That fat old F****r Churchill

Strangely, I have found myself quoting Winston Churchill a few times this week. Strange, because like most of my family I despise him irrespective of how he kept plucky old Blighty going during the dark days of the Blitz. Because his Dardanelles adventurism killed thousands of ordinary Tommies and Anzacs and long before the war he happily ordered the British Army to open fire on striking coal miners.

Anyhow,  the fat old bugger once said”This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, it is merely the end of the beginning.” And so it is with us. A good start but that is all it is, and the Labbers have to keep up their intense level of diligence and concentration up as they move back into the everyday, which is going to be really hard. They will be proud of the work they have done here and so they should be, but now isn’t the time to rest up and feel satisfied.

I personally want at least three of these films to be in production within the next twelve months and I am going to work hard to make that happen. I know what is already coming down the pipe from the first Labbers and I can tell the most recent intake the bar has been set very high. Any success a Filmlab film preceding yours has will means your film will be the object of comparison. In its own way it will be expected to perform as least as well, particularly by me.

And soon people, particularly in this town, are going to see the Filmlab logo on the front of a film and have an expectation that they are going to see something fresh, smart, provocative and original, a true voice. Yours. So on we go.

Favourite song lyrics

I was in store buying a diet coke this evening when David Bowie’s “Young Americans” came on the radio playing in the shop. I called over Dr Speyer, who was studying loaves of bread as if they were neurotic patients in an asylum, to see if he knew it. Of course not, silly question. I told him it contains one of my favourite lyric lines, that I use all the time talking to writers: “Play me one damn song that will make me break down and cry”, i.e. put something emotional in it that moves me enough to care about working on the rest. 

Someone once said ”never underestimate the potency of cheap music” and it’s true, pop lyrics sometimes hit the nail on the head, like my favourite Smiths lyric: “it’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate, it takes guts to be gentle and kind, over and over and over and over”.

What’s this got to do with the Lab? Not much, except that as I watched the presentations today I felt that the next step along the line for so many was to hit that deep emotional chord – “play me one damn song” – that all of the Labbers know is there somewhere in their material. It’s not that all that’s needed is emotion, but it’s the touchstone that they need to feel deeply, deeply, at some point this week so they can remember what that felt like as they toil (and make no mistake they will be toiling because we haven’t really started the hard development yacca yet) over the next two months.

Some of them have hit that emotional chord once or twice already, others have been probing but have not quite hit the seam yet. That’s OK, we will. We don’t look for it in order to indulge ourselves in the feeling, but in order to know that in this material is a story that has the capacity to touch people. That is by no means all that it has to do, but it must be able to do that.

Some of the work the participants showed today moved our guests in a way that their oral presentations didn’t, and that’s OK too. It means that the emotion is in the work, but not yet on the page. Getting it onto the page is a challenge, but not a real problem because a real problem would be no detectable emotion at all.

As Rolf de Heer said today, a script is two things, a blueprint for a film and a document of seduction. In both of those manifestations the generation of emotion is a principal requirement: no-one ever got seduced by logic and order, and film blueprints need to generate feeling in the actors and crew as well as understanding. As Rolf said too, people work better when the script is better because they care more: emotion again, you see.

I suppose that one really important thing that happens when someone tells a story to someone else is that there is a basic transaction, one human communicating with another, an exchange of human warmth, which must include emotion because we are emotional creatures.

In one of the warm-up games we do in the mornings people are asked to hold hands, and someone said to me today how strange it felt to hold hands even with people you know.

How sad a thought that is. My daughter Charlotte, three and a half, can’t really exist for long without putting her hand into someone else’s. As you walk with her, human warmth passes from hand to hand like a wordless story and it isn’t that it makes her happy, it’s that it makes her able to face life at all. We stop holding hands a lot as we grow – except often older people who maybe remember something from long ago – and so maybe the stories we tell are partly a substitute for that simpler transaction that children understand so profoundly, just a way to hold hands without embarassing ourselves.   

And Sandy, there is one more thing to come….

Another another thing.

Can I just say that Sonja’s food on the Lab is spectacular? The chicken today was so good that I thanked God I was only allowed to eat protein at lunch. It’s these details that make the work so much easier to do, so chapeaux to Bec, Kerri and Sonja and her team.

Happy, me?

