The screenplay has received little attention from translation scholars. It is a modular text-type (Price, 2013) whose precursory, mutable and multifunctional nature poses a serious challenge to functionalist translation theories. However, the basic focus on purposeful translatorial action in Vermeer’s skopos theory makes it of fundamental relevance to a text-type whose basic function is to generate its own intersemiotic translation. Drawing on the author’s experience of translating a French-Indian screenplay, this methodological article proposes combining skopos theory with his own synoptic theory of strategic layering—previously described in relation to poetry and journalism—to render functionalism workable in the context of screenplay translation.