Voice Over.

I’ve yet to find a writing element that has divided a community so clearly down the middle than the use of voice over in a script. There are the detractors that declare that voice over is a cop out, providing internal emotions and motivations that should be left to images and performance. Conversely there are the supporters that say it lends a poetry to the image and performance that accentuates the visual and performance.

Both sides are right, which leaves the use of voice over in a pure limbo. Personally, I love voice over but have rarely used it. Lilith contains zero voice over, and 19 Revolutions uses it sparingly. My experiences with the major studios has brainwashed me into thinking that using voice over is a bad thing, and is the mark of an amateur writer and director.

But I can think of dozens of films that beautifully employ voice over, and the ones that first come to mind are the films of Terrence Malick and Wong Kar-Wai. These filmmakers employ voice over as poetry, as abstract internalization that resembles our most introspective moments within our own conscience. They are filmmakers operating on the highest level possible, and I’d be hard pressed to think that anyone would call their reliance upon voice over as a weakness.

WKW uses voice over to masterful, drippingly romantic effect. From ‘Fallen Angels’.

Jean-Luc Godard famously used voice over in post-production as a way to stitch together his films, to connect the scriptless footage that he would randomly collect. It works for Godard because he established his own brand of absurdist cinema, where JLG was both the creator of phenomena and the voice of God. In major studio films, the use of voice over is often a telling sign of a weakness in the edit, where transitions are lacking or the performances are not working. One can often tell when the “voice-over patch” is applied to a film when a voice over is used and then is never returned to again.

Which leads me to think that there might need to be some guidelines as to the use of voice over. These are not rules by any stretch of the imagination, but rather considerations that have to be taken into account when using voice over, and they are gleaned from my personal experience only.

Keep it short and rhythmic. I’ve read and written voice over passages that go as long as ten to twelve lines, and there’s one very big consideration to make when writing these kinds of lengthy passages: there must be a corresponding visual. In a lot of instances, voice over is a compression of time, done over a montage of actions. If you read a long passage of voice over aloud, think of how much footage has to accompany that passage. It’s more than you think, and cinematic time is much longer than real time. (Two minutes of onscreen time is the real-life equivalent of fifteen). If we study Wong Kar-Wai or Godard, their voice overs are short and concise. They read like poems, and not like essays. These short bursts allow them to cut in images accordingly and not have to have the image catch up to the voice over.

Malick, who uses long passages, uses long, languid takes that are visually textured to hold our attention. But he too breaks his voice overs down into a specific rhythm, a rhythm that allows for a diversity of images.

But keep in mind that the greater the diversity of images, the more you will actually have to shoot. You can plan out the images on paper to the most exacting level, but irrespective, the more you shoot, the more money it will cost.

Separate voice over from the action. Voice over should never describe what is already on screen. Imagine hearing a voice over “I was so incensed I exploded,” and then seeing the corresponding image of a man in an office going ape shit and destroying everything. In that poorly constructed example, the voice over adds nothing to what’s already being shown. Voice over should have a narrative purpose. So if instead we use that same footage and use a voice over such as “Sam’s is doing his first porno shoot today” and then we see the man explode in violence, then we’re adding something interesting to the narrative, and it lends a texture to the man’s actions.

There must be good reason to use voice over. We can just shrug and say “it works better this way,” but that’s not sufficient for a director, and, more importantly, to an executive. Voice overs must have a purpose. Fight Club is a brilliant piece of voice over because its narrative is told through a fractured psychosis. Tyler Durden is a voice in our collective heads. In the director’s cut of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott removed the voice over that the studio demanded and it made for a far better film, because the ambiguity of Deckard’s existence is amplified by his mental silence and Harrison Ford’s performance. The studio insisted on a voice over because of fears that audience wouldn’t understand the imagery of the scenes. They were wrong. Frank Darabont explained it best:

We must always remember that film is, first and foremost, a visual medium. Everything we add thereafter is to bolster the visual language. If the emotion is not cutting it on the visual, then no amount of voice over can make it resonate. You’ll have to figure out a creative way to re-edit the sequence and wrestle the correct emotional tone from your coverage. But more so, the decision to use voice over must be a well thought out one, and one made long before the script is finalized. Voice overs are the voice of the mind, and it must correspondingly have the gravity of that impossible weight. Use it wisely.