A day spent mainly listening as the Labbers went through a rehearsal of the presentations they are going to be doing tomorrow and I ended feeling encouraged. Not so much at the prospect of the presentations tomorrow, though I think they will be interesting and in some cases thought-provoking for our guests, but encouraging because these stories are beginning to firm up and we have three more days to set about them.

If I had one thing to say to the Labbers tonight it would be stop thinking about your stories so much from the inside and put yourself in the shoes of the people tomorrow who are going to be hearing them from the outside. Why will they be fascinated by what you have to tell? What makes your stories interesting not to you, but to people who don’t know  what you have been up to this past few weeks? How do you tell it to them in such a way that it compels?

For all the work we do, there is some part of storytelling that is very simple. Sit someone down and tell them a story for five minutes that catches, and then keeps, their interest. If you can do that you not only have a story, you also have a workable structure. If you can’t do it, what is it that you have? Your structure can be conventional or radical, you still have to find a way to tell it that grips the listener either way. Remember where we started last week: stories are for the people who hear them, not the people who tell them.

Three days left and stories to tell, over and over and over……

One more thing….

The labber’s blogs are great, a kind of secret window into their thoughts, and I look forward to them every day. Each day I go to a team’s blog and find there’s nothing new there, my little heart quivers a forlorn sigh…

Back on the chain gang

A hiatus as I was excluded from my own blog by the website. Someone trying to tell me something?

Anyhow into week 3 and the beginning of a process of shaping up the stories into things a serious decision can be taken  about in a few days. So after a good deal of thought – a long afternoon in Aldgate, walking and talking on the beach, a damp lunch in the markets, we have a strategy and plan of attack.

First. lots of technical story information to add into the creative pot and, I hope, to bring home to everyone that a story is shaped by the neccessities of technique as well as the power of your imagination. My favourite example of this is Leonardo, who was obsessed, seriously obsessed, with the oils and varnishes you could use, and in what combinations, to mix paint. So his masterpieces were a combination of the most sublime  ideas and the most basic technical skill and without either, he would not have been the artist he was. The problem is that sublime ideas, inspiration, falls relatively often, but the skills take years of practice to learn how to use properly. We have to compress those years of learning into a much shorter space of time.

Impossible? No. How do you do it? Wll, the range of technical skills you can learn is truly vast and it does take years to learn to use even half of them well. But each story uses only a certain number of skills, often a fairly limited range. So if you can nail exactly what the story is going to be you can nail exactly what technical skills are going to be called on and you can concentrate on those. So that’s why we are pushing to get a firmer idea of the stories we have now, this week. To be able to define the technical skills the writers are going to need to call on.

Not in every case, because for some writers the workshop is about opening up the imagination to a range of possible stories and to allow the right one to search the author out: one or two writers here have, I think, been hiding from stories that are looking for their voice to be told in. Sounds wierd, doesn’t it (uh-huh)?

Any more wierd than paying taxes to pay back money borrowed by banks who screwed themselves by lending money on imaginary financial constructions that no-one understands? No? Glad we cleared that up then. Crawl back into your drab material holes sceptics, there’s some serious artistic shit going on here!  

Anyhow, we decided to enlist the help of the producers in accelerating this process of definition of their stories and have started holding regular producer meetings to keep their eyes on the creative prize. Not without some tensions I think, which is good because it brings up another issue we are going to explore this week, the role of the producer in development, a role made more complex by the fact that some producers here are not only producers, but producer -directors or producer-writers, which for all their desire to behave as if that didn’t make any difference to how they behave as directors or writers does make an enormous difference. So the writers are on a journey with their stories, but don’t forget the producers are on a journey too, and the success of the films we are going to make depends as much on the producers making progress as the writers and directors.

The final element is regular story development sessions team by team. There’s no hiding place here, the story either holds up or it doesn’t and I’m looking to knock each story down if I can, to show the team where it doesn’t hold up and challenge them to find a way of building it back up more strongly. The Labbers are a tough and brave set of film-makers, and they need to be. And for the next couple of days I need to be cruel to be kind.

No Peace for….

Rest Day today but not really resting. Lots going on in Labworld, some very good, some not so good, all looking better by the end of the day. My brain mainly rested while my body worked – 40km cycling in total, I reckon, mainly in the heat of the day. And as ever, when I have a day off away from home, I miss it.

Why now? Why here? Why this?

