on finding a narrative shape from within

7 Dec

I started writing a document in Pages yesterday. The second attempt of a document for this film in the software: the fifth piece of software (and the sixth tool) I’ve used for composing this film. (To date: a notebook — most effective — then: Google Docs, Final Draft 12, Apple Notes, Milanote, and now Apple Pages (x2). Not that any of these tools haven’t been profoundly useful in themselves (well, with the exception of Final Draft — so far). They have. They’ve just probably represented phases.

[Actually, I missed one out: Pinterest, of course. I keep returning to it for visual references. And Milanote, for that matter. Milanote will likely prove more useful later down the track, than it currently is in this early piecing-together stage. As a mood-board and random-note repository however, I can’t fault it. I just wish there were software that more accurately expressed the tangential, visual-rhythmic way my brain works.]

I’ve been working with a filmmaking coach lately who has encouraged me as part of her process to delineate a development process for myself, and keep a linear system for its procession. I did this, and it worked bloody brilliantly for the first month of backstory. But then as I actually started to let story and character come through, I had to let the idea of producing outline-based documents fall completely away. (Perhaps that’s part of the process too?)

It’s like the struggle I have articulating to a funder what the work will be about (or like) before I’ve made it. Something similar with an outline — even for myself. I can create the conditions for the work to come through, but I can’t tell you (or myself) what it’s going to be before it comes. Not with any degree of accuracy. (I could try — and sometimes I do, but I’ll probably be very wrong about it.)

Trust. We are taught not to purely trust though. In screen especially, we are told instead to have insurance plans. To articulate things as if we were talking to a stranger. (It feels counterintuitive to me — like trying to tell someone what a child’s life will be like before it’s born.) The safety of planning and speculation is I think, on some kinds of projects an inverted expectation. Not all that useful from an artistic perspective.

But I do also mistrust the writerly term “pantser”. It by and large implies that you haven’t got anything up until the moment you sit down and put fingers to keyboard. Au contraire in this case. I’ve been working virtually non-stop on this creature for years now behind the scenes. I just can’t tell you exactly what it is yet. To attempt to do so would be arrogance, I think. For me, at least. I know others are not this way. I envy them that sense of safety.

Because it’s so hard to have trust. In a work that hasn’t yet been born. And in your own damn hands as its mouthpiece. (Will I understand enough to translate this animal’s sounds into words and images and time? Am I fluent enough to be faithful? Am I sensitive enough to translate its poetry or will I be a gauche, clunky, foolishly garbling interpreter? Such hazard in this work.)

I had even tried to visualise the work in a circle (or spiral, rather) but realised that there was absolutely no point in trying to plot structure on a shape (be it more or less linear) yet.

I’m in two minds about putting the text as it currently is into Final Draft again at this stage. I’m unsure as to how to represent jumps back into other scenes I know that I will get to when I cut, but that will need to be shot as single scenes. I know how hard it is as an actor when I receive sides on the day that are technically in the same scene but fall at intercut points along the temporal timeline of the screenplay. It’s laid out as such for the benefit of the producers, for the crew, for the post-team, and of course you can work with it on your feet (it’s just a screenplay language thing), but still, it’s unintuitive. I can do it in the screenwriting software, but at this stage I am loathe to. Still, I’m finding it difficult to notate the subjective experience of memory on the page.

I even dug out an ancient live performance script that I wrote for reference — as a score, because I did a similar thing in that, and then I saw all I did was cut up monologues and duologues physically from the page, and pasted them in the patterns and repetitions that I decided would work during rehearsal. Easier in theatre / installation text I think, than in film, but I don’t quite understand why. Fewer rules, perhaps. I don’t know.

(How on earth can I break these rules most effectively?)

Because there is only so much I can know from a high-level vantage point. The conditions of engagement for me — when it’s working much of the time — is being in the work, not standing back from it and structuring it. Structure I think can sometimes only best be observed retrospectively. Oh, gosh. Then suddenly it becomes so pleasing.

People have often asked me how I wrote Intrusion. Well, I didn’t write it the way it ended up on the screen, that’s for sure. The narrative on the page was far too linear for my taste (sensibility? Understanding of the world? Understanding of the refracting experience of trauma?) when I got into post. Form is content; but for me so often form is felt; intwined in the content. Intuited. It can’t be assigned or dictated, and for the most part, its pathway can neither be described nor reverse-engineered afterwards.

But I also have to stop trying to get ahead of myself and overrepresent how the work will be pieced together on the page in a perfect document. I have to stop thinking about the cast and crew for now. I’ll write a document for them later.

Actually, it’s quite wonderful to be referring to Apitchatpong Weerasethakul’s notebooks for Memoria published by Fireflies Press. There is a moment in the text where all the notebook pages, letters to research team and producers, photographs, ephemera and letters to himself come to a slight close, and suddenly we receive pages from a shooting script, and you can see the very physicality of the transition between the phases, it’s such a privilege to bear witness to. What a powerful instance of alchemical transformation, from pieces and internal dreams into a document that then draws together the team that will slowly physicalise another (sacred) document (which will then make a kind of “document” of our, the audience’s witnessing). What an enormous, palpable event.

Okay, then perhaps what I need to do is stop overthinking this, and simply to trust that the decision the work wants to make (and the tools it wants to use to come into the world at this point, in this version) will be known and correct, and I don’t have to stand back and try to plan, structure or second-guess that, either. Trust.

[Edit: three hours after writing this, it went into Final Draft. The work wants what the work wants. The work will tell you.]