One bit of conventional wisdom about scripts, plays, and novels is that they should not be too talky--that is, more should be going on than just having your characters talking. I've always felt that if what they are saying is interesting enough, then talking is just fine. This is also why it's so annoying when the producers of factual TV programs are so insecure about whether we will find a 'talking head' interesting that they resort to weird camera angles, text whizzing across the bottom of the screen, etc.
Anyway, in an interview in the Sunday Times (London) director Mike Nichols had some interesting insights about this: "I’m fascinated by this whole thing of things being talkie or not being talkie. Nobody ever thought that All About Eve or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? were talkie. It’s not about the words. It’s: ‘Is something happening or not?’ If something’s happening, you can talk all you want and you’ll never think of it as talkie.
The experience of people sitting in a dark hall, all thinking the same thing; the joy of something in the room during a play that’s not spoken . . . that is the reason Chekhov is the best. He invented all this. He said, ‘He loves her and she loves him, and he loves her, and so on and so on. None of the characters knows this; you do. Now watch.’ It was such a great idea. Because they can sit around saying things like ‘Cook doesn’t know how to boil rice’, and it doesn’t matter, because we know who wants to f*** who, and who never will.
Modern theatre was invented that way, and I am heartbroken when those things are erased, effaced, ignored – and happy when they are not."
