Mid-August Lunch (Satyajit Ray Award)

The other night at the BFI we were lucky enough to see writer-director Gianni Di Gregorio receive the Satyajit Ray Award for his delightful film Pranzo di Ferragusto (Mid-August Lunch).

The film is the slight but utterly charming story of Gianni (played by Di Gregorio), a 50-something bachelor who – usually with a glass of wine in his hand - lives in Rome with his spirited 93-year-old mother.

Deep in debt, Gianni is forced by the building manager to look after the latter’s mother over the August holiday of Ferragusto. However, the situation soon escalates and he finds himself being run ragged by four very imposing old ladies.

One of the beauties of the film is its sensitive and respectful treatment of old age. The ladies who take over Gianni’s flat aren’t the decrepit and embarrassing zombies so beloved of the youth-obsessed media. Instead, they’re women who have been given cast-iron personalities by decades of experience.

Di Gregorio – one of the scriptwriters on Naples gangster drama Gomorrah - said that he’d been trying to sell the story for around 10 years, but – “fortunately” – no-one wanted to take on such a tough sell. However, Gomorrah director Matteo Garrone agreed to produce the film (at a very low budget) and Di Gregorio stepped in as director and actor, as well as writer.

The low budget becomes a virtue, as the use of natural light, found locations and – especially – non-professional actors combine with mobile camerawork and leisurely pacing to create an irresistibly naturalistic tone that perfectly depicts the stifling summer heat.

As the writer-director confirmed in his Q&A, there’s a strong autobiographical element to the work. He lived alone with his mother – in the flat used in the film - for the last 10 years of her life. During that time, he became immersed in the world of his mother and her friends, seeing their vitality as well as their vulnerability.

From a strictly screenwriting perspective, I guess this is a somewhat extreme lesson in ‘writing what you know’. From his experience, Di Gregorio has crafted a deeply personal but totally accessible film that uses dry humour and strong characterisation to bolster a minimal plot.

It’s impossible not to empathise with the hapless Gianni as he finds himself drawn into a battle of wills he doesn’t have a prayer of winning. His gestures and choices reveal a great deal about him; every time he reaches for his wine glass in a moment of quiet stress, you sense his turmoil.

However, Di Gregorio said that the ladies he recruited to act in the film (from local old people’s centres) refused to take much direction, so much of the script went out the window. Instead, he tried to guide them where he wanted each scene to go, and then let them largely improvise. The result is totally natural performances that are utterly convincing.

Di Gregorio was a charming interviewee, beaming with gratitude at his award and the reception he received. His film is a small (75 mins) and delicate gem that deserves a much wider audience than it’s likely to receive.

Production notes (PDF)

Interview with Gianni Di Gregoria (twitchfilm.net)

What filmmakers do in their time off

I'm sure I'm not the only person to have noticed this, but has Shane Meadows been doing a bit of moonlighting on Britain's Got Talent?













(Stavros Flatley on the BGT semi-final (YouTube))

Ernest Lehman on screenwriting

Screenwriter and tireless blogger Scott Myers has published two lengthy excerpts from an interview with Ernest Lehman over on Go Into The Story.

Part One covers a range of subjects, including his approach to screenwriting, before Part Two focuses on working with Alfred Hitchcock on North by Northwest.

Ernest Lehman was one of the most critically lauded and commercially successful screenwriters in Hollywood. In a writing career that spanned three decades, Lehman wrote many notable movies including Sabrina (1954), The King and I (1956), North by Northwest (1959), West Side Story (1961), The Sound of Music (1965), and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Lehman was nominated four times for the Best Writing Academy Award and was the recipient of a lifetime achievement award in 2001. Lehman died on July 2, 2005.

The Suit: hubris and nemesis

It was nice to see Ruth Millar on Ashes to Ashes the other week, reprising her role from Life on Mars as hard-bitten Glaswegian journo Jackie Queen.

Back at the turn of the century, when you could smell the millennial optimism in the air and everything seemed possible, the very same Ruth Millar starred in a short film wot I wrote entitled The Suit.

At that time, I'd only been screenwriting for a couple of years, having drifted into it almost by accident. I'd previously wanted to write comics, but had drifted out of the medium as both a reader and a would-be creator.

