Because of Tumblr, I started watching Hannibal and inadvertently fell wildly in love with Mads Mikkelsen’s voice. That’s not really an unusual thing for me, btw. So I went over to Netflix to check out some Danish films, and found a perfect visual character intro for you in the first ten seconds of Adam’s Apples.
A bald, scowling white guy gets off a bus in the middle of nowhere with a duffel bag. There’s an iron cross tattooed on his arm. He takes out a pocket knife. As the bus pulls away, he stands there and drags the point of the knife all along its nice clean paint.
You don’t need four dialogue scenes of this guy being an aggressive asshole and making racist remarks to know exactly who he is and what the conflicts are going to be in this film. You don’t need to know why he’s there, or where he came from or how he got this way. He just is, he’s an accident waiting to happen, and we can wait for the rest.
Visual saves so much time. It’s so much more interesting.