... In looking to fill this piece out a bit more, I was going to add two things at the beginning. One would be an audio-only segment, running under the intro titles, that depicts the salesman arriving, being met by the woman and some initial intimacy. The second scene would be of a car arriving at a house, implying the Man arriving home. Then cut to the start of the dialog.
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I would honestly use these as flashback items in the monologues. First, you don't have to find even more material to fill in. Second, it gives an edge to the dialogue.
Now, a couple of questions...
In breaking up the monologue, would you leave the audio running and just break it visually, or cut entirely to the new scene and then back to the monologue?
A grey area here. The director normally will have his/her own cinematographic view. As a screenwriter, I try to convey what I see in my head. Obviously, the producer/director wins out when it comes to budgets. My personal preference would be to start off with the talking head then switch over to a voiceover with the scenes. Because audio clashes, if you are going to have dialogue--script it. If it's just giggling, motors running, that should be fine. Just do good sound editing so they don't compete with your voiceover.
The cuts that I had been envisioning (in the house) were mostly still photos. They would really just flash in with enough duration to register and be gone, except for the final one where we see the woman on the floor.
Film is a dynamic medium. Short cuts to static images are fine. I kind of hear a Psycho theme in my head with pieced static shots. Again, this is a cinematographic call. For me--again directorial style--I would have the last image as dynamic (blood running down the drain) and fade back to the talking head.
Say there were 4 or 5 more cuts added to break the monologue, would that be overworking the visual impact?
Thanks... Don
A lot of this is up to you since you are writing, directing, and producing. The one rule is that there are no hard and fast rules. From an aesthetic point of view, don't allow visuals and audio background to derail the dialogue and storyline. Having said that, a rough rule of thumb that I use with long dialogue is to break it up after 3-4 lines. It's not hard and fast. Unless you are filming Shakespeare, soliloquies need to have something interspersed. Often a director will change angles or depth to accent portions of the dialogue.
A spec script is really just about the story idea. A shooting script details all the shots and how this will be put on screen. These can be and often are very different beasts.
