mamet has shared a lot of helpful advice about how to add more subtext into your scripts, but I think the simplest way to do it without having to overthink it is by cutting your dialogue down to the bare minimum. Your audience is being told what's going on instead of being allowed to explore the story and figure it out themselves. When you over-explain or have clunky expositional scenes, your story begins to feel - I don't know - heavy. Essentially, subtext is all about the subtle messages you're trying to convey to your audience without explicitly coming out and stating them. Subtext can be used in just about anything in your film, whether it be in the script, the editing, or the cinematography. The most amusing parts of the film were the surprise cameos, including John Turturro as Chuck - an angry, paranoid and psychotic Grenada War veteran (Daves 'anger ally' during therapy), two adult film star patients and lesbian lovers: Stacy (Krista Allen) and Gina (January Jones), Harry Dean Stanton as a Blind Man, Woody Harrelson as Galaxia. One concept that Cade brings up, though, is something I've seen countless young filmmakers and screenwriters fail to incorporate into their films time and time again - and that's subtext. Cinema is all about storytelling, and pretty much everything you put into your film, dialog, props, lighting, a song, or even an edit, communicates something to your audience.

Cade breaks it down thusly: (He also breaks down all of these elements into more specific concepts, like 'conflict', 'plot', and 'dialog' for the script, which you can study more effectively here.)Īll of these elements are important in making a great film, but let's highlight the one thing that I personally think can make or break your movie: storytelling.

The great wall movie plot