Scenes From A Movie: 7 Brilliant Beginnings
Seven examples of memorable film opening scenes, each great in their own way.
A great opening is the fastest way to guarantee that an audience is going to continue watching a movie. To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, all bad openings are alike, while every great opening is great in its own way.
The following examples of magnificent openings in movies stand out in different ways. This is NOT a list of the best opening scenes ever, but some examples of great opening scenes and why I think they work so effectively. One has no dialogue; another is entirely driven by dialogue. Yet another serves as a prologue to a vast story, while another uses sex and intimacy to tell us so many things about the characters before we know anything about their identities.
What they do have in common is that they effectively set up the world we are about to enter and establishing the tone. A great opening scene might introduce all the principal players; or it may not.
But when it’s done properly, there’s nothing quite like it.
(Note: Wherever possible, I will try to attach a clip of the opening for your viewing pleasure. If it’s not available and you haven’t watched, I highly recommend you get a copy of the movie and check it out.)
A Shot in the Dark (1964)
Directed by: Blake Edwards
Written by: Blake Edwards, William Peter Blatty
Based on: A Shot in the Dark by Harry Kurnitz
Without a single word (except for one character softly calling out a character’s name), Blake Edwards establishes the world and social classes of the Ballon country house using unhurried long takes that follow various characters sneaking up and down staircases, in and out of rooms, as they try to clandestinely meet each other while also avoiding running into people they don’t want to see in this farcical comedy of manners that is also a standalone sequel to The Pink Panther— and the best Inspector Clouseau film of them all. Imagine the amount of prep and blocking required to get the timing of the characters’ movements right; all set to Gina Carroll’s crooning vocals of ‘Shadows of Paris’. Even without any dialogue, we understand what kind of world we’re about to fall into— and this is before Peter Sellers even turns up to create havoc. What’s amazing is that *SPOILER* the opening gives away the identity of the killer that sets the story in motion— which then makes you wonder what is in store for the rest of the film. There’s nothing show-off-y about the length of the shots. It’s just pure confidence that tells the viewer: Buckle up, it’s going to be fun!
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Directed by: Quentin Tarantino
Written by: Quentin Tarantino
Story by: Quentin Tarantino & Roger Avery
It’s impossible to talk about creating memorable opening scenes without mentioning Quentin Tarantino at least once— dude knows how to boldly open a film. For my part, I like the diner scene from Pulp Fiction best. It starts off seemingly normal: a couple having breakfast in a diner, trading quips over a friendly argument. But the good-natured banter slowly reveals that these two are a modern-day Bonnie & Clyde… and they’re about to rob the diner they’re in.
What is easy to miss is that the dialogue doesn’t exist for the sake of adding color. No, Tarantino uses it to build suspense. For instance, look at the film’s first line:
PUMPKIN: Forget it. It’s too risky, I’m through with doing that shit.
The line is an immediate hook. What is he calling risky? What is he through with? Right away, Tarantino creates mystery. He also drops us into the middle of the action, not at the start.
Then he starts using repetition to create rhythm and a kind of musicality:
HONEY BUNNY: You forget about it in a day or two.
PUMPKIN: The days of me forgetting are over, and the days of me remembering have just begun.
The other thing that Tarantino does is that the dialogue is actually structured in three acts, and each act ends on a cliffhanger with the use of a waitress refilling their cups as an interlude between each act.
Observe.
After the initial dialogue and after Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) makes fun of Pumpkin (Tim Roth), we end the first “act” on this exchange:
PUMPKIN: Take heart, cause you’re never gonna have to hear it again. Since I’m never gonna do it again, you’re never gonna have to hear me quack.
HONEY BUNNY: After tonight?
PUMPKIN: Correct. I got all tonight to quack.
Now what is happening after tonight? That’s the intrigue. But before we hear more about it, the waitress turns up, asks if they want anything else, then leaves.
Then begins the second “act”: Where Pumpkin talks about it being easier to rob a bank. It sounds like he’s making an exaggerated point with his quirky anecdote about a man who robbed a bank with a telephone, but you soon realize that he’s a robber, and these two have been taking risks robbing liquor stores. Honey Bunny is puzzled— what options do they have?
Pumpkin lifts his cup, hollers for coffee— and right before a different waitress turns up, he taps the table and says, “This place.”
That’s the end of the second “act”. The waitress is snooty, and this interlude creates more tension— you can’t help wondering if she’s going to get whacked if Pumpkin actually decides to rob the diner.
When she leaves, the third and final “act” begins. Pumpkin elaborates why robbing a diner is a low-risk robbery. We watch Honey Bunny get convinced. We see them prepare to go at it— and then it ends on a real cliffhanger when the frame freezes on Amanda Plummer deranged line (“Any of you fucking pricks move, and I’ll execute every motherfuckin’ last one of you!”)…
… AND THEN WE DON’T RETURN TO THE DINER UNTIL NEAR THE END OF THE FILM, THUS CREATING THE CYCLICAL STRUCTURE OF PULP FICTION!
