In Praise of Long Conversations in Film

I love long conversations. I love to be fully engaged in an exhausting give-and-take of overlapping stories and ideas. It’s the ease of sharing myself and seeing my eagerness reflected back that does it for me. Afterwards, I feel like I’ve been relieved of some burden I didn’t know I had.

My deepest friendships and relationships have grown out of such conversations. They’re sustained by them. But these interactions are rare and hard to predict. Film offers the closest substitute. It’s not the same thing—but sometimes, it’s actually better.

In real life, a conversation is a two-person juggling act. It can be nerve-wracking work. Am I hogging the microphone? How long has it been since I asked them a question? Why didn’t they let me finish my story? How deep should I go into what I really want to talk about? Good on-screen conversations liberate me from these pressures. I can project myself into the avatars of Hollywood actors and experience a ventriloquist’s thrill as they articulate my thoughts and introduce new ideas, as though they were my own.

A good long conversation on screen isn’t a spontaneous construction but a deliberate exchange shaped by multiple creative minds. Each line of dialogue is honed to its most poignant expression. The entire sequence is made to feel like one perfectly calibrated whole. The initial chit-chat and personal shorthand is minimized. The dramatic revelations are heightened. The intrusions from the outside world enter the scene only as required. But the feeling of being heard, or somehow revealed, can be just as intense as in real life.

It’s hard to justify a long stretch of expensive screen time where two people are just chatting in a diner booth. Film school can instill a well-founded bias against scripts with ten- or fifteen-page chunks of dialogue in a single location. The longer these scenes go on, the more we might find ourselves channelling dogmatic principles: “Film is a visual medium”; “audiences expect constant movement”; “good scenes are short scenes.” It’s a reflex, and it’s probably right most of the time. Long conversations are a gamble. I think that’s what makes them so great to watch. There’s a high risk of failure. If these scenes work out, they’re the most memorable part of a film. If not, you’ve committed what director Frank Capra called the cardinal sin of filmmaking: dullness.

There needs to be an eagerness to participate in long on-screen conversations. In Before Sunrise, two would-be lovers meet on a train in Europe. Jesse and Céline are young and cute and full of energy. An older couple starts to argue, providing the two twenty-somethings with a moment to connect. He invites her to the lounge car and they start sharing their thoughts on travelling, culture, parents and the future. Just as we sense their energy escalating, he’s supposed to get off the train in Vienna. “I want to keep talking to you,” he blurts. She chooses to join him, sensing their potential connection. They wander streets filled with Austrian architecture and quirky locals—theatre artists, a palm reader, a poet. It’s a romantic experience we want for them, but we also want it for ourselves.

Before Sunrise tempts you to imagine yourself as young and confident, strolling through a safe, magical landscape as you commune with your soulmate. In this idealized fantasy, the conversation is all that matters—not the specific content of what they say, but their unrelenting enthusiasm to say more, to extend the fantasy as long as possible. Their awkward intensity is both alluring and a bit cringe-worthy. They seem simultaneously self-assured and uncertain when talking to each other. There’s a youthful contrast between their unearned cynicism and cheerful way of embracing new experiences. I think the film endures because it captures the truth of young adulthood and how these marathon conversations demand that nothing be left unsaid.

In My Dinner with Andre, a film known for its one long conversation, we’re tainted early by the financial and creative anxieties of a mid-thirties playwright, Wally. He’s not eager to socialize over dinner with Andre, a theatre acquaintance known for strange adventures. Amidst the restaurant’s musicians, eveningwear and muted chatter, they meet and Wally is quickly drawn into his friend’s tales of an artist’s life. Andre shares one story after another—from a bizarre theatre workshop in a Polish forest to a mock burial that seemed to rattle him deeply. Wally is a generous listener.

They find common ground on the impossibility of communicating. “I think we’re all in a trance,” says Andre. “We’re walking around like zombies.”

“I never understand what’s going on at a party,” says Wally. “I’m always completely confused.”

I was really bored the first time I saw My Dinner with Andre. I found Andre annoying and couldn’t summon the interest to finish watching it. But years later, when I gave it another shot, I felt a shift, deep into the film, when the one-way storytelling transforms into a more substantive back-and-forth conversation that’s worth watching. Wally expresses love for his electric blanket and Andre thinks it’s insane to shield yourself from the cold. This small disagreement opens the rift we’ll see between their perspectives. While Andre is hungry to shake off the modern world in favour of some pure, atavistic creativity, Wally defends the right to enjoy the small pleasures of his life, such as it is. “Everybody can’t be taken to Everest” to have the deep psychological transformations Andre is chasing.

Where Before Sunrise mines the euphoria of new lovers, My Dinner with Andre seeks out the philosophical chasm between two middle-aged artists. Once they fall into it, their conversation evolves into something more than just trading their respective points of view. What they’re discussing is so large and complicated that discussing it at all is both pointless and totally captivating. They’re trying to define how to live and create in a world that’s increasingly dead inside. Do you pursue enlightenment in some faraway landscape, or do you try to find joy and purpose in your own small bubble at home?

The magical promise of film is its capacity to blot out the confusion of life and create an ideal state for human experience. It can blissfully narrow the scope of communication and make mutual understanding achievable. I believe writing can clarify my own thinking, while writing conversations can clarify what I wish I could say or what could be said to me. I carry around too much context in real life and it doesn’t fit neatly into discrete dramatic questions and arcs. People rarely say profound things on cue. Film, however, can transcend this messiness.

The pivotal conversations in my life have mostly happened over drinks at night. My thoughts tend to feel more insightful when I’m armed with a buzz and some atmosphere. At some point, I would check the clock and realize the end was coming. I would feel myself disengage and turn inward again. But the landscape in there would be different in some way. These experiences, in real life or on screen, help articulate my identity to myself. It’s like unearthing a fossil of uncertain shape, little by little.