The Good and The Bad

I read somewhere – or I’m just extrapolating from my own thought processes – that humans are much more likely to remember the bad things than the good things. For example, if you had just about a perfect day, and just one itty-bitty thing were to go wrong, that day would be remembered more for whatever went wrong than for every good thing before and after it. It’s very easy to roll around in self-pity when things don’t go your way.

Shit happens. But most of the time, with perseverance (and/or stubbornness), talent (self-belief) and good luck and timing (a kick-arse manager), all goes well.

This year has been my most productive to date. I don’t have much to show for it, but I did enough film-related work – and earned enough from it – that I didn’t have to do any full-time temp work.

I co-wrote, directed and produced an HD feature. The experience provided fodder for an unreliable account kindly published by WriteUP.

I produced a short which screened in November.

I helped develop a t.v. series.

I co-wrote a feature for Unkreative which is currently in post-production.

And I’m due to finish a long-overdue feature script for Mr Blyth.

So. Not a bad year, all up.

Here’s to 2007.

 

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Three Garden Implements

I hate this time of year. The forced bonhomie. The wall-to-wall-and-floor-to-ceiling advertising to Just Buy It. Family obligations. Where’s the love? What happened to “it’s the thought that counts”?

Anyway. Bah. Humbug.

I’ll be back in 2007, so until then, a merry freakin’ Christmas, and a happy New Year to you and yours.

Manuia.

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Feature Film Virgin

The lovely people at WriteUp have very kindly published another piece of mine. It’s a soft-focussed, selective and utterly unreliable reminiscence of the BREAK production. I present it for your entertainment.

Feature Film Virgin

Inspired by a true story.

Script

This is what I get for being impatient. After a couple of paid gigs – both in development hell – I wanted a credit. I was going to be one of those self-starters.

I sounded out FRUSTRATED DIRECTOR, a fellow film school graduate, on my wildly ambitious idea: I would outline a feature-length story for a bunch of actors to workshop, he and the actors would hit the streets guerrilla-styles, and BAM! an indie feature. He loved it. (I could see it now: “Written by Impatient Screenwriter”; I had to talk Frustrated Director down from a “A film by” credit to “Directed by” though – whose insane idea was this to begin with, bub? Best to thrash these things out as early as possible.)

Frustrated Director had the connections. The production company he worked for was suffocating his creativity but it had all the equipment and facilities that we would need. He also knew a couple of young ‘n’ hungry actors who were looking for just this kind of project.

I drafted a twenty-page treatment that had all the clichŽs I abhorred. I didn’t have the luxury of time. I discovered a newfound admiration for those B- to Z-movie screenwriters: that love-triangle between the protagonist, antagonist and the damsel – ‘s there for a reason, bud. Frustrated Director read it, adored it, but suggested that some ‘indicative dialogue’ be included so that the actors could really get into their characters.
I drafted a fifty-page scriptment. It hurt. A lot. A twenty-page prose treatment is fine when you’re just trying to sell your story. But with a script you have to show and tell everything. A scriptment was the best I could do with the time available. And I got some ‘indicative dialogue’ in there.
I decided that this scriptment would be as much as I would write, script-wise. It was time for the actors’ input. We were going to work fast and loose.

Preparation

The first read-through of the scriptment was an eye-opener. Interpretations of what I’d knowingly written as cardboard cut-outs gave me a new appreciation for the acting craft. Dialogue that had zinged in the acoustics of my cave fell to the floor with a croak despite the best thespian efforts. I had to be careful with how I answered questions on character and motivation. Answers like “because I felt like it” or “it was three in the morning when I wrote that” or “because that was the best excuse I could dredge up to lead into the set-piece” did not suffice, regardless of the good will in the room.

I walked away from that read-through – and subsequent ones – with a sense of satisfaction and achievement: no longer was I struggling alone with characters and action; I was now part of a team. I wasn’t defending my script’s shortcomings, real and perceived – everyone’s goal was to make it a better creature. Despite my earlier resolve to just add notes to the scriptment and work fast and loose, I ended up writing a full script, revising it a few times along the way.

Frustrated Director introduced me to ENTHUSED PRODUCER. Enthused Producer agreed to provide equipment, crew and cash for unavoidable expenses; the project had stepped up from being a no-budget film to an ultra-low budget film. No one would be paid; everyone would be fed and watered, and would be in for a slice of any action the film made.

He also fired Frustrated Director. “It’s a tradition in New Zealand,” he persuaded me, “the Film Commish love writer-directors.” My protests of an attachment to my cave (and wife, children and pets) were overridden with what would become a refrain in the Writer/Director-Producer relationship: “You want to make this film, don’t you?”

