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.
