Movie dialogue tries to be verisimilitudinous, rather than realistic.
I'm mostly making this comment because "verisimilitudinous" is an excellent word that I love getting the opportunity to use.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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This may one of the reasons Alien works so well as a movie. The actors were often directed to improvise dialogue based on a description or just a few written lines. The conversations feel natural as the actors seemingly struggle to find the right words.
Idk if you hang out with people a lot and cultivate good banter then most movie dialog is subpar in comparison. Just got to step up your game friend 🤷
step 1 - find friends
My boss and I both forgot the name of the MDM we use at work.
"I gotta get the, uh, the mobile thing setup"
"Uh, yeah, whatever its called get Tyler in it"
Thats where we are at
And yet you managed to communicate the meaning. With enough context sometimes just an intonation is enough
Yeah but it still feels like I have lost brain cells somewhere.
Headwind?
/smugbrag
When I was younger, my former roommate's crush (and future girlfriend) described being part of our conversations as "like watching a TV show". How much of that was us being cool and unique versus how much was us autistically mirroring characters from pop media? Don't care, great compliment.
There is a documentary called the wolfpack. 8 or so kids growing up with only movies and themselves. When they got out of the house for the first time in 16 or so years they were surprised that real conversations aren't like in the movies. There isn't always something interesting going on. They also all talked like they were in a movie.
There's some debate on this! Most movie dialogue is designed to convey the impression of conversation, but this is naturally unrealistic. People stutter and start over and get distracted in normal conversation much like you described, which can become very burdensome on the screen. Like when your boss won't get to the point in the standup. Overly precise dialogue is equally burdensome and often fails to maintain attention (see: the Time 1776 AI videos). A lot of the discussion around how best to balance those natural pauses and disruptions around the otherwise "eloquent" speech in movies to best convey a characterization.
I'm sure others out there can point to legitimate sources, but I'm not super read up on it
This is one of the things I love about the movie, The Big Lebowski. The characters often start a sentence, but transition to a different thought before finishing the first sentence. They’ll pick up an overheard word or phrase they like and use it in their own conversations. It feels so much more real than typical move dialog.
Also there's the style of delivery - old acting used to be very exaggerated and hammy, then there's the kind of flawless but somewhat natural style that OP is talking about, through to today's more realistic "mumbling" style that everyone complains about.
The old hammy style ties back to theatre. Performing live to an audience in seats that can be relatively far takes some degree of exaggeration to seem natural.
That makes complete sense. If the point of a movie is to tell us a story, then it should be catered to be more exciting and engaging. Of course it also makes sense for someone to come up with a story that benefits on being told realistically, like a found footage kind of movie, in which OP's suggestion makes sense.
You do realise bodycams are just filming real life, right?
So yeah ... people in real life will sound like ... real life people, not movie characters.
I want everyone to talk like they're in a David Lynch movie.
It would be tedious and annoying to watch a movie of real dialog. That's why there's so much editing in documentaries.
No, I don't think you want more realism in fictional writing. I've written two fiction books, and dialog is hard to get right, especially for characters very different from myself. When I first start, I don't know the characters well, and I get the dialog wrong. About 3/4 of the way through the book, I go back and rewrite a lot of the dialog because I know the characters better by then.
For me, the fascinating part about writing fiction is that I don't always know what the character is going to say, or do. I just have a general idea of what needs to happen in each section, but sometimes I'm surprised at the solutions they come up with. It really feels like I'm just an observer for parts of the process. They say what they say, and I write it down.
The worst thing that can happen while writing is to lose a conversation due to some technical reason. Because, I'll never be able to recreate it exactly as it was the first time. I just need to ask them again, and start over.
If you've never tried writing fiction, I recommend it. It doesn't need to be "good", and you never need to show it to anyone, but I think you'll learn a lot about yourself and how you see the world.
Sounds a lot like taking the role of Dungeon Master in a D&D game. Your goal is to provide a believable world and NOCs as a backdrop for your players to tell the stories of their characters adventures. For me, it was like having a whole fantasy world running in the back of my mind, and I'd often surprise myself with how that works would react to the heroes.
but realistic is boring.
I'd like to be able to talk like a stand-up comedian. I rehearse shit in my head. Put the funny word at the end! Sometimes it even comes out the way I intend.
I talk like a couple stand-up comedians.
Specifically Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks; Full of anger and lots of yelling.
Two of my all-time favourites. Since those legends are no longer with us, though, you might also like Simon King
Full Show at 800 Pound Gorilla
Charismatic actors saying lines written by professional writers. All the pauses cut out too, ofc.
And it's all simplified language. Like I thought I knew german until I seen ich_eil "normal" german talk.
I saw an interview with Joe Mantegna (I think), talking about David Mamet's dialogue. He said "Everybody always says that he writes the way people talk. Bullshit. People don't talk in iambic pentameter. He writes the way people wish they could talk."