For ten years as an agent and personal manager, I watched monologues — hundreds, maybe even thousands of them. Much of my coaching is based on what I discovered worked for actors and what did not. Certainly there are no rules, but there are some reasonable guidelines. Here are my observations for a successful monologue performance. Choose something in your age range and gender, where the language is colloquial and a comfortable fit for who you are.
Select material where your character is talking to one specific individual. Get a sense of how it plays, how it sounds out loud and which parts need more work. Have an actor friend perform the piece for you; get a small audience of writers and actors to hear the monologue and give you feedback. While a monologue may be no less complex than a play or a film with multiple characters, it is, thankfully, a lot easier to showcase as it requires only a single person.
Use this to your advantage: arrange to hear the piece out loud and strengthen it from there. What makes your job easier? At all times during and after this process, remind yourself that writing is a skill. Any skill can be learned and improved with time and effort. And so our final piece of advice is the same for any article on writing: keep at it.
Start on the next one! And it never loses its thrill. Alexander Lee-Rekers is a Sydney-based writer, director and educator. He graduated from NIDA in with a Masters in Writing for Performance, and his career across theatre and television has seen him tackling projects as diverse as musical theatre, Shakespeare and Disney. Alexander is drawn to themes of family, ambition, failure and legacy: how human nature can flit with ease between compassion and cruelty.
How to Write a Short Film. Those aren't monologues. The bar scene in Good Will Hunting isn't a monologue either because it involves the back and forth between two characters playing academic and intellectual chess against one another.
This is a perfect example of an active monologue that actually takes on some of the structural characteristics of a narrative monologue as well. There are twists, turns, and reveals, like we'd often find in a narrative. But Sean is using these words to accomplish a goal — to get through to Will and challenge his confidence. When these two first meet in Sean's office, Will examines Sean's various belongings and decorations. We see a picture of a younger Sean in Vietnam, posing with some buddies.
Within the monologue, Sean reveals that while Will may know what war is like through an academic or literary perspective, he's never been in one. He's never held his best friend's hand as he took his last breath, looking for him to help. That's a reveal. In Sean's office, Will discovered an important detail about Sean after he mentioned his wife during his interpretation of Sean's painting.
He thought he found Sean's weakness to exploit. When he pushed Sean's button in that respect, Sean reacted with extreme rage and anger — emotions we couldn't imagine attributing to this character that had an otherwise controlled and calm demeanor.
Within the monologue, we're offered the twist that Sean didn't marry the wrong woman. His wife didn't leave him. She died. And Sean was there for every minute of her suffering through cancer without a damn thing he could do about it.
He has clearly proven that Will can't possibly know who Sean is by looking at a painting. He can't possibly portray himself as a superior because he hasn't truly lived or loved. Sean then masterfully flips Will's assertions by saying that just because Will is an orphan, he can't possibly know how difficult his struggles have been because he read Oliver Twist.
This monologue had purpose. Sean's goal was to take action and push against Will's mind games in order to help Will reach out to him. And here's the most important factor of this — or any — great monologue. If you take it out of the script or movie, nothing else beyond it works. If this monologue isn't in the story, Will doesn't open up to Sean.
Because he doesn't open up to Sean, he never confronts his inner demons and he never experiences the love of a girl he just met. He likely goes back to his old ways and ends up in jail. This is the ultimate narrative monologue, as Quint tells the story of his experience during the sinking of the U. Indianapolis and resulting shark attacks as the remaining crew were left in the ocean waters, waiting for rescue that wouldn't come until a majority of the men were eaten alive.
There is no goal for Quint to tell this story. After the three characters drunkenly compared their various scars, the Chief asks about a certain one. Quint's eyes narrow as he reveals it was from the Indianapolis, a story that shark specialist Hooper is familiar with. Quint goes on to tell the harrowing and horrific story. This monologue is placed in between the action of them hunting a deadly shark.
By this point, Quint was seen as nothing more than an obsessed and cranky captain — almost like an obsessed Captain Ahab. But when we hear him narrate this story, we learn why he is obsessed with finding and killing the shark. And we learn that he's not as invulnerable as we thought. It is also a foreboding moment of foreshadowing as his fate is about to be decided in the coming hours — a fate that will force his history to come around full circle as he dies violently at the jaws of a shark.
The way he tells the story — as if they're around a campfire — gives the audience an equally foreboding feeling leading into the third act of the film.
We learn how dangerous sharks truly are, beyond what we've seen with a few deaths on and off-screen. And we know that if Quint is as scared and haunted as he was to this day telling that story, then we should be as equally scared for those characters going into the climax of the film. It masterfully sets the tone that drives us further into this insane quest to kill a seemingly unkillable monster of the deep ocean blue.
This despite the fact that in giving this opportunity, Jordan is defrauding others. Jordan believes his company is what makes America great. Others see this plainly as fraud and greed run amok.
Red goes on to illustrate how far away he is from the man that was imprisoned 45 years ago…. A young stupid kid who committed that terrible crime.
I want to talk to him. I want to try and talk some sense into him. Tell him the way things are. This strikes as a great monologue primarily in its sentiment, which is tragic. Furthermore, he suggests the whole point of being in prison has little merit, rubbishing the concept of rehabilitation, on which the American prison system is built. In not even trying to prove that he has been rehabilitated, the parole board feel that he has been.
As he singles out Rachel Maggie Gyllenhaal , threatening her with a knife, he teases her with a tale about how he got his terrifying scars…. Who tells me I worry too much, who tells me I oughta smile more, who gambles and gets in deep. The sharks, one day they carve her face. We have no money for surgeries. I just want to see her smile again. So, I stick a razor in my mouth and do this to myself. She leaves. Now I see the funny side. This is such a great monologue as it creates a terrifying visual picture of a traumatic experience.
The Joker tells a sad, dark story, rich in tragic imagery and pain. The context also makes this a great monologue, the Joker holding Rachel in a vice-like grip, not letting her squirm away and demanding with his demeanour that she listen to his story.
Furthermore, as the film goes on we see the Joker tell many different stories of how he got his scars. Was this story of a girlfriend true? Andy scoffs when they debate over two types of belt that she thinks look the same as one another. She explains to Andy the journey that an item of clothing or style will go on from high fashion to a high street store that Andy is likely to frequent.
This is a great monologue in how acutely it sums up the fashion industry, particularly in defence from those who think it is ridiculous. But this great monologue brilliantly illustrates the complexity of the fashion world. The monologue marks a change in the film, a point of no return at which Andy will embrace her new job and the fashion world more and more.
But this monologue illustrates complexity where we might previously have just seen frivolity. Sean is a therapist and has just taken on Will as a client. Meeting on a park bench, Sean confronts Will about his arrogance.
You know a lot about him. As Sean goes on, we can see that his words are having an effect on Will, who listens intently.
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