Ask A Genius 1549: Good Movie Dialogue: Cut Ruthlessly, Show Don’t Tell
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/16
As a writer, what makes good dialogue in movies? And what’s an example of that?
Rick Rosner tells Scott Douglas Jacobsen that sharp movie dialogue comes from cutting: show, don’t tell, and dodge clichés like “We’ve got company” or “Chop, chop.” Keep audiences oriented through action, not exposition. He riffs on Bond’s implausible durability and imagines alternatives—a centuries-old vampire spy, or a post–near-death Bond with OCD who grades every move—fresh premises that justify survival without speeches. Rosner cites The Accountant as adjacent but abrasive. Big franchises second-guess scripts for precision. Great actors prefer fewer, stronger lines; compress three sentences into one natural beat. Concision, novelty, and situational clarity make dialogue land and performances sing too.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: As a writer, what makes good dialogue in movies? And what’s an example of that?
Rick Rosner: I believe the secret to good dialogue is cutting. You write what you want the characters to say, and then you see how much you can remove. People, under normal circumstances, are concise. The saying is “show, don’t tell.” Too much exposition—or any exposition, really—is irritating. Don’t have a character say, “You’re my brother.” Find another way to make that relationship clear.
So conciseness is key to dialogue.
It also helps if the audience can easily follow what’s happening without being told directly. Movies are made of situations that people have seen before in other movies. If there’s a car chase, that implies there’s a car behind you chasing you. There’s always a point where someone notices they’re being pursued.
The standard line people use in those moments is, “We’ve got company.” It’s short, and it works, but it’s overused. Another line might be, “There’s someone behind us,” but “We’ve got company” is the cliché. It irritates some viewers because it’s what everyone always says.
So if there’s a way to show that without saying “We’ve got company,” people will appreciate it.
There’s another line that drives me crazy: when someone in a movie wants another person to hurry up, they say, “Chop, chop.” I hate that because it’s been used so often. I’ll give it a little leeway—it’s the kind of thing a jerk would say after hearing it in other movies—but still, try not to repeat what’s been said in a thousand scripts before.
Also, try to make situations unfold differently from how they’ve played out in countless other films.
I’ve been thinking about James Bond, where he often survives not just because he’s good at what he does but also because he’s lucky—and, honestly, more durable than is plausible.
I think we talked about the scene in the last Bond movie where someone sets a bomb trap for him. He gets blown up, flies through the air, but somehow he’s not torn apart. He gets up, dusts himself off, and gets into a car.
Then there’s the gunfight. Maybe Bond was supposed to be farther from the bomb, but mostly it’s that, because the plot required it, the bomb just didn’t blow him to pieces.
I’ve been thinking—again, for no good reason—about how to make James Bond more reasonable. I think about this sort of thing while I’m at the gym: how to create a Bond-like character who makes sense.
Let’s say there’s a vampire who’s been undead for about 350 years. He mostly keeps to himself, enjoying his existence, until he sees fascism sweeping across Europe. After centuries of ignoring the horrors of humanity, he decides this one looks particularly bad. So he volunteers to become a spy. He’s durable—vampires are hard to kill—and he’s got centuries of knowledge and experience. He’s also talented in the art of seduction, so a vampire would make a great World War II spy. You could blow him up, and he’d still survive.
That’s one idea. Another thing I’ve been thinking about—completely ridiculous, of course—is that Ian Fleming actually killed off James Bond. Fleming had written several books, but Bond wasn’t selling well. So at the end of From Russia with Love, he said, “To hell with it,” and killed Bond off. Then President John F. Kennedy publicly said that the Bond novels were his favorite books, and sales exploded.
So Fleming had to bring Bond back. At the end of From Russia with Love, the villain Rosa Klebb has a blade hidden in her shoe coated with poison. She kicks Bond and poisons him, and the book ends with him apparently dying. But in the next novel, You Only Live Twice, it’s revealed that Bond spent about a year in the hospital and barely survived—as the title suggests, he literally lived twice.
So I was thinking—what if a near-death experience like that gave Bond, or a Bond-type spy, obsessive-compulsive disorder?
Before almost getting killed, Bond is known for being careless, carefree, arrogantly unconcerned with protocol, probably a bit lazy, but naturally talented, skilled, lucky, and debonair. You never really see Bond training. Maybe somewhere in the series, but I don’t recall any scene where he’s practicing his skills.
But imagine a character like that who, after a near-death experience, becomes obsessive—OCD about perfecting every element of being himself. All the espionage skills, all the spycraft, all the fighting techniques—he becomes consumed with mastery.
I can relate. I have OCD tendencies myself. Every time I park my car, I give myself a letter grade based on how precisely I parked it. It’s surprisingly hard to park a car with real precision. Most people don’t know where their car actually is in space within six inches. If you watch drivers, they really have no idea how their car is positioned relative to other things. I’m better than most, but I still have trouble getting my car within two inches of where I want it.
That’s pretty OCD—every time I park, I give myself a grade. Usually B-plus, sometimes A-minus. That’s obsessive as hell. But imagine a spy like that—someone who, every time they get into a fight or pull off a mission, constantly evaluates their performance, grading themselves on how perfectly they executed it.
I don’t know—something like that would be interesting to me. There’s already a character somewhat like that in film. Ben Affleck plays a hitman with severe autism in The Accountant (2016). His condition makes him extremely meticulous as a killer but leaves him with almost no interpersonal skills. It works as a premise, but the character can come off as grating.
So, if you had a James Bond with OCD—or who had been knocked somewhere onto the spectrum—you’d still want to preserve his debonair quality. But now, in his newly obsessive way, he’d be grading himself on how successfully he’s being debonair. It’s an odd complication, maybe not interesting to anyone but me.
And that doesn’t really answer your question about dialogue. In general, though—whether it’s dialogue or anything else—do something different. Pretend every viewer has seen 5,000 other movies and doesn’t want to see the same recycled material. And that’s basically true.
If you make a movie where everything is strange just for the sake of being different, that’s annoying too. But you shouldn’t take any part of your dialogue, action, setting, or plot for granted. You should question every piece of it. That’s what happens with Marvel movies. If they’re spending 200 million dollars, they’ll have the main writers—and then a team of others—to second-guess them and make sure every detail is as refined as possible.
The less dialogue, the better. A good actor will look at their lines and suggest cuts, ways to say less. It takes a truly skilled actor to deliver three or four sentences in a row—to make a small speech—and have it sound natural rather than artificial.
If you can shorten those three or four sentences into one strong line, the actor’s job becomes easier. It’s simpler to say something naturally when it’s concise. It makes the actor look good, rather than like someone reciting a bunch of empty dialogue.
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