As any screenwriting textbook will tell you, the opening scene is the most important in your whole movie. If it doesn’t draw the viewer in immediately, chances are they aren’t going to hang around for the rest of the film. Raiders is obviously a great example, and in fact just about any Spielberg movie will fit the bill: the landing on the beach in Saving Private Ryan, the shark attack in Jaws, the coffins in the river in Empire of the Sun.
Some of my favorite movie openings are the ones that withhold information, presenting you with a scene so confusing and mysterious that you just have to stick around to find out what it all means. The opening few minutes of P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love are a favorite example:
Another terrifically bizarre opening? The first several minutes of Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, in which (and I unfortunately couldn’t find it on YouTube) Chiwetel Ejiofor’s hotel clerk is called up to a room where he discovers a human heart in the toilet and fishes it out with a wire coat hanger.
After watching Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, I did something I rarely do: I skipped back to the opening, just to watch the first scene again:
And I noticed something: I couldn’t turn it off. Not because I was so entranced by the story–I had just finished the movie, after all–but because every shot, every scene, led so seamlessly into the next. Eventually, I had to turn it off mid-scene for lack of any good stopping point. Those are the best openings: the ones that draw you in immediately and don’t give you a chance to walk away.
One last opener? American Beauty. A friend was once skeptical about watching this movie, so I invited him to watch the first scene, the long take on video of Thora Birch, and told him he was welcome to leave afterward, if he could.
shot / reverse shot
Filed under: Commentary, Directors | Tags: American Beauty, Dirty Pretty Things, Opening Scenes, Punch-Drunk Love, Steven Spielberg, Vanilla Sky
As any screenwriting textbook will tell you, the opening scene is the most important in your whole movie. If it doesn’t draw the viewer in immediately, chances are they aren’t going to hang around for the rest of the film. Raiders is obviously a great example, and in fact just about any Spielberg movie will fit the bill: the landing on the beach in Saving Private Ryan, the shark attack in Jaws, the coffins in the river in Empire of the Sun.
Some of my favorite movie openings are the ones that withhold information, presenting you with a scene so confusing and mysterious that you just have to stick around to find out what it all means. The opening few minutes of P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love are a favorite example:
Another terrifically bizarre opening? The first several minutes of Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, in which (and I unfortunately couldn’t find it on YouTube) Chiwetel Ejiofor’s hotel clerk is called up to a room where he discovers a human heart in the toilet and fishes it out with a wire coat hanger.
After watching Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, I did something I rarely do: I skipped back to the opening, just to watch the first scene again:
And I noticed something: I couldn’t turn it off. Not because I was so entranced by the story–I had just finished the movie, after all–but because every shot, every scene, led so seamlessly into the next. Eventually, I had to turn it off mid-scene for lack of any good stopping point. Those are the best openings: the ones that draw you in immediately and don’t give you a chance to walk away.
One last opener? American Beauty. A friend was once skeptical about watching this movie, so I invited him to watch the first scene, the long take on video of Thora Birch, and told him he was welcome to leave afterward, if he could.
He couldn’t.