Film analysis-DUEL: character's inner world

Duel is the first film by Steven Spielberg. Nowadays, Steven is one of the most famous directors in the world. 40 years ago, he shot this film and becomes famous overnight. It is a film with a simple story. We even cannot see the villain's face in the film. However, the story still very interesting because of director's outstanding skills.

Actually, this film has two editions. One is for cinema, nearly 130 minutes. Another one is for TV, only 75 minutes. At that time, filmmakers are worried about the audience would not like this film because of the simple story. So they cut many parts from the first edition. But in my opinion, the 130 minutes edition is very brilliant. Here, I will choose a part from the first edition to analyze.

At last two blogs, I try to analyze how to show animal character's emotion in the film. I find several different useful ways. Before watched this movie, I thought maybe use subtitle is also a good method. So I studied on it and shot an experimental film, Can Story. When I watched this film, I realized maybe subtitle is not the only way. Because voice-over is a good way to show character's emotion as well, no matter human character or animal character. 

Let watch a part of Duel first:

In this part, we can see the main character come into a restaurant and he finds the man who wants to kill him is sitting here as well. However, our leading man never saw his face, so he has to guess who is the trucker. He peeked everyone in the restaurant, and he wants to judge. In the beginning, he becalmed himself because he wants to solve this misunderstanding. Then, he finds a man like the trucker. He changed his emotion here. After that, he was thinking how to talk with the man. And then, he makes a decision, he needs to talk. Unfortunately, that man is not the trucker.

We can hear a lot of voice-over here. These voices are come from character's inner world. Other characters can't hear these voices, but the audience can. That's exactly what director wants. Audience would think with the main character when they heard these voice-over. They also did not know who is the trucker. They will guess as well. That is suspense effect.

Through use of the voice-over, the director makes the audience thinking with character successful. Of course, audience can understand the character's emotion this time.  After watching this film, I write the Friendship's screenplay and I decide try to use voice-over to show the character's emotion in my film.