The Re-Write

Over the last week we have met up a couple of times and talked about what changes we want to make to Luke's script. We initially wanted to keep the same story and use lots of stylistic devices to represent the two sides of the character. However, we decided that more could be done if we changed the story and kept the theme of the main character being schizophrenic and having not taken his medication.

Our first port of call was researching the characterestics of someone with schizophrenia and seeing how we could encorporate them into what would otherwise be a normal situation. The symptoms which stood out to us as working best were, dillusions of grandeur and paranoia. As these were subtle enough to reveal his condition over the course of the script and not as cliché as the idea of a dual personality as in Fight Club.

We had two conflicting ideas to start with, one was just of an opening shot with the main character sitting in a police cell and another which involved the main character in a typical office workspace or possibly a job interview. In the end we came up with an amalgamation of all of these ideas. The main character had been arrested and was in a police interview, which he thought was a job interview. As the title Treatment was no longer relevant to the script, we changed it to The Interview.

As we felt we might be changing the script a bit too much from the original concept, we kept most of the scenarios that featured in Luke's script in flashback sequences, when the crimes of the main character are being discussed in the interview. We also named the main character Luke Phillips in homage to its original writer.

Here is a storyboard I completed on my iPhone, using the Hitchcock application I spoke about in a previous post.

And The Winner Is...

After much debate about which of the three films, mentioned in my last post, we would pick we came to a decision. Albeit not a very decisive decision, but rather one based on the outcome of a coin toss (and not even a real coin toss, but rather one stimulated by an iPhone app!). Well without further ado, the result was Treatment by Luke Phillips.

Treatment is about a schizophrenic man who forgets to take his medicine one morning. Although the first draft needed lots of work, we liked the theme of schizophrenia and thought it would be an interesting issue to explore within our film. We are going to start a re-write over the next couple of days. In the meantime, however, I am going to rewatch a few films from my collection that deal with schizophrenia (all in very different ways!) and see if I can gain some inspiration. My to watch list tonight is:

• Fight Club (1999) - dir. David Fincher


• Me, Myself & Irene (2000) - dir. Bobby & Peter Farrelly


• Julien Donkey Boy (1999) - dir. Harmony Korine

Obviously some of these are going to be more useful than others, by which I mean Julien Donkey Boy will probably be the only useful one! But it will be fun nonetheless.

Picking...

Recently or time has mainly been occupied with picking things. First of all we had to pick groups for our new film project, then we had to pick roles within the project and the script we would be producing. Here is our team and their roles:

Elspeth Wild - Co-Producer

Josh Montague - Sound

Lord McAuliffe - Co-Producer

Mark Davies - Cinematographer

And myself as director.

Our next task then is to pick which script to make. After reading through the classes scripts, there were 3 which stood out to everyone in our group. These were Liz Scott's The Industry, Lyndon McGuckian's A Justified Presumption and Luke Phillips' Treatment. Once we decide which film we are going to remake, then we can get started on a rewrite and the pre-production.

Done In 60 Seconds

As most of you probably know, every year Empire magazine runs a competition in which you have to remake a feature length of your choice and fit it into just 60 seconds. Of course the aim of the competition is the challenge of managing to transfer the entire plot of a feature length film, with a running time of 2 hours or so, into just 60 seconds and on a tiny budget. This of course results in films that are entertaining for the ways in which they get round the obvious time and budget problems, for example here is last year's winner. Jerry Maguire (1996) in 60 seconds.

This competition led me to start thinking about which films would be the easiest to reduce to just 60 seconds. After a brief think about it, I came up with a shortlist of my top 5 easy to do films:

5. Permanent Vacation (1980) - dir. Jim Jarmusch

Jarmusch's feature debut follows Allie, a drifter, as he roams the streets of New York and occasionally stops off to speak to various people he meets. A 60 second remake would be much the same, he would just have to have shorter conversations and not travel quite as far. Jarmusch's non existent budget in the first place gives way to no real concerns on that front either, as anything he managed so can you.

4. Rope (1948) - dir. Alfred Hithcock

One of the most immediate things to notice about Rope is that it is all filmed in one location with the illusion of all being one take. That said, it is perfect material for this competition, with the story being simple yet structured enough to bring down to time.

3. Koyaanisqatsi (1982) - dir. Godfrey Reggio

The first in a trilogy, Koyaanisqatsi is a collection of brilliant and beautifully epic footage compiled to a Phillip Glass score. The film opens with shots of America's natural and untouched beauty and progresses to show how it has been built on and used. This would be relatively easy to mimic in Bath, with so much open space surrounding it and the building works in progress. With Glass's score ready for us to use, the film which took Reggio 6 years to make could be done for this competition in 6 minutes (but more realistically a few hours!)

2. Blue (1993) - dir. Derek Jarman

If you are already familiar with this film, you must be wondering what could possibly be easier than this to make it to number one! If you are not familiar with it, the whole 79 minute film consists of a plain blue screen which doesn't change, with a score from Brian Eno and voice over from Derek Jarman as he recalls his life and meditates, facing death from AIDS related complications. The colour and the concept being significant as blue was the last colour he could see before going blind through his illness. The main complication with remaking this film, is the high probability that it would be received as rather insensitive, when his heartfelt story is reduced to a mere 60 seconds.

1. Empire (1964) - dir. Andy Warhol

If you could be given one piece of information about a film to help you decide whether or not it would be suitable to remake for this competition, "What is it's runtime?", would be a reasonable question. In the case of Empire, the answer would be 485 minutes. From that information it would probably seem like the least likely candidate, it's only saving grace being, perhaps, that it's title might be appreciated by the competition's organisers. If, however, you were not only granted one piece of information and curiosity as to how a 485 minute film could even be considered for such a competition led you to wanting to find out more then you might not be so surprised. The entire film consists of one shot from one angle of the Empire State Building for over 8 hours. Whilst the film was constructed as an experiment, to see how long people could watch the same image before growing impatient and giving up, this would probably be lost in the 60 second version, as it would be over before they realised they were being tested.

Feel free to leave comments of other films that would be suitably easy to do.