5. Other thoughts
Other movie examples
When digging the topic of voice-over, I found Scott Myers‘s series of studies in voice-over narration:
And an interesting movie on the process of writing Fight Club, here some interesting quotes:
I finished my own rough first draft of the script and looked at it and said ‘This will kill the project if I turn this in’. And I remember that David had said the narration should not help the audience, it should be its own disembodied thing. So then I just changed it all to commentary that either did not move the story forward but moved the character forward, or contradicted what you’re seeing.
Jim Uhls, screenwriter
I just feel like a character has to say something, even if it’s stupid, something a character has to stand for, and has to risk saying the wrong thing even if it’s just so somebody else can step forward and say ‘oh that’s full of shit’. At least they’re saying something. You know, taking responsibility for their viewpoint, which is really what Tyler’s speeches were about – expressing himself even more so than sort of coming up with a vision of a dream.
Chuck Palahniuk, author
…
From both sources, I made a list of what the narration is in movies as a tool, what are its possibilities.
Narration can:
- give a lens through which to interpret events
- handle the passage of time, and time jumps
- express the viewpoint of a character
- help the audience, or not
- be its own disembodied thing
- be a commentary
- move the character forward instead the story
- contradict what you see
- be unreliable
- provide foreknowledge
More about Fight Club
The example of Fight Club is very interesting not only in the aspect of editing, but also the message of the movie, as it has a lot to do with finding one’s identity.
Here another quote from writing Fight Club:
The furni catalog idea was, again, some kind of visual representation of this, you know, the idea that we’re a byproduct of the armour that we select to let people know who we are and that those are not just clothes and cars, and hairstyles, but it’s also the furniture that you pick and whether or not it’s, you know, sort of southwestern or pottery barn, or IKEA.
David Fincher, director