Accepting the darkness.

Last night, I finished writing my fourth short film script since the beginning of 2015 - that is, roughly over the last six weeks. I'm remarking upon this because it's quite a tangible achievement for me - given that it took a good six months to bleed out the first solid draft of the feature. 

It's been an interesting progression from writing something purely for functional purposes, to getting right down into the belly of the beast, and finally writing ten pages of material that I'm terrified to produce, and actually make me feel quite nauseated every time I read them. 

I want to unpack the process a little. 

The first screenplay I wrote - in early January - was written with a particular effort: to be the thematic and stylistic distillation of the feature (working title, "The Fashion Director" - this will change). 

The feature itself is about a woman who is embedded right at the very heights of the fashion industry - a director - a magazine's stylist, that is - and her unfolding discomfort and misgivings about the violently sexualised ways in which she represents women's bodies - misgivings that threaten to come to the surface, but ultimately remain neatly suppressed; dismissed. 

The film story has strong thriller and surrealist elements, so it's difficult to unpack here structurally without giving a really dreadful one-para synopsis (wouldn't help); but it's tricky too, to describe my protagonist, Marion, because any throwaway adjectives or labels like "ruthless" or "exacting" make her sound stereotyped-female-Hollywood-evil, and that's not her at all. Marion is much more of a Euro New Wave protagonist. Struggling, flawed, human, but ultimately strong in her resolve to survive - even at the expense of others. 

So, it's hard to squish this big mountain of complexity and ambiguity into a short - given how bloody impossible I find the form of short film to be - and trying to do it would only be telling half the story. Less. That's how I felt in January, anyway. So - instead of trying to be thematically faithful, I took a key motif from the film and wrote around that, instead. I ended up with:

Short #1: A woman photographs her neighbours through their apartment windows. She is captivated by an elusive young man who moves into the previously empty apartment opposite her. They develop a strange, erotic relationship based entirely upon her and her camera's gaze.

This one was never intended to be made this year. The intention behind it was - in purely strategic terms - the short that gets made with funding, once the no-budget short gets made, but that precedes the feature film, for obvious reasons. So. Long finger. And probably in line for half a dozen re-writes before it even begins to dream about production.

So then I needed to write the requisite one-room short that I could make with absolutely no funding whatsoever, that somehow would be proof sufficient that I have the capacity to direct narrative cinema. Ha! Just that little old thing. Well, a girl's gotta give it a red hot go, right? So, I set about beating my head against the desk repeatedly - and after much agony landed on what felt like an elegant solution for a one-room-ish story in the form of the second screenplay. 

Short #2: A man watches a woman. He brings her to an empty room. She undresses. She tells him about her abusive husband. He pays her, and tells her she has to stay with her husband. End. 

Yeah, yeah. There's more to it than that. It's the story of a covert handler and his asset, and the abusive husband is the target. Yadda, yadda. Anyway, that was my John Le Carré inspired number, and in terms of it being a neat little story, I could even probably write a couple of lines more dialogue and it would be submittable to Tropfest. Not my primary intention with this. Truly.

What was my primary intention, anyway? To simply get a film made, or to make a film that actually mattered? I was having difficulty confronting myself with this question. In my panicked state, my reptile mind was yelling "just make a film, any old film! Get it made! It'll be fine!"

Anyway, as soon as this script was delivered, the producer I've been working with told me to go away and write another one - just for kicks - well, as part of the process, actually - to see whether the next one wouldn't trump #2.

So, a bit overwhelmed and tapped out, I went away and baked. Literally. I baked bread and pickled vegetables for three days. And then I sat down and wrote: 

Short #3: A woman walks through a day in her life, trying to process something she's just seen that morning. She is confronted by the visage of a beautiful woman, seemingly everywhere. All the while, she is reminded by strangers that her own body is there for men's consumption. At the end of the day, the woman walks into a darkened space where the beautiful woman performs. 