What’s remarkable is that Tarantino doesn’t use any visual effects or fancy sets to create a gripping opening. He just uses dialogue effectively to build suspense and create the world we’re about to enter— the sleazy low-level criminal underworld of Los Angeles— and before you realize it, he’s got your attention. It’s pretty brilliant.
Scream (1996)
Directed by: Wes Craven
Written by: Kevin Williamson
It was Drew Barrymore’s idea to play sweet Casey Becker, because as the biggest name in the cast, nobody in the audience would expect her to get brutally killed in the first 12 minutes of the film. Once Wes Craven and everyone else came around to it, Barrymore’s presence added a Psycho-like twist to the proceedings.
But the scene’s brilliance is due to Kevin Williamson’s clever screenplay paired with Craven’s meticulous shooting. Right off the bat, we are dropped into a world that was revolutionary at the time: it’s a horror movie in which the characters actively watch horror movies. And unlike most horror films, the entire opening is BRIGHT. Bright lights, no shadows for the killer to jump out from. The telephone, that modern invention used to connect people, becomes an instrument of torture in which Ghostface first flirts with Casey, then switches to sinister while toying with her. The real horror isn’t that a teenage girl is alone at home— it’s that she ISN’T alone.
The entire opening, which stands on its own separate from the film, was inspired by two things. One was a one-act play he wrote in college about a young babysitter who gets a creepy call and starts talking about all the tropes in horror movies. The other was a real-life experience where he was house-sitting for a friend and getting creeped out by a true crime report about the Gainesville Ripper, when he discovered an open window in the house that he couldn’t remember being open. Freaking out, he started searching the house while a friend stayed with him on the phone (a scene that would inspire a similar one in Scream 2). There was no killer hiding, luckily, but the discarded one-act play plus this experience sparked an idea for a script he could write— and behold, a franchise— and an excellent opening scene— was born.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
Directed by: Peter Jackson
Written by: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson
Based on: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Here’s a riddle for you: How do you introduce a world of magic rings, elves, dark lords, and hobbits— plus an entire history and context of Middle-Earth vital to the plot— without confusing your audience?
That was the challenge cut out for Peter Jackson and his co-writers, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. They had to get the average viewer who’d never read the books to understand and care about Middle-Earth, a fantasy world entirely of its own.
In the book, it starts off right away in the Shire, then starts providing the background and history of the One Ring in the second chapter— effectively grinding the story to a halt as Gandalf tells Frodo about the trinket in his possession. But Jackson and the team must’ve realized that they couldn’t do that.
What they needed was a prologue that delivered all the necessary exposition.
Peter Jackson also had one objective: he wanted to “blow people away in the first five minutes”, because it would then buy “that little bit of story set-up time during your first act”.
So for ideas, he turned to a movie that he loved which had the kind of bombastic prologue he wanted to emulate: Thunderball. Yep, Jackson modeled the Lord of the Rings prologue after the fourth James Bond movie— and you can see the flourish, the excitement, and drama with all the dramatic imagery and swooping cameras.
But he doesn’t just dump exposition. He creates mystery and intrigue, like a parent uses to recite a bedtime story, holding the attention by injecting drama and suspense. almost as if telling a fairy tale.
He sets the tone with Howard Shore’s music, its ethereal choir conjuring a world different from our own. Then we hear the first line of dialogue in voice over… spoken in haunting Elvish. Followed by Cate Blanchett saying: The world is changed. By the time she gets to the line “Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it”, you are drawn forward. This Tolkien-esque dialogue is the equivalent of “Once upon a time, there was…” or the equivalent of “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”
And only then do we get the story of the Rings of Power, but instead of telling it like it’s a documentary, it’s delivered with twists and turns— Great Rings were forged and given to different races BUT a Dark Lord forget a ring in secret to rule the others and start conquering Middle-Earth; BUT there was a Great Alliance and battle with victory close at hand; BUT then Sauron began to decimate them until Isildur cut the Ring from his hand BUT instead of destroying the Ring, Isildur… well, you get the picture.
The exposition doesn’t have to be told like it’s exposition— here, it’s told like a story. And when it ends with the tantalizing cliffhanger: “For the time will soon come when Hobbits will shape the fortunes of all”, you have an idea about what kind of movie this is going to be, what kind of characters are there, what kind of enemy is out there… and of course, what is a Hobbit??
In seven minutes, the prologue establishes everything required. Either you’re in, or you’re out. Judging by the film’s success— the entire trilogy’s success, really— a lot of people were in.
