Archive for July, 2006
‘The Player and the Advocate’ draws on a number of Shakespearian comedic conventions: a play-within-a-play, mistaken identitites, cross-dressing, twinning, mismatched lovers, and so on. It’s not necessary to be familiar with the entire Shakespearian canon - the conventions exist already because they make for good comedy, after all. In my film, I’ve borrowed a number of these conventions and tried to make them work in a modern film setting. I’ll try to outline, with some examples, in a later post exactly what I’m trying to do.
But another interesting Shakespearian convention, this time in the tragedies, is the ‘fatal flaw’. The ‘fatal flaw’ in the hero is the character trait that lead to his downfall. For Macbeth, it’s ambition; for Othello, it’s jealousy; for Hamlet… well, take your pick of introspection, a vengeful nature, thinking too much, not thinking enough… In Shakespeare, characters are moved by grand passions. In ‘The Player and the Advocate’, I’m trying to stick to this convention as well - Oscar is motivated by Revenge to steal the playbook from Gravitas, the director. This grand motive is set in opposition to his second motive, Love, for Amy, Gravitas’ daughter. For Oscar, pursuing one conflicts with the other, and leads to some good juicy dramatic situations.
In modern movies, this type of grand, sweeping motivation seems to be absent. Particularly for male characters in modern films (and I’m thinking especially of the comic-book, superhero movies, and the “idiotic-adult-male-stuck-in-childhood-phase” see Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson etc, which seem to dominate the modern film landscape), what are the main emtoion forces driving them? Almost always, it’s a sense of vulnerability; lack of self-esteem (’Spiderman’), a feeling of being unable to communicate (’Superman Returns, ‘The Hulk’). ‘Pirates of the Caribbean 2′ even spells out this dilemna with a magical compass that “point the direction to the thing you desire most”. Naturally, all the male characters want it and spend the whole movie chasing it, because they don’t have real desires or motivations of their own.
While vulnerability, lack of direction and lack of self-esteem are worthy feelings, and certainly accurately capture a real human emotional depths, they’re not exactly… active. They’re kind of anaemic.
Characters whose main emotional force is feeling “lost” are very hard to put in dramatic situations. They’re reactive, waiting. They’re, in a word, boring.
And in modern films, who are the characters who *are* driven by grand passions - ambition, madness, jealously, lust for power? They’re the villains! In modern films, it’s nearly always the villains who kick off the film: pulling off the heist, planting the bomb, snatching the girl, until the hero is roused into action to fix things. When the antagonist is the more interesting, more active, character in a film, you usually know you’ve got a problem with your script.
So this is one of the issues I’m dealing with in my film - trying to ensure that the main character, Oscar, stays the main character. This means making sure, not only that his character develops the most in the film, but that he is *active* throughout the film, not just bouncing off the obstacles the antagonists throw at him like a pinball. And this means giving the main character, ostensibly the hero, some of the character traits that you mostly find in villains - a grand passion, a fatal flaw, which may lead to his triumph, or to his downfall…
July 27th, 2006
‘Shortbus‘ is a film out of New York, screening in the Wellington Film Festival. It’s screening tonight at the Embassy at 8:15pm, and it’s likely to get general release on DVD (with a very high R rating).
I really enjoyed this film - it’s a perfect date movie (even first-date if your partner is open-minded). It’s the story of a bunch of New Yorkers sorting out their relationship problems, with sex firmly at the center of proceedings. The story revolves around a swingers’ club in Brooklyn, a haven where people are free to explore and be themselves. The sex scenes are graphic, very funny, and non-stop, in every conceivable permutation (solo, straight, gay, lesbian, trans-gender, BDSM, in roughly that order.)
While it’s refreshing to see adult sexuality depicted on the big screen without the usual helpings of adolescent sniggering or gratuitous sexual violence (Hollywood comedies and thrillers, respectively), if this was all that was going on,the film might have been a little repetitive. But the script is also witty and humane in exploring human desires - the director and screenwriter John Cameron Mitchell does a nice running gag for the writers in the audience by overtly contrasting the characters pursuing what they think they want (sexual release, in this case), instead of recognising their needs (love, communication, understanding). If this sounds pretty conventional, it is, but the story is told with sweetness and a sense of celebration at the weirdness that is being human.
The film captures the jittery, melancholic New York, post-9/11 spirit, and interestingly for a New York movie there are almost no scenes shot outside in the big landmark areas. Instead, a cartoony model of the City stands in for the real thing, and the camera swoops around it like Spiderman.
Overall, very enjoyable.
July 23rd, 2006
A quick summary of the history of ‘The Player and the Advocate’:
October 2001, Wellington - woke up one morning with the main plot fully formed in my head. Went to the computer, typed for 4 hours straight to get down all the major character and plot points. Promptly fell back asleep and forgot about it.
May 2002 - departed for New York, script put on the back burner. About 15 pages written.
September 2003 - return from New York, determined to get script finished and produced over the summer…
2004 - pretty much a write-off, actually…
2005 - started working with greater focus on the script to iron out story problems. 1st act complete, around 25 pages written. October: realised the current story wasn’t long enough to be a feature length film. Over the course of an evening and a bottle of red wine, I decided to separate the beginning and end of the story and put in an entirely new middle act. Problems integrating this into the rest of the story kept me busy for the rest of 2005.
February 2006 - negotiated with current employer to start working part-time in order to concentrate on writing.
Present: 82 pages complete, most of the scenes are now outlined with dialogue written, some placeholder scenes still waiting to be filled in. The script is finally starting to look like a feature, rather than a 1-joke short film.
July 22nd, 2006
Welcome to the development website for ‘The Player and the Advocate’. ‘The Player and the Advocate’ is a feature film currently in pre-production in Wellington, New Zealand. This site has been developed as a tool to keep people up-to-date on the progress of the film, and as a way of getting in touch with the filmmakers, should you wish to contribute moral or material support (I sincerely hope you will…)
I have also developed this site (with the help of my wonderful web design sponsor, Alto) to try to lay bare a bit of my writing process. There’s been a resurgence in writing in New Zealand, both for the screen and for stage in the past couple of years. Organisations such as Script to Screen and the NZ Writers Guild are focusing attention on the efforts of the nation’s writers, possibly as a reaction to the flood of special-effects driven movies in recent times (LOTR et al). As a first-time feature writer, I hope this production diary will become part of the discussion and prove useful to people interested in learning about the writing process. I’m certainly not pretending to be an expert (see above: first-time feature writer), but I’m of the ‘learn by doing’ school of thinking, and part of this production diary will be an ongoing reflection on what I’m learning.
On this site I will be publishing excerpts from the script, production sketches and story boards as pre-production proceeds, and hopefully I’ll be able to introduce other collaborators as they come on board. Basicaly, through this site you will be able to witness a digital feature film evolve before your eyes. I’ll be chronicling the challenges and setbacks as well as the triumphs (hopefully educational), but fear not - under pain of death, this will not be a blog about my cats, what I had for dinner, or what music I’m currently listening to (unless it has a material impact on the writing).
Please check out the press kit for more details about the project, subscribe to the RSS feed at right to keep updated, and drop me a line at the email address above to let me know what you think of the site.
I look forward to providing some entertaining and thought-provoking content over the next few months. Thanks for stopping by, and see you again soon.
July 16th, 2006