The Art of Letting Go

There comes a time when you have to let your children go. In the case of scripts this usually involves locking them in a drawer, not giving them the keys to the car!

As with children (so I’ve heard), it’s some times hard to do this. But continuing to work on ‘dead’ scripts is unproductive and is time that could be spent on new projects.

It’s a realistic assessment of the merits of a project versus the cons of persisting. So in that spirit I have had to, regrettably, euthanise a few of my ‘children’. 

So Vale:

The short script Immortal which I still love but whose Memento style structural conceits make you a hard sell.

The feature script Don’t Come Monday, a ten page excerpt of which could not find a place in the recently announced 13 screenplays selected for a local workshop. What chance then the big, bad world?

The feature script The Tangled Web which has been optioned twice (and nearly a third time) but lucked out on development funding recently. Your time has come and passed.

I shall bury you all in the metaphorical backyard of my mind, in a fragrant plot next to the childhood embarrassments and ill-advised romantic entanglements.

But wait?

Does a script truly ever die?

A 15 page excerpt of The Tangled Web has been entered into a competition as a last gasp act of attention seeking.

The full draft of Don’t Come Monday has been sent to a producer who had expressed some interest in the ten pager just as the shovel was digging its final resting place.

Old scripts resurface like the short The Fifth Quarter which hadn’t seen the light of day for over 3 years but now has a very strong director attached and, as of today, a new draft.

Any completed script, yes even the ‘vomit draft’ (or rough draft as I prefer) is an entity that has some intrinsic value.

Perhaps ‘hibernate’ is a better word than ‘euthanise’.

They all remain my children, even the ugly, temperamental ones. Some just won’t get played with as much for a while…

Case Study - "Freeze-Frame"

Another question I usually get asked as a writer is, "what sort of things do you write about?" Well, a strong recurring theme in all my work is a blurring of fantasy and reality in many and varied ways - parallel worlds, fantasy constructs, the supernatural, the masks and disguises we wear to hide our true reality, the self-delusions we create. Not sure why or what that says about me but that's probably another discussion!

The short film Freeze-Frame, produced by Serena Ryan and directed by Iain Dawson, is a prime example of this duality. In this case, though, it was a script I never quite nailed. Too many ideas, too complicated and not clear what is real and what is imagined by the main character.

The original idea was that a jogger discovers a camera on the foreshore and accidentally takes a picture of himself which implicates him in a heinous crime. A friend read an early breakdown and offered, "what if he really did it?" That lead to the whole idea of the victim being the jogger's wife. In the story, the wife has left him for another man and he has photos from a private investigator of their illicit liaisons. The discovery of the camera leads him to fantasise about killing her (while he continues to jog) as he is unable to deal with his anger and bitterness at her betrayal. The laundry sequences, the second visit to the chemist, the detective interview, for example, are therefore all totally imagined.

The notion was that the act of unleashing his dark side is what eventually allows him to heal and achieve some form of closure. An unconventional thought but one I liked very much.

So this no-budget short is an insight into a developing story style that I continue to deploy - The Tangled Web has a heightened parallel world (cyberspace), The Red Bride plays with hallucination versus supernatural manifestation, Hotel Blue explores a fantasy construct created by self-delusion and the upcoming Trench could combine several of these facets, wrapped up in a pseudo-war genre.

Looking back at Freeze-Frame, the short is not the ideal format for this sort of layering. Immortal is also a complicated short script with a character in the grip of self-delusion. Neither script received funding support though Freeze-Frame was short-listed for FTI's Link programme a couple of years ago. THAT was an interesting panel interview!

So the lesson learnt is that features are the way to go to explore "the fantasies we create to deal with the realities of our lives".

Case Study - "Immortal"

I was recently asked a fairly common question (once people discover you are a writer) - So where do you get your ideas from? Simple question, not so easy to answer. It's kind of like Kevin Costner in Tin Cup - the more you try to analyse your 'swing' the quicker it may desert you!

Yes, I keep clippings of newspaper stories that pique my interest and jot down random ideas but mainly I "see" scenes in my head which then trigger a larger narrative. Case in point is my short film script Immortal. This is a scene I wrote at 30,000 feet on a flight back to Perth from Sydney a few years ago now. I had NO IDEA what it meant but it seemed an atmospheric opening for ... something.

FADE IN :

BRIGHT YELLOW ... FLICKERS ... becomes a FLAME.

PULL BACK to a CANDLE ... wax running down its side. The

flame sputters, nearly dies.

