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How to Create a Great Action Sequence: Clear and Present Danger
A beat-by-beat breakdown of a single scene reveals what goes into a great cinematic action sequence
Okay, ignore the title of this essay. I have to come up with these things to entice you to read what I write, because writing these things is no fun if people don’t interact with them. I’m not a “how to” kind of storyteller, is the point. I like to consider art, contextualize it for specific audiences, and hope that those audiences — such as aspiring screenwriters, in this case — might find something useful in my “lessons”.
In other words: Let’s just have a conversation about what makes most action sequences great.
So many screenwriters I know are terrified of writing them. Everyone intuitively understands at this point what a great one is, but the prospect of crafting one, of conceiving and executing one on the page, proves daunting for many. What I’m going to do here is take a look at a single key action sequence in Clear and Present Danger (1994), and offer some thoughts on both why it is a masterful example of what we’re talking about and what can be learned from it when setting out to dream up your own action sequences.
