Welcome to screenplay-writing 101. Your instructor for the day is David Mamet:



There are a number of fine quality reasons to be a fan of Ronin.

To start with, this film stars Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Natascha McElhone, Stellan Skarsgård, Sean Bean and Jonathan Pryce, which pretty much makes it a United Nations Of Blow-Your-Ass-Away Acting Talent, and when coupled with an intensely paced series of WHAT THE FUCK plot twists and HOLY SHIT AWESOME car chases, it all adds up to one seriously sweet package.

(Side note: John Frankenheimer, the director of Ronin, also directed the woefully lackluster sequel to Billy Friedkin's The French Connection, but in Ronin, Frankenheimer finally managed to not only EQUAL, but EXCEED Friedkin, with not just ONE, but TWO car chases, that actually surpassed the scene of Gene Hackman chasing the L-train.)

And yet, for all those stellar merits, it's the little scenes in this film that have stuck with me the most ... the subtle, understated moments that hinted at the characters' hidden depths.

Say what you will about Mamet's politics or storytelling tics, but there's a reason why so many vastly less talented storytellers ape the shit out of his style; to wit, the man can reveal more detail, with less dialogue, than almost any other modern screenwriter that I can think of, off the top of my head.

Mamet's scripts snap more loudly, and with more rhythm, than a streetcorner beatnik, and when his lines are delivered by actors as excellent as De Niro, McElhone, Bean and Skarsgård, as in the clip embedded above, his scenes transform into fascinating studies of the power-politics of interpersonal relationships.

Scroll back up and watch that scene again, and you'll see that every character in it is motivated by either the caution of pure survival instinct, the aggression of attempted social dominance, or both.

Neither Reno nor Skipp Sudduth's characters say ANYTHING in that scene - they're just quietly hanging back, watching and waiting to see how these two confrontations will play out, first between De Niro and McElhone's characters, then between De Niro and Bean's characters - whereas Skarsgård's character only speaks AFTER the action is done, and even then, only to try and find out how much De Niro's character actually knows. Indeed, during the action itself, Skarsgård's character literally PHYSICALLY REMOVES HIMSELF from that final confrontation.

By contrast, De Niro, McElhone and Bean's characters are all acting out of a clear need to wrest supremacy of the situation out of each others' hands. McElhone is ostensibly the leader of their team, since she's the one who recruited them, and she's the one who's supplying them with their mission parameters, but her tension with De Niro comes from the fact that he feels that he needs more information about the larger plan than she feels comfortable giving him. Bean, on the other hand, is a poser who's been boasting of a resume of experience that's obviously all lies, which causes friction between him and De Niro, because Bean is correctly afraid that he'll be eaten alive if his teammates call him on conning his way into their operation, and De Niro doesn't want to worry about one of his teammates being an unqualified fuck-up who's gonna bring down the heat on everyone else.

So, in a sense, even with these characters, their aggression stems from a survival instinct of sorts, and this is as true of De Niro's character as of any of the others. Watch it again; De Niro constantly TAKES from others, without GIVING AWAY ANYTHING, and he does it with hardly any posturing at all. Skarsgård retreats and regroups, McElhone glares and gives orders, and Bean brags and bullshits, but De Niro simply NAGS, over and over and over again -"What's in the case? Is it heavy? Is it explosive?" - and when he finally does resort to demands, he gets away with them by backing them up with action ("I ambushed you with a CUP OF COFFEE!") and by sharing his wealth with the others (demanding from McElhone, in front of the others, that the increased fee he negotiated for himself also apply to them, even though he already knew, before McElhone even told him, that she already understood this to be one of the terms of their renegotiated agreement).

This is a movie moment that should be mandatory viewing for anyone who wants to tell stories, in any medium, because if you watch it with the right kind of eyes, you can almost always see something new in it.