I’ve been reflecting on the presentations the labbers made yesterday. As usual mostly brave and revealing. So why this vague feeling of dissatisfaction? Possibly because I’m more interested in looking forward and anticipating where we have to go to next, rather than dwelling too long on the successes the labbers achieved through all their hard work and comittment.

So what next? Well for a start, how come most of these stories could be made in other countries in other languages and to my mind the stories therein would lose nothing? What is truly Australian about these films? And above all, why do they have to be made now, as opposed to in five years’ time or last year? The answer is not that the film-makers want to make them now, that’s a non-answer. Why do these stories demand to be made now? What are they for?

So on to the next phase. Up to now we have been looking at the film-makers and the impulses behind the stories they want to tell, and the themes they are turning over. Here we start to harden it up a little.

Tell me a story, make it one that grips me, tell me in a way that makes it necessary that it is made as soon as practically possible, tell me in a way that demonstrates why people need to see it. Tell me a story which has fire in its belly and show me that fire reflected in your eyes. Stop telling me that the story is really important to you because stories aren’t for the teller, they are for the audience. Answer my questions. Why now? Why here? Why this?

Tomorrow Calling

As finishing touches are put on the various project assignments being prepared for tomorrow, now is the time for the labbers to start thinking of context. How will they present their ideas to new people tomorrow, people who do not know what they have been doing up to now?

I’m very curious as to how they are going to do this. And unless I am specifically asked, I am going to give no tips or pointers. You see this too is a test. If tomorrow a project which has been diligently worked on, considered and crafted is not introduced to the “outside world” in the right way, then it may be regarded as incomprehensible and opaque when in fact the work is excellent and the purpose, to those in the know, clear. But the presentation will fail because the presenters failed to include the needs of their audience in the list of things they set out to satisfy.

Now I will never remind filmmakers of this necessity during Filmlab because I’d rather they learn the hard way if they forget. And filmmakers should not need to be reminded of the necessity to consider the audience’s needs either. So what will they do? Will they automatically think of their audience? Will they read this blog and suddenly start thinking about it? Or will they be too self-absorbed to do anything except think about the work from their perspective and no-one else’s? We’ll see.

Thoughts on a bike

Cycling back from Filmlab today I got to thinking: what is the relationship between the creative impulse, the idea, structure and the story? Given that we have spent a week saying look, we don’t want you to think too much about the structure of your story right now, nor even the characters, we just want you to live in the world of the impulse, the feel, the theme if you you insist on giving it a name you could recognise from a screenwriting self-help manual.

And then what we get are these mewling little forms, half-realised, precarious, hanging on to life but having life, full of potential. And if you leave them in the daylight without help they either show a astonishing robustness, they refuse to die, or they gently expire. But really, for all the difficulty in producing them, there isn’t much to them.

What is most important about them is the emotional bond they have with their creators, take that away and there isn’t much left worth dealing with. What I’ve spent a lot of time doing these past seven days is looking to see whether the labbers care, really care, enough about these half-formed ideas to want to put in the time and effort needed to give them a chance of a meaningful life.

Because if the parent chooses to put in the effort, only then do these impulses stand a chance. So if that connection isn’t there, better to let them die and find a story of yours that you really can love and nurture. To find, as the poet says, that “your children are not your children,they are the sons and daughter’s of life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you”

But enough hippie claptrap, once the decision is made to keep your form alive, how does it thrive? Through the application of technique, through asking great technical questions, through understanding what other sorts of stories contain ideas like these, through looking at what choices other great writers made when dealing with the problems these stories pose.

The next stage is not about you making choices any more, you made your big choice when you decided to let it live. And this is where it really does get like parenting. it’s not about making it what you want it to be, it’s about understanding what it is and helping it grow into what it can be, the best version it can be. If you try and force it to be what it isn’t, it will rebel, and turn around and screw you up and ruin your life. And you will deserve everything you get, because your ego got in the way, and you stopped loving it for what it was and might be. You sinned.

Technique, technical know-how and skill, are the first set of clothes you dress your idea in, and if you do that well it will get up and walk about on its own. You then point it in the direction you think it needs to go and hope it walks that way, gets strong and speeds up. And the kinds of clothes you dress it in define how well it walks.

That’s where we are going next week: structure, determined stories, directions forward and decisions, big decisions, because where filmmaking is not like parenting is that other people have the capacity and right to make decisions about whether your offspring deserves life at all. And if they don’t think it does, they’ll tell you to kill it.