Casting

We already had our leads: MALE LEAD and FEMALE LEAD. They’d really helped flesh out the script; in return, I was going to make them stars.
Now I had to surround them with supporting actors. A trawl through the script elicited twenty speaking roles. Oh. My. Gawd. Maybe I should’ve read at least one of those books on no-budget filmmaking. (A moment of weakness at the local library found me flicking through such a book: it recommended a maximum of six speaking parts and three locations; I had ten locations.)

I was urged to properly audition actors for the supporting roles: it’s professional; it’s courteous; and they’re on their best behaviour.
The auditions were another learning experience. Actors competing for the same role found different yet equally compelling facets in their character. A great audition in the room didn’t always translate to a great performance on tape.

I advised all successful and unsuccessful auditioners of our decision and soon discovered why they say, “Don’t call us – we’ll call you.” An actor who’d accepted a supporting role written specifically for a woman had to pull out. I’d burned some bridges on breaking the news to her competitors. A two-o’clock-in-the-morning epiphany: the character could just be as effective as a male; the details of the character’s relationships to others would change… but not dangerously so.

Preproduction

Okay. So I was now a multi-hyphenate. I knew one thing absolutely: I would need all the help I could find to get this show on the road.
A core crew was assembled: GRIZZLED DP; HOT DOG ART DIRECTORS (they were a package deal); and MONOSYLLABIC PRODUCTION MANAGER. Monosyllabic Production Manager was the nexus of all communication. It soon became apparent that her availability via first her phone, then her email access, became what could best be described as ‘intermittent’.

We had two weeks of preprod and a few meetings. I found myself answering questions and considering alternatives that wouldn’t have entered my cave-based writing in millennia. I was more than happy to delegate. I insisted on clear lines of communication, demarcations of responsibilities, and that everyone understood. The buck stopped with me. I could see how a director could become the centre of their universe.

Production

The camera’s rolling, audio’s set and there’s a small crowd of people watching a lone actor in an urban landscape. “Action!” I called. Right before my eyes a small moment from the script came to life. It wasn’t until afterward that I realised that almost a year of development had led to that moment. This was why I wanted in on this industry.

The production schedule was a tight, intense fifteen-day shoot spread over five weeks. When Monosyllabic Production Manager was unable to either do properly detailed call-sheets or be on set as a first assistant director (1AD), I considered buying shares in Grecian2000. I called in a favour and we got ourselves ALWAYS ANXIOUS 1AD. Even though I grew to fear and loathe him in the heat of shooting, a good 1AD is the engine that ensures that Things Get Done. It wasn’t until Always Anxious 1AD had to leave for a prior commitment and we cycled through RELUCTANT 1AD and SURLY 1AD that I began to truly appreciate his work. Take my word for it, a good 1AD is worth killing for.

Most everyone else had day-jobs so I was the only one who knew the project inside and out. There was some pre-production outstanding that was sorted out sometimes only hours before call-time. Enthused Producer was nowhere to be seen on set. I began to feel the true weight and cost of having the buck stop with me. Everyone looked to me on what to do now and what to do next. As I took on preparing call-sheets and finishing off preprod, I realised I had become, by circumstance, a writer/director/producer.

Our Female Lead became unavailable part-way through the shoot: I experienced first-hand those scheduling conflicts they mention in the showbiz news. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place: she’d been involved since the heady script-development days. It was either reschedule an already fragile production schedule around this one person, or recast. I recast.

In the end, we shot twenty-three days over ten weeks. The small army of twenty dreamers that had greeted me on my first day of shooting had shrunk to a hard-core crew of six within the first week. That crew and I – ‘my crew’ – had finished a journey together, filled with heroic deeds and apocryphal tales, where legends were forged in blood and towing fees. No more was this ‘my film’ but ‘our film’ – those stubborn sumbitches had earned it.

Post-production

We had footage in the can. Time for BLUNT EDITOR to work her editing magic. By the end of the first day’s editing, I knew my place: I was now an Informed Observer. I had to bite my tongue and hide my expressions of pain/horror/embarrassment as the footage was viewed with accompanying disappointed sighs, disapproving tongue-clicks and/or sad shakes of the head. Suggestions had to be carefully worded to avoid curt reminders of footage that was unusable, unavailable or unshot. I missed the deference of the set.

