Movie Speeches That Still Work, and Why

Kenneth Branagh's Henry V came out in 1989, and the St. Crispin's Day speech in it runs a shade over three minutes. The king is filthy. His army is outnumbered and dysentery-ridden and standing in a field in northern France in October. And the first thing out of his mouth isn't a rallying cry. It's a correction of one of his own nobles, who has just wished out loud for ten thousand more men from England.

That's the move. Before Henry says a single inspiring word, he addresses the thing everybody in the field is already thinking. He names the fear, and then he refuses it.

Almost every speech that still works does that in the first fifteen seconds. Almost every speech that doesn't skips it and opens with the inspiring part, which is why nobody remembers it.

Content note on Henry V: PG-13, and it earns it. Agincourt is mud, blood and hacking. The aftermath includes the killing of the baggage boys. Fine for teenagers, not for a nine-year-old.

Name the fear before you name the goal

Aragorn does the same thing at the Black Gate in The Return of the King. He rides the line and says he sees the fear in their eyes, the same fear that would take the heart of him. He admits it's his fear too. Only then does he get to "but it is not this day."

Compare that to the generic sports movie speech where a coach yells about wanting it more. Nothing in it costs the speaker anything. Nobody in the room believes he's scared, so nobody believes anything else either.

If you're giving a best man's toast and the room is stiff, say the room is stiff. If you're telling your crew the quarter was bad, lead with the number. The audience relaxes the second they know you're not going to lie to them.

Shrink the ask until it's carryable

Rocky Balboa, standing on a Philadelphia sidewalk in 2006, tells his son that it ain't about how hard you hit, it's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. Notice he doesn't ask the kid to win anything. He asks him to take one more step.

Apollo 13 does the coldest, best version of this. Gene Kranz doesn't give a speech about heroism. He tells the room to work the problem, and not to make things worse by guessing. That's a management instruction. It's also the most stirring line in the movie, because it's the only thing anyone in that room could actually do at that moment.

The speech fails when the ask is bigger than the next twenty-four hours. Give people the next thing. They'll get to the big thing on their own.

Apollo 13 is PG, with some scattered language and one tense marital argument. Rocky Balboa is PG and about as clean as the franchise gets.

Talk to one person while a hundred are listening

Terence Mann's monologue in Field of Dreams is addressed to Ray Kinsella, one man, standing in his own corn. He's not addressing America. That's precisely why it plays to an audience of millions.

Watch where the actor's eyes go in any speech that gives you chills. They almost always land on a single face. Henry names Bedford, Exeter, Warwick, Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester out loud. Six men, by name, in the middle of the most famous pep talk in the English language.

So when you stand up at the rehearsal dinner, pick your father-in-law's left eyebrow and talk to it. The room will feel included, not excluded. It works in a living room too. "Son, I need you to hear this" beats a lecture delivered to the ceiling every time.

Use nouns you can touch

George Bailey's finest moment in It's a Wonderful Life isn't about hope. It's a property argument. He tells the board that the rabble Potter is sneering at do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Working. Paying. Living. Dying. Four verbs a child understands.

Atticus Finch's closing argument in To Kill a Mockingbird is built the same way, out of short plain words, delivered slowly, in a hot room. Gregory Peck takes his jacket off. That gesture does half the work.

Content note: Mockingbird centers on a rape accusation. The crime is never shown or described in any detail, but it's discussed in court, and the film contains racial slurs in period context. It's a great one to watch with a twelve-year-old and then actually talk about, which is more than you can say for most of what's on.

Abstract nouns are speech-killers. Excellence. Commitment. Synergy, God help us. Nobody has ever been moved by a noun they couldn't picture.

Let the cost show

Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is hoarse, gray-faced and falling over by the time he says that lost causes are the only causes worth fighting for. The words land because the man saying them is visibly paying for them.

Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire preaches on a Sunday in Paris instead of running the hundred meters he was favored to win. The sermon isn't the powerful part. The empty lane is.

Charlie Chaplin ends The Great Dictator in 1940 by dropping the character entirely and speaking straight into the lens, at a moment when half of Europe had fallen and America hadn't entered the war. He was risking his career on it. You can hear that in his voice. It's a G-rated film, it's eighty-five years old, and it will still put a lump in your throat.

Finish on a command

Great speeches don't conclude. They turn into an order.

"Men of the West!" Aragorn doesn't wrap up. Henry doesn't summarize. Herb Brooks in Miracle ends with "Now go out there and take it," and the last word he says is a verb. Kranz sends the room to work.

This is the one most people get wrong. They build to a peak and then add a closing paragraph that thanks everyone for their time. Cut it. Say the hard sentence and sit down. The silence afterward is doing something.

Two honest concessions

The Braveheart freedom speech is magnificent and historically ridiculous. Wallace's army didn't look like that, the woad was centuries out of date, and the whole thing is closer to Mel Gibson than to Scotland. It works anyway, because of the fear-naming trick in the opening lines. Also, the film is a hard R with brutal battle violence, a graphic execution and adultery in the plot. Don't put it on for the kids.

And the 1970 Patton opening, delivered by George C. Scott against a wall-sized flag, is a masterclass in commanding a room. It also contains profanity, softened from the original but present. Know that before you queue it up on a Sunday.

What to watch this month

Pick three. The Great Dictator (G). Apollo 13 (PG). Miracle (PG). All three are safe with anybody over about eight, and all three end with somebody being told to go do something.

Then try this. Next time you have to say something that matters, write the first sentence and the last sentence only. Name the fear in the first. Put a verb in the last. Leave the middle rough.

You'll be nervous. Henry was outnumbered five to one and his men had dysentery. Go anyway.