Jane put me on an Introduction to Screenwriting course (via Croydon adult education) as a means of getting me writing again. I soon found that I connected with the medium, and it might offer a more accessible way in than comics, which were in a bit of a slump at the time.

Anyway, within a few months I had a couple of short scripts ready, and I started to respond to calls from directors on Shooting People, which was still lean, mean and useful at the time.

Most of my submissions went unacknowledged, but one day I got a call from a young director who said she'd enjoyed my script for The Suit and wanted to make it.

At the time, it seemed like the stars were suddenly about to fall into some improbably auspicious alignment. The director was very driven and enthusiastic - albeit in a head-girly kinda way - and she had hooked up with a City lawyer who fancied jumping into the biz they call show.

I happily trousered £200 for the script (plus an expensive meal with champagne) and set about the torturous development process. Which wasn't that torturous, actually. She only suggested a few changes, and was happy to drop any that I could make a good enough case against.

'Unfortunately', the shoot coincided with Jane and I packing our bags and 'flashpacking' around the world for six months. When I found myself scoffing breakfast in Sydney and reading how well the shoot of my film had gone, I thought - perhaps not unnaturally - that the even-better times were just around the corner.

As a dramatist, I should have all too aware of the dangers of hubris and the fact that Nemesis would be rollerblading round the bend at high speed any minute...

The rest of the trip went OK, but when we got back to bohemian Penge village in mid-2001, my showbiz dream was beginning to fray a bit at the edges.

The director wasn't totally happy with the rushes (it was her first time shooting on DV) and she'd managed to go significantly over-budget, incurring the wrath of her increasingly disenchanted producer.

With just a rough cut assembled and no soundtrack added, the producer decided to pull the plug on the project and try pop music instead. I tried to hook up the director with musicians who'd do the soundtrack for expenses, but gradually she stopped returning my emails and the icy shadow of abandonment fell across my inchoate masterpiece.

And that was that. I've since tried to get hold of her again, to maybe even pay myself for the film to be finished, but she seems to have disappeared. Leaving me with just a VHS of the rough cut and the desolation of dashed hopes.

Anyway, that's the story of how the film industry chewed me up and spat me out. I can't be arsed trying to get the rough cut into some newfangled digital format, so from my archives here's a copy of what I guess ended up as the shooting script. (Ruth Millar was suitably feisty as Poppy.)

MA Screenwriting: Unit Seven

I'll try and rattle through the remaining four units, as the majority of the most interesting stuff happened in the earlier units.

Unit Seven was Study of Industry Practice, which was a useful way of accumulating a fair bit of knowledge about how films are financed and produced, but which hasn't really had much of an impact on my writing since.

For the unit, we were given a feature-length script by one of the previous year's MA graduates and asked to write a 2,000-word report describing its potential for production and sales in the world marketplace.

In support of the unit, we were given a lengthy and thorough lecture by Tom Strudwick - a highly experienced film sales and marketing consultant.

(Tom also hosted a thoroughly bruising pitch session before we handed in our major project proposals - the only time over the two years of the MA that I didn't want to play any more.)

Anyway, Tom guided us through assessing a project at script stage from both creative and marketing perspectives - particularly the art of 'positioning' a film: ie, defining its key audience and working out how the film could be effectively marketed to it.

Perhaps most usefully, he stressed throughout the importance of knowing what you're selling (at whatever stage of development or production it's at) and being able to describe it as succinctly as possible to the next link in the chain.

What he said seemed to equate to the importance that Blake 'Save the Cat' Snyder puts on the idea of 'what is it?': A movie must have a clear sense of what it's about and who it's for. Its tone, potential, the dilemma of its characters and the type of characters they are should be easy to understand and compelling.

We also had a look at the importance of genre and generic conventions in film marketing. For instance, Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters would normally have been a tough sell to the mass audience (drama/older audience/female-skewed). However, it broke through after being marketed in the same generic terms as a prison movie.

After looking at publicity and promotion, we also had a brief introduction to the various models of film finance (including 'soft money', co-production, distribution, etc), as well as other factors that would influence production, such as regional incentives and assessing the scale of the enterprise.

