Every time I watch a movie I don’t like, or that I think is bad, I find myself wondering: what are the key ingredients that separate good movies from bad movies? What actually makes a movie good?
The key ingredients that make a movie “good” are when the acting, directing, writing, cinematography, and overall production value all come together to tell one cohesive, entertaining, and impactful story. In essence, a good movie uses all these tools of filmmaking to tell a compelling story that makes you feel.
That’s just the short version, of course. There’s so much more that goes into creating a good movie, and since certain ingredients, like writing or directing, can be subjective to the viewer’s individual tastes and opinions, separating good movies from bad ones can be complicated.
However, it is impossible for a movie to be considered “good” without all or most of these key ingredients involved. Because film is such a collaborative medium, it requires multiple artists with various talents all working together to make one cohesive product.
So let’s have a look at each individual ingredient that goes into a good movie and see how they all add up and interact with each other to make a movie most people can objectively call good!
Screenplays are <strong>blueprints</strong> that every other department working on a movie uses to inform their own decision-making.
In case you didn’t know, every great movie that was ever made started with a great script.
In fact, almost every movie that gets made has to start with a script. Unless it’s a big franchise tentpole movie a studio has planned years in advance (I’m looking at you, fourth Spider Man reboot!), you need a locked script written before you can start working on a movie.
Without a script, how would the production designers know what sets they need to build? How would the casting directors know who to cast? How would the cinematographers know what to shoot or the director what to direct?
Screenplays are blueprints that every other department working on a movie uses to inform their own decision-making.
You might think that directors are the ones who tell everyone else what to do, but you’d be remiss to think costume designers and sound mixers don’t reference the script to inform their decisions on how to tell the story.
And while directors have a vision that guides the work of the other departments, their vision still refers back to the movie that jumps off the page and into their head when they read the words of the script.
