Screenwriting technique has a nasty habit of calcifying into scripture. Every scene needs conflict and advance the story. Characters need objectives. All true.

Professional writers don't agree on where scenes come from either, which means you get to steal from all of them.

Brown treats location almost as a character, and sometimes picks the place before he knows what happens in it. While writing Origin, the Guggenheim Bilbao and Sagrada Família weren't backdrops, they were load-bearing structure. He's described finding a spiral staircase at Sagrada Família he'd previously missed, and the staircase itself suggested where a character could die. The building solved a plot problem he hadn't solved with plot.

Most writers work backwards from this: I need a confrontation, where do I stick it. Brown flips it

Before you set another conversation in an office or a café out of sheer habit, go find the spiral staircase.

Gilroy takes this further and gets physical about it. Writing the Bourne films, he travelled to Berlin and Moscow with the action sequences still blank on the page, then let actual markets, bridges, and traffic dictate what could happen. Real geography is bossy. It tells you where the character can't escape, what blocks the route, where the street narrows and traps everyone in it.

A chase that only exists because of exactly this bridge, this crowd, this dead-end street, that has a pulse. This works for romance and betrayal too. The moment the physical world stops politely pausing while your characters deliver dialogue, the scene wakes up.

Sorkin starts with the intention and the obstacle first: somebody wants something badly, something formidable is in the way.

So strip the scene bare and ask: what does A want from B, why won't B give it to them, what does A try next when the first move fails? In his Steve Jobs script, Steve needs Hertzfeld to make a demo work. Hertzfeld can't. Steve pivots to threatening him with public humiliation. That's a character being who he is, live, under pressure.

Script doctor Clive Frayne's contribution: stop assuming one story beat equals one scene. A chase is one dramatic event that might sprawl across six locations. Conversely, several dramatic beats can happen in a single unbroken room without anyone standing up.

Write scene by scene without thinking bigger and you get an accidental metronome, two pages, new location, two pages, new location, until the whole script reads like a furniture catalogue. Think in sequences instead: what's this whole movement actually accomplishing, and how many scenes does that genuinely require? Sometimes the honest answer is "one look." Give it one look.

One more from Brown, worth separating from the location trick. Before deciding how to dramatise something, decide what it needs to accomplish. Reduce it to one flat sentence: by the end of this sequence, Élodie discovers the professor lied.

That's not a scene yet. It's a job description. Now the options multiply; a conversation, a document, an accidental slip, an eavesdrop, a trap sprung on purpose, the audience finding out before she does. Separating the job from the execution stops the first workable idea from bullying its way into becoming the only idea.

Same requirement; she discovers her colleague betrayed her, run through all five, and you get five entirely different scenes:

None of this is a rulebook. Sorkin himself has said what unlocks one writer can be useless to another. So don't study these writers to imitate their scripts. Steal their questions instead.

Screenplay gone static - try Brown, find the staircase. Action reads generic - try Gilroy, go stand in the real street. Dialogue sounds sharp but dead - try Sorkin, delete the words and find the fight underneath. Every scene the same length and rhythm - step back and think like Frayne. Can't decide what happens next - stop deciding, and write down what the story needs instead.

Then pick whichever door produces the most interesting cinema.