I think the script we assessed is in development somewhere, so I won't post my essay. Because of the rapidly changing finance and production environment, most of the resources I used were online - especially articles from journals. However, here's the brief resource list we were given for the unit:

Trade Press

• Screen International
• Variety
• The Hollywood Reporter
• Screen Finance

Books

• Dealmaking in the Film and Television Industry – Mark Litwak (Silman-James Press)
• The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook - Chris Jones and Genevieve Joliffe (Continuum International Publishing)
• The Guerilla Film Makers Movie Blueprint – Chris Jones
• The Movie Business Book - Jason E. Squire (Virgin Books)
• Film Budgeting – Ralph S. Singleton (Lone Eagle)
• The Big Deal - Thom Taylor (Quill)
• David Puttnam: My Story So Far - Andrew Yule (Time Warner)
• Final Cut - Stephen Bach (Faber)
• My First Movie - Stephen Lowenstein (Faber)
• Rebel Without A Crew - Robert Rodriguez (Faber)
• Money into Light – John Boorman (Faber)
• Projections – John Boorman and Walter Donahue (Faber)

Waiting for Godot: absurdity and naturalism

The mouth-watering combination of Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart has made the production of Waiting for Godot currently playing at the Theatre Royal into London's hottest theatrical ticket.

Watching the play last week, it dawned on me how quickly we begin to take things for granted once they've been officially designated a classic and analysed to the nth degree.

While the production strives to make the play as accessible as possible, highlighting the music hall comedy flavour of the central double act, it doesn't take too much of an imaginative leap to imagine how utterly alien Beckett's drama must have seemed when it first appeared in 1953.

Thinking about Beckett and his Theatre of the Absurd mates, it dawned on me how we've never really managed - or maybe even wanted - to get away from naturalism as the default mode for our various forms of drama in this country.

Maybe the old Puritan distrust of fiction is still lurking in our cultural DNA. In the early days of the English novel (c1720-1750), writers had to fly in under ye olde radare by disguising their work as true life stories (Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders) or exchanges of letters (Pamela, Clarissa).

In terms of screenwriting, the social realism of the British New Wave, exemplified in 'kitchen sink dramas' like Room at the Top (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961) and A Kind of Loving (1962), fed through to Coronation Street and, later, EastEnders - the most-watched shows on TV.

As screenwriters, we have the advantage of being able to create meaning by stepping beyond the dramatic unities and manipulating time and location: for example, Charlie Kaufman's audacious use of time in Synecdoche, New York creates a terrifying impression of the brevity of life.

Similarly, Eisenstein and his mates were big on creating meaning through montage - the juxtaposition of shots to create associations, or symbolic meanings, that are greater than the sum of their parts. Actually, I find that a key part of screenwriting, so maybe I'll try and do a quick survey of their theories for a future post.

After being energised by Beckett and Pinter when I discovered them as a teenager, I later went off them slightly. After seeing one too many productions of The Birthday Party, it seemed to me that they were full of showy theatrical dialogue and gestures that looked and sounded impressive but didn't really say much to me about my life.

However, seeing Waiting for Godot again has revitalised my enthusiasm for the experimental. While not everything we write has to veer off into the wildly experimental or esoteric, it's never a bad idea to cross-pollenate your experience with stuff that works in a slightly different mode to what you're normally comfortable with.

Just don't expect everyone in Albert Square to turn into a rhinoceros any time soon.

(PS. Blimey, this blog's going a bit David Bordwell, innit?)

Screenwriting and empathy

I know it's a bit lazy to run 'repeats' when the blog has been running for less than a year, but I published this very early on, and thought it might be worth another outing now that a few more people are looking.

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(Originally posted 28 August 2008)

In response to an excellent post on Robin Kelly's invaluable blog, I've dug up these notes from a lecture given during my MA course by David Hanson.

During the lecture, David told us that in order to create an empathic bond between our unknown audience and our characters, we need to use basic psychology to ensure that our characters share the same fundamental human needs and desires as the viewer.

To identify these needs, he drew on the work of psychologist Abraham Maslow, who proposed a 'hierarchy of needs' in a 1943 paper entitled A Theory of Human Motivation.

The notes are in a PDF, and are pretty much as I scribbled them down in the lecture room. They might not make complete sense without the accompanying film clips, but a lot of those excerpts should be familiar enough. If nothing else, the notes might provide a starting point for further research into the theory.