Scope vs depth

Depth: Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie as an outcast Puritan mother and father in The Witch (2015)

An insightful line from this good short video essay on The Witch and how writer-director Robert Eggers created such a beautiful, authentic film with such limited resources:

“Scope requires money. Depth only requires knowledge.”

This has been the peculiar pleasure of Eggers’s three films so far: whether narrowly focused on a single family or a pair of lighthouse keepers or having a sweep encompassing Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Iceland, and Asgard, all three films go deep. Eggers has done the work. However little or however much he shows, you feel the reach and fullness of the worlds his films take place in.

A gloss for writers, whether for the screen or the page: Your story may or may not have scope—breadth, epic sweep, intricate complications, civilization-size conflict—but there is no reason it shouldn’t have depth. In an ideal world, every story could balance both. But if you can only have one, go deep. Learn everything you can. Let it inform, strengthen, and deepen the story. If your story has limitations, let it be because of conscious artistic choice to work within self-imposed boundaries rather than overreach, bad judgment, or unknowing error.

As the essayist puts it in another good line from that video, “Know your limits. Don’t show your limits.”