Steve Coombes - Moment

In our latest lesson in screenwriting with Steve we talked about characters and dialogue. He told us to focus on how someone's accent and vocabulary describes their character, and use that for when we're writing our own scripts.

We were then challenged to find a moment in a film that we like and think of what it is that makes it a good moment.

The moment i chose is from the film "Bridge of Spice", a historical drama legal thriller from 2015, directed and co-produced by Steven Spielberg and written by Matt Charman, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. The film is based on the 1960 U-2 incident during the Cold War where a US U-2 spy plane was shot down while being in Soviet airspace.

The trailer:

Bridge of Spies Trailer from Wild Card on Vimeo.

Rudolf Abel, played by Mark Rylance, is a very sweet character and it's easy to fall in love with his personality. He is held under the custody of the US, accused of being a Soviet spy.
In this scene he and his lawyer James B. Donowan, played by Tom Hanks, have just been in court where Abel has been found guilty and sentenced to death.

The scene lasts for 3.5 minutes where there are very little action, but great and inspiring dialogue. Even though Abel is hated by the whole country, Donowan is determined to treat him as innocent and as a fellow human being.
Abel is not scared of dying, and instead of talking about the death sentence they are talking about family. Abel tells Donowan that he reminds him of a man he knew when he was young, calling him "The standing man".

I love this scene because it's a dialogue that gives me goosebumps every time i watch it and i also like the way they have filmed it, moving the camera around instead of having a lot of different still shots. Which gives the scene only 11 shots and 17 edits.

The scene. 

//All images are screenshots from the movie\\