"When you are working on a script, the story itself is not difficult. You say this would happen and then this, resulting perhaps in this. And the dialogue you make as true as you can"
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Malle strips screenwriting of its mystique with the blunt confidence of someone who’s spent a career watching “important” stories collapse under the weight of their own significance. The provocation is in the phrasing: the story “is not difficult.” In an industry that fetishizes plot mechanics and three-act dogma, he reframes story as basic causality: this, then this, maybe this. What matters is not the architecture but the lived texture inside it.
The second sentence quietly reveals the real ambition: “the dialogue you make as true as you can.” Not lyrical, not clever, not “good” in the workshop sense - true. Malle’s cinema (from Elevator to the Gallows to Au revoir les enfants) is obsessed with the uneasy gap between what people feel and what they can bear to say. He’s pointing to dialogue as the place where character stops being a schematic and becomes a human being with self-deceptions, evasions, small cruelties, and sudden honesty. Plot can be assembled; truth has to be earned.
There’s also a pragmatic, almost anti-authorial humility here. “As true as you can” admits limits: you never get purity, only approximation, constrained by your observation, your empathy, your era’s taboos. Coming out of postwar French filmmaking, where realism and moral ambiguity became weapons against propaganda and melodrama, Malle’s intent is clear: stop worshipping narrative “difficulty” and start listening harder. The script’s job isn’t to impress; it’s to corner reality until it talks.
The second sentence quietly reveals the real ambition: “the dialogue you make as true as you can.” Not lyrical, not clever, not “good” in the workshop sense - true. Malle’s cinema (from Elevator to the Gallows to Au revoir les enfants) is obsessed with the uneasy gap between what people feel and what they can bear to say. He’s pointing to dialogue as the place where character stops being a schematic and becomes a human being with self-deceptions, evasions, small cruelties, and sudden honesty. Plot can be assembled; truth has to be earned.
There’s also a pragmatic, almost anti-authorial humility here. “As true as you can” admits limits: you never get purity, only approximation, constrained by your observation, your empathy, your era’s taboos. Coming out of postwar French filmmaking, where realism and moral ambiguity became weapons against propaganda and melodrama, Malle’s intent is clear: stop worshipping narrative “difficulty” and start listening harder. The script’s job isn’t to impress; it’s to corner reality until it talks.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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