As the film slowly took shape, at times it felt like Blunt Editor was taking the story away from me. But she wasn’t: she was rewriting it. No – she wasn’t doing that either. She was fashioning a whole new creature that I had written and then shot. A sleeker creature. A creature that looked and sounded and felt… like a real goddamned movie.

Our movie.

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Telling Stories

(This one’s for Mr Power – we just ran out of time after that screening.)

Disclosure: I still haven’t read Robert McKee‘s Story (which I’ve requested from the local library). But I can heartily recommend William Goldman‘s Which Lie Did I Tell?, Alex Epstein‘s Crafty Screenwriting and Stephen King‘s On Writing.

Mr Epstein gets it in one: just tell a good story that keeps people interested.

Okay.  So all the good stories have been told already and there’s no pressure to be, like, truly creative. Therefore it’s not necessarily the story I’ll be worrying about – it’ll be how I’m going to make it interesting. My mission will be to grab the reader’s – and eventually, the audience’s – attention, take ’em for a ride and then afterwards, drop ’em back in their seat, exhilarated, excited and begging for more.

How do I do it then? I write the story how I’d like to see it done.

This springs partly from all the films I’ve watched and thought, I could’ve done better’n that! Fighting words – and extraordinarily naive ones, in hindsight. (Ah, those were the days – watching bucketloads of films and videos and television, taking it all in and un/sub-consciously figuring out what worked for me and what didn’t, and why.)

I believe I’ve seen enough films, videos and television, and read enough books, comics and stories, to know what stories worked.  I survived film school and have had people pay me to write to trust my own sense of story telling and sturcture. I may have foolishly uttered in a script meeting, “I don’t necessarily think and write in terms of protagonist and antagonist,” but I certainly made up for it by referencing enough films to show that I knew what I was talking about.

For me – and at this stage in my career – I still see the script as a story: ninety-plus pages to be read by someone. That script had better transport the reader into my world for each and all of those pages. And all the while, hidden in the text is a subliminal message: Wouldn’t this just make a freakin’ great movie?

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Purely Coincidental Similarities

With the Silly Season about to smother my General Good Will, I’ve been proactive in sending out overdue emails to longtime friends and acquaintances. ‘Touch-bases’, ‘hi-how-are-ya’s’ and ‘long-time-no-see’s’ have been the order of the day. Mucho time and/or distance may have passed but these are the people that do reply to my emails, and the mutual exchanges of offers of visits and hosting and/or coffee are sincere.

It’s had me thinking, too: if I had a dollar for every friend I snuck into a script, I’d be twelve dollars richer; and if I had a fifty cent piece for each line of dialogue I’ve ripped off those same friends, I’d be comfortably wealthy, thank you.

Friends’re good like that.

When it comes to characters based on friends, by the second or third draft, the character has its own idea on what s/he should be doing in the story. (Usually because the friend in question may not be an astronaut/psychiatrist/assassin by trade.) The similarities with its origin begin to blur further as traits are added and/or subtracted at whim. That’s how it goes.

As for dialogue, no one’s safe. I make sure none of it’s attributable and as long as I don’t get asked directly, I can take credit for ‘creating’ it. Damn, I’m good.

Using friends and family for dialogue or characters isn’t just for some in-joke (or laziness) on my part. Their existence provides a grounding that points to some kind of Truth. It’s fun, too. And I also see it as … love letters to friends and family.

I lie, cheat and steal1 for a living – I’m a writer. Get with it.

1 All on paper, of course. And within reason (and libel laws).

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Hunting the Phoenix – Addendum*

(* My manners have always required a conscious effort.)

Firstly, big ups to Dan and co – namely: screenwriter Victoria Cleal, cinematographer Ethan Smith, audio recordist Kurt Oram, Darryl from FX Contracting who provided the pistola, and the actors Jacob Tamaiparea and Tamariki Totoro.

And a big thank you to Gina, Katrin, Tamara and Kate, being the ladies behind Jameson Show Me Shorts film festival for providing the opportunity.

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Hunting the Phoenix

Dan Power and Victoria Cleal‘s Hunting the Phoenix had its world premiere before an audience of two dozen last Saturday at the Jameson Show Me Shorts Festival.

I’d watched it at least a half-dozen times since Dan locked down the final cut… and goddamn it, I was still pulled into the story for those nine minutes. Maybe it was because it was on the big screen. Or maybe because it was a very well executed short film by Dan and his people. Probably both

Yeah I’m biased but I believe it was on certainly par with its companions in the Love or Loss section – almost all of whom had state funding and medium- to large-size crews. Dan’s crew was three, including hisself.

Boo-yah.

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