How to Engage Your Audience Through Immersive Storytelling

I think we moviemakers would all agree that we want our audience immersed in the story we are telling.  We want them to feel like they are a part of the movie world as much as possible. You don’t want them checking their phones while watching your movie. 

I’d like to suggest one technique that can help you accomplish this.  This technique is the under-appreciated use of overlapping dialogue. 

The first time I became aware of overlapping dialogue was when I first saw Citizen Kane in a film class.  The news reel near the beginning of the movie that chronicles Kane’s life ends, and we find ourselves in a projection room with a crowd of journalists.  I remember thinking that the scene had an amazing sense of realism, or verisimilitude.  I later realized that the journalists were talking over each other, just like a group of people would do in real life when coming up with ideas and trying to be heard. 

Robert Altman is the mastermind who took the idea of overlapping dialogue and progressed it into an art form.  He first became known for this technique in 1970 with the film MASH.  Though Altman would record multiple conversations happening at the same time, he was careful to make sure the primary conversation was not drowned out.  But the effect of having such a dense audio experience was to force the viewer to pay attention and allowed “them to hear multiple scraps of dialogue, as if they were listening in on various private conversations.”  This makes the viewer feel like a participant in the drama. (Wikipedia)

I hope the effects of overlapping dialogue mentioned in the above paragraph register with you, moviemaker.  This technique makes the viewer feel like a participant in the drama.  

As British film critic David Thomson put it, “The mosaic, or mix, permits a freedom and a human idiosyncrasy that Renoir might have admired.”  Human idiosyncrasy is a very compelling phrase and I hope it sticks in your mind.  

Early in his career, Steven Spielberg made frequent and brilliant use of this technique.  I can imagine the voracious young Spielberg watching Citizen Kane or McCabe & Mrs. Miller and cogitating over the technique and strategizing how he was going to use it. 

Watch the scene near the beginning of Jaws in Chief Brody’s office where he types up the initial report on the remains of the girl that washed up on the beach.  He talks right over his secretary, and then, as he moves to the outer office, he talks to his deputy while the secretary continues to talk. And then an old man comes into the room complaining right over everyone else about someone parking right in front of his store.  It’s a wonderful mosaic, to borrow Thomson’s word, of Chief Brody’s daily life.  It feels real and it carries a kind of amusement as well. It’s fun to watch partly because we do sense the idiosyncrasy of these characters.  

There are many other scenes in Jaws with overlapping dialogue: at the beach, on the dock where the fishermen gather to go bounty hunting for the shark, etc. 

Consider also the scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind inside the air traffic control tower.  Putting off for now a discussion of the brilliant camera framing with foreground, middle-ground and background actors all pointing via graphic vector lines to the green-lit radar screen, we have the central air traffic controller talking to the pilots who are witnessing the UFOs.  At the same time the other controllers who have gathered around audibly speculate as to what the pilots might be seeing.  As it begins to dawn on the controllers that the pilots are seeing something extraordinary, we, the audience, get to imagine what that could look like.  Again, it’s a beautiful mosaic made more tactile to our imaginations because of the realism of the overlapping dialogue. 

Like Jaws, there are many excellent and compelling examples of overlapping dialogue in Close Encounters, so maybe watch these movies again paying attention to this technique.  I believe if you can appropriate it for yourself, it will be a powerful tool in your moviemaking toolkit.