Actually, as much as I know most people would probably be jumping up and down screaming, "but where's the goddamned story!?", this is one that artistically I was very curious about making. About realising directorially that is. Oh, god. By the end of the first draft, the script needed rewrites to kingdom come, and to be completely honest, there was absolutely nothing "one room" about it. So, I shelved it for the time being. 

We went back to focussing on the idea of Script #2 - but still the question of "why?" kept plaguing me. If I was just making a film for the sake of getting one out there, that didn't feel particularly decent of me. I know that some people can do it - and do do it quite successfully - but I've tried that before with theatre, and it's just not in my DNA. I end up making things that I don't feel a great compulsion around, and there is very little to get obsessed about in the process - that I think comes through in the finished product. Well, how could it not? 

I hit on a solution (in fact, three of us hit on it simultaneously, but just didn't say it all at once) which was turning the man into a woman. For me that meant exploring the female/female power dynamic, which was getting a little closer to the thematic investigations of the feature film. Something a little more interesting. Something that gave me a little more of a "why". 

But you know, even with that broadly expanded power dynamic embedded now within the narrative, the more I sat with it, the less I was convinced it was a project worth making. 

Not that we couldn't make it good. Not that we couldn't find things and make it mean something very real. It could probably even end up being quite convincing as an exercise in sexual politics, and I'm sure that visually we could get it looking very serviceable indeed. 

But the night before last I was sitting at the kitchen table feeling utterly flat about it. I don't really like the concept of "inspiration" - I think the idea of being devoid of it is an excuse for not making work - but it was true, I was lacking something around this project. The very best way I could think to describe it to my husband was, "This project just doesn't feel in any way extraordinary." 

I was still really curious about the idea of the female/female power dynamic - but I realised what I hadn't explored in my writing of any of these scripts was what was so fascinating to me about the story of the feature film: what happens when women are complicit in the objectification and exploitation of other women - and do women on either side of the equation actually ever have a choice in these behaviours? 

Something went "clunk" in that satisfying-piece-of-the-puzzle kind of way, so last night I went away and wrote: 

Short #4: A female intern is being mentored by a photography studio manager. The studio is owned by a notorious male photographer who openly takes advantages of the young woman who cross its threshold each day. The young woman navigates her own complicity and feelings of obligation, exploitation and rejection in this equation. The studio manager, having been there herself, observes it all, neither encouraging nor intervening.

And thus we've come full circle thematically, really. The story itself is about the young intern Alice, and then the studio manager, Del gets her own turn really in the feature film, in the character of Marion. In the feature, the intern character is then split off into two: Marion's PA and a model she's working with. They're both fascinating characters to me: the younger, somewhat innocent apprentice who is eager to use her sexuality to gain power - however fleeting; and the older woman - the mentor, and puppet-master to an extent, who has been there herself but recognises the fact that she is still in many ways in service to the male gaze in this scenario.

It's not an easy subject to grapple with, and it's not going to be an easy film to make. Remembering of course that it's actually going to be the first narrative film I've ever directed. There is a lot I want to achieve with this on little money. And there are very sensitive issues, delicate performances required, and quite physically sensitive sections of the story to film. 

So, I'm fucking terrified. And it makes me feel ill, because in many ways I feel like it's a truth that I live and have lived on a regular basis for all of my professional life - on both sides of the equation. I think to some extent, all women have.

And it's not a story about demonising individual men. I've even been playing with the idea of how much of the photographer we see, or whether he simply represents something much broader than himself as an individual character. It's about the entirety of the paradigm. Its complexity. How difficult it is to fix with rage, protest, reforms, exposés. How in a way, we all need to be complicit, simply for the sake of our own survival. How our relationship with it remains strained, but at the same time, ambiguous. Because we profit from this as much as we are hurt by it. 

It's taken me six weeks of writing four relatively differing projects in order to get to this place where I've finally found a story that I feel is worth working on. And the only reason why I know it is the one that needs to be made is because it's scaring the shit out of me but at the same time drawing me into something that I can sense is only going to get darker and darker and trickier and trickier the more we investigate it. And I think I'm finally prepared to live with that.