What a treatment is for

Every job we pitch starts with a treatment, and I read several a week, ours and other people's. Agencies sometimes treat them as a sales document and directors sometimes treat them as homework. Both are partly right. A good treatment is the first time a film exists outside someone's head, and it has a specific job to do.

What it does

A treatment answers one question: what will this film feel like to watch? It does that with an idea stated plainly, usually in the first paragraph, and then with everything that follows that idea. Rafael Duarte's treatment for Night Drive opened with one sentence saying the film would never leave the cabin of the car. Every page after that, from casting to lenses to sound, was a consequence of it.

It also shows how the director thinks. Clients are not only buying a film; they are choosing a person to spend the next six weeks with. The treatment is where they find out whether that person listens to a brief, has taste, and can make decisions.

And it is a production document, whether the director likes it or not. Once a treatment says the film is shot at night in real rain, with a crew of nine, in a city we have never filmed in, the budget has been written. That is why our producers read every treatment before it goes out, and why the director and producer should write the schedule section together.

What it does not do

A treatment is not a shooting script. It does not need to describe every shot, and the ones that do tend to read as anxious. Nor is it a promise that the finished film will look exactly like the reference frames. If the references are stills from other people's films, the client will expect those films. We push our directors to use their own photographs from a recce, tests shot on a phone, or nothing at all.

It does not replace a conversation either. The best treatments come after a call with the agency, not instead of one, and they answer the questions raised on that call rather than the ones in the original brief.

How long it should be

Shorter than you think. For a commercial, eight to twelve pages is plenty, with the idea on the first. For a long-form documentary, a little more, because it has to explain access and time. If a page could be removed without the reader noticing, remove it.

What we look for

When a treatment lands on my desk, I check four things. Is the idea on the first page? Is there a clear approach to casting and performance? Is the production thinking honest about time and money? And does it sound like the director, rather than like a template? If all four are there, the design can be plain. If one is missing, no amount of design will hide it.