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)
Directed by: Sidney Lumet
Written by: Kelly Masterson
Opening with a sex scene is certainly one way to get an audience’s attention (well, except maybe the more sex-averse Gen Z viewers) but in Sidney Lumet’s final film, there is an absolute reason for this scene: it captures the dilemma of the couple, Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Gina (Marisa Tomei), and it’s going to be the only moment of happiness for them. As a matter of fact, the actual sex only runs for less than a minute… the rest of the scene is pillow talk; we don’t get their names, or much about them in terms of identity, but we get the impression that this couple haven’t felt this connected or intimate in a long time. “Well, what the hell happened?” Andy marvels. “We’re an old married couple! Was it the pot?” They’re both happy…
… until Gina suggests it could always be like this if Andy has enough money to stay in Brazil forever. Okay, so they’re in Brazil. But Andy hesitates… and that kills the mood. Gina’s smile fades away and she turns away from him. A melancholy tunes fades up, echoing the strained straits of their relationship. Andy tries to comfort Gina but it doesn’t really work as Gina starts crying and says: “I don’t feel like such a fuck-up when I’m here, that’s all.”
All of that opening— especially that last line— is set up for one truly messed-up series of events, in which Andy convinces his younger brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) to rob their parents’ jewellery store for money (Andy says they’re insured, and they’ll be fine) only for it to go horribly wrong. Oh, and in the midst of all this, Gina and Hank are having an affair because she’s terribly unhappy in her marriage and Hank is unhappily divorced and in a bad financial state.
Sidney Lumet had a fun anecdote about blocking this scene, recounting in an interview:
I wondered, it occurred to me, "Is Philip [Seymour Hoffman] going to have more difficulty with this than Marisa [Tomei]—because he's never had to do this?" The way good actors are with each other, and how well they understand each other…
Because it was the first scene in the picture, it was the first scene I had to stage, block. There was a bed for the bed in the hotel room. We walked over to the set and Marisa hopped onto the bed, got up on her knees and elbows and slapped her ass and said, "Come on, Phil!" Well, the generosity of that! No, I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. How brilliant it was! She took all self-consciousness out of it. If Phil had been feeling self-conscious about it, it was over. And she did it. It was generous and giving and loving. I don't know, I'm sure—I don't think it ever occurred to her how generous it was. But she's got a generous heart, and that's what she did, without thinking. It was great.
Get Out (2017)
Written and directed by: Jordan Peele
In less than three minutes, Jordan Peele turns an innocuous bland suburb into something terrifying— for African-Americans. It begins with a bit of funny dialogue as Andre (LaKeith Stanfield) banters with his girlfriend on the phone, but then as he’s walking on the empty street, the tenor shifts as a passing car (white, no less) turns around and follows Andre. Jordan Peele stages all of it in one single take, which keeps us locked in with Andre to experience everything at the same time that he does, which makes the moment when he sees the car’s driver door open and the masked driver suddenly marching up to put him in a chokehold all the more shocking. Peele doesn’t use any music until after the assailant gets back in the car— the only music is diegetic and comes from the car speaker, playing the eerie choice of the 1939 song ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’. It’s a bold scene to start both the film— and his directing career— while also rapidly establishing what we need to know: it’s taking place in contemporary America, the target is African-Americans, and the threat is humans (later, we learn White). Now that’s one way to begin your horror movie.
Midsommar (2019)
Written and directed by: Ari Aster
The horror in the opening of Midsommar is not supernatural: it’s that a couple who really need to break up are going to be stuck together for much, much longer. The first image does hint at the folk horror to come, courtesy of a tapestry as well as the soundtrack of a woman singing in Swedish over images of a forest in winter. At night. Which is ironic because later, all the horror is going to happen in broad daylight.
There’s also a real palpable anxiety that emerges from the situation to follow. Dani (Florence Pugh) is anxious about the latest email that her bipolar sister has sent— “I can’t anymore- everything’s black – mom and dad are coming too. Goodbye”— and she can’t get through to her parents. Then comes the excruciating phone call between Dani and Christian (Jack Reynor), the latter who has clearly checked out a long time ago but is also reluctant to break up; mind, Dani knows something is wrong as she frets in her conversation with a friend.
The opening also establishes the key players— or rather, victims— of the film: the aforementioned Christian, the crude and vulgar Mark (Will Poulter), and the pretentious Josh (William Jackson Harper). The other person in the group is the guy who is secretly responsible for arranging their eventual demise, the Swedish Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren).
The scene runs for 11 minutes, but Ari Aster effectively gives us everything we need to know. More remarkably, he establishes a low-key dread that continues to build and build and build until the end of the film, which makes the horror in this unnerving and different from typical horror. The horror isn’t supernatural or a ghost; it’s how people hurt each other in different ways. You don’t need a ghost to scare an audience or make them uneasy. You just need to make them think about the people in their lives struggling with mental illness or the relationships that they should have ended a long time ago.
What are your favorite opening scenes? Please share them in the comments below.
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Long live the movies!
D.L. Holmes