Good scenes make good movies. When you think of a good movie, you remember scenes, not the entire film.
Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (2005, p. 161)
In every scene, remember, a protagonist is presented with a mini-crisis, and must make a choice as to how to surmount it.
John Yorke, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (2013, p. 124)
A scene is an action through conflict in more or less continuous time and space that turns the value-charged condition of a character’s life on at least one value with a degree of perceptible significance. Ideally, every scene is a story event.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, pp. 35)
Within the body of a scene, something specific happens—your characters move from point A to point B in terms of emotional growth or reaching a decision; or your story links point A to point B in terms of the narrative line of action, the plot.
Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (2005, p. 166)
The issue isn’t simply that scenes without cause and effect tend to be boring. Plots that play too loose with cause and effect risk becoming confusing, because they’re not speaking in the brain’s language.
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling (2020, p. 54)
The shortest scene contains all the elements of a three-act play. It has its own premise which is exposed through conflict between the characters. The conflict grows through transition to crisis and climax. Crisis and climax are as periodical in a play as exposition is constant.
Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives (1942, p. 241)
The relationship between these scenes of seemingly unrelated information sets up the entire story. Every scene, every piece of information, no matter how seemingly small, reveals something about the story and leads to that moment when the real Evelyn Mulwray shows up.
Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (2005, p. 110)