PULL BACK FURTHER ... Crazy SHADOWS make it almost

impossible to define the space we're in.

An indistinct FIGURE clad entirely in black does pushups

within a circle of candles. Breath disturbs the flames, the

price of punishing, machine-like exertion.

A face is visible in the gutting candlelight - a face like

alabaster. Sweat drips from the figure's forehead, lands in

a pool tinged with RED.

FIGURE

(softly chants)

Forever ... forever ... forever.

One by one the candles die until only the chant remains.

I had worked with a director who always liked to start a story in ECU so we're not sure what we're seeing at first then slowly pull back to reveal what is going on. I've noticed I tend to do this in quite a few scripts (including The Red Bride) and "Pull Back" is one of the few overt screen directions I use.

The second piece of information that helped shape the story was a newspaper article about a German teenager who had killed an elderly woman and drunk her blood believing himself to be a vampire.

Imagine that? Thinking you're a vampire! Matching the thought: 'how could you come to believe you're undead?' with the 'candle scene', Immortal emerged. The first draft was about a teenage boy whose mother dies of a rare blood disease and in his grief comes to believe he is a vampire and ends up killing the nurse he blames for not saving her. An exploration of an extreme form of loss and mourning with the material lending itself to tragedy.

Only problem was, that when I wrote the scene breakdown, it seemed so ... linear. So I reversed the narrative and it took on a Memento style structure - main story told backwards intercut with forward moving sequences of the "vampire" being interrogated by a detective. At the start, we think the teenager is a vampire and slowly the tragedy and reasons for it are revealed with the climax being an emotional one as the horror of the self-deception is exposed.

The script lay dormant for a while, until recently when producer Michael Facey read it, liked it, wanted to submit it for FTI's Link program. Jeremy Passmore came on board as director and immediately impressed me with a detailed visual breakdown of the script and a stylistic approach incorporating green screen. Not what I saw in my head but sounded exciting.

A little tinkering was done to the script but hardly any changes that impacted the spine. All looked good until the short list came out ... and we weren't on it. Apparently the panel was confused by the structure and didn't get the way Jeremy wanted to shoot it. Michael was angry, Jeremy angrier while I was surprisingly ambivalent. It's a script I really like (would make a kick-arse short film) but it's not a cookie-cutter one that tends to do well in funding rounds.

The producer wants to re-submit but I literally don't know what I would change that wouldn't make me gag as I dumbed it down. I cheekily suggested we submit the chronological version, shoot it, then edit it with the fractured time-line in post!

The lesson I've learnt is that next time I write a short destined for a funding round is to keep it as simple as possible - nearly set-up/pay-off - and spell it out in the supporting documentation so the panel "get it".

The Wisdom of Christopher McQuarrie

Christopher McQuarrie is, of course, the Oscar winning writer of The Usual Suspects. If you haven't heard the podcast of his interview with Creative Screenwriting Magazine's Jeff Goldsmith I would highly recommend it. Not only is it enormously entertaining, there is a vast wealth of knowledge about how the film industry works and the screenwriter's place within it.

One of the insights that is starting to increasingly resonate with me, even in the tiny fish bowl of the Perth film industry (if there even is such a thing), is that the director is paramount in getting a film made. McQuarrie cites his personal experiences which are clearly on a much larger scale but the lesson, I believe, holds true outside of Hollywood.

For example, the short film Kanowna - the director (and in this case, writer) wanted to realise his vision so he basically made the film (okay, I'm simplifying an enormously challenging task given there was no budget and it is a period piece, set on location in quite difficult terrain, with, amongst other things, horses and a baby!).

In contrast, my short script, Immortal, which I am very fond of, wasn't even short-listed for a recent local funding round and will now basically fade into obscurity. Why? Because, as a writer, I can't make the film.

Which leads me to feature scripts. If your director loves the material and has a passion to shoot the film, then you'll both find a way to make it happen. If your director loses that passion for the script you are dead in the water and the project will be on life-support, shortly to die. You may not even know it until the project is terminal. All you can then do is decide whether to find another director who embraces the script and brings a new wave of energy and passion ... or you call Dr. Kevorkian and administer the last rites.

Enough with the medical analogies!

You will find a link to download the McQuarrie podcast here:

http://creativescreenwritingmagazine.blogspot.com/2008/12/christopher-mcquarrie-valkyrie-q.html

or do a search in ITunes for 'Creative Screenwriting Magazine' and look for the Valkyrie Q&A. Trust me, the Benicio Del Toro anecdote is worth it alone!