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In scenes driven by dialogue, characters must have believable and distinct voices, partly because dialogue needs a rhythm. The pulse of a character’s talk makes it easy to read and hear. Discourse dialogue is also compressed and moves rapidly, like a ball in a ping-pong match. The verbal exchanges move back and forth between characters, shifting power from one side to the other, until somebody scores the point. Screenplay dialogue needs to be full of conflict as well, lots of it. Never make it too easy for any character. Especially in a heated argument when emotions…

Screenplay Genre: Action / Crime / Thriller Movie Time: 148 minutes 1. INCITING INCIDENT After botching an extraction job for their employer Cobol Engineering, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) decide to lay low for a while, but before they can take a chopper out of the city, Saito (Ken Watanabe) offers Cobb a proposal. Saito assures Cobb that he will be able to return to the United States and see his children if Cobb carries out an “inception”: making Saito’s main competitor’s son decide to break up his father’s empire.…