deadandimmortal:

I am fascinated by this because I was taught very specifically and intensely to use only the present tense in my screenwriting. No one is ever “setting” a table in the action or “has set,” they “set the table” or “the table is set.”

So, in this case, Charlotte would never ever ever have smiled, past tense. “Charlotte smiles knowingly,” we’d be told to write. (And, with an action like that, we’d frequently be told “That’s a tough thing to act, can you describe that better?”)

But! And, again, I may be giving Sofia Coppola a lot of credit here, because that’s my position on Sofia (RE: Thinking Marie Antoinette is a modern classic, Somewhere as a masterful [if problematic] critique of the criticism Sofia has endured about her career being too feminine or relying too much on her father.), but I’m suddenly fascinated by it because of why I’ve been told to write in the present tense.

My screenwriting professor has always said that present tense is more “masculine.” It’s powerful and immediate. Past tense weakens the delivery, he claims. Was Sofia told this? Is this a fuck you? Sofia does what she does, and we all know that Lost in Translation has it problems, but I’m going to meditate on this for a while.

This commentary!!

(via feministfilm)