Emotions are the cross-currents a story rides on.

Yes, ‘tis the season’…no not that one….the Awards Season, when the film industry comes to a boil. The culmination in a slow build of recognition of an ever increasing number of talented filmmakers around the world. Awards are also certain indicators of the success of the winners.

I can mention several, but my personal, top of the list in all categories, is Bong Joon Ho’s …Parasite. He is an amazing and truly original talent. I went back to screen Okja (2017) and also his earliest Memories Of A Murder (2003) which i hadn’t seen. In all three, his distinctive style has the signature crescendo of chaos, which, in Parasite is mastered to dizzying heights of hilarity and eventually to devastating heart stopping effect. A film about inequality, it is a jolt to the system, and we go crashing along to the gut punch at the end. In my opinion Parasite is a far better film than Okja, a fairy tale about greed; simply due to a more satisfying balance, between the intricacy of the plot and the satire…stretched beyond all credibility, and the contrasting fully developed range of human emotions in all of the characters. Bong Joon Ho said in an interview that he likes humor “because in it I can hide a a sharp blade.” Indeed, he wraps you in joyous humanity, despite horrific circumstances, and then, with the measured and precise skill of a surgeon, uses that “sharp blade” until you bleed. Bleed with compassion and outrage.

My blogs are not meant to be film reviews but some films are worth talking about. For a legitimate critique on all the scripts of the upcoming Oscar nominated films I suggest you read a New York Times piece by film critic Wesley Morris, The Mysteries of the Oscars: How Do You Really Vote for a Script? I don’t agree with Morris all the time but he always has an astute and worthwhile point of view.

Writing is hard work and much of it comes from day dreaming. An oxymoron you could say? Yes, we live on two planes…all the time. It takes a certain type of person…I suppose but that’s what artists do. When it comes to fleshing out the human emotions of each of your characters, most of it comes from listening to your own inner voice. Finding a tiny chink in yourself or rummaging through past encounters, that inform what comes out of your characters mouths. No matter who our characters are, we must allow ourselves to ‘feel’ the emotions they are feeling in order to write them. Allow ourselves to be exposed. We allow them…even the crazy ones and the evil ones, to inhabit our imagination. Emotions are the underpinning of all action. The cross-currents in all good stories. Loyalty, fear, love, jealousy, greed, the full kaleidescope.

I wish I could remember the name of the well known filmmaker I recently heard in a radio interview, who, when asked to describe the difference in his experience, between writing in the dramatic narrative form and in making documentaries, he answered, “I feel vulnerable, more personally exposed. The creative narrative all comes out of my imagination, whereas the documentary is the telling of facts.“ Yes, being vulnerable! For most people it is wise to leave their feelings out of their work. But we as writers must do the very opposite, we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. For a living!.

Children access their imagination with no inhibitions. The long process of education tames that imagination by emphasizing the need to learn ‘facts’. My niece Vicky, went through a period when she was about seven or eight when she’d pepper all family conversations with “Aunty Vimi (or..) can I tell you a fact?” Everyday we are bombarded with ‘facts,’ and taught, rightly so, to hold them in high regard.

So with all that, how do we as storytellers retain the freshness of our imagination?

Adam Price the Danish screenwriter and producer who produced the powerful and troubling TV series Herrens Veje, said, “You have to write a story that means something to you. You cannot have all kinds of thoughts about how someone will react to it in South America. You cannot let thoughts like that disturb you too much, because you will end up confused in your choices. You have to focus on your story. If I believe it and feel it and make other people feel it, then it stands a chance of working internationally as well.”

We write stories for different reasons, we may be lucky enough to be given a job, or, we have have a strong feeling about something and are compelled to write about. It can also be that we are at a point in our career where we feel a particular kind of story, a certain genre that we haven’t written in before, will further our recognition. Writer/Director Anja Murmann, made a calculated career choice when she made her film Unintended, of which I spoke in my last blog - and to whom I owe an apology - Unintended is her second film, the first was 15 Days In May.

“A distributor at the Toronto Film Festival told me that right now, that was 2014, thrillers were on the rise and so was horror. Well I knew horror wasn’t my thing. So while on a bumpy ride back to New York and bouncing in my seat feeling super scared, I thought, what if a woman returns to her hometown because she has done something in the past that haunts her. I guess that was my initial seed of the idea of the script for Unintended. When I started dreaming up her childhood I drew some experiences from my own childhood. At the time I was starting to write the script, I was grieving the death of my father, and dealing with memories of him informed all the male characters. I don’t know where the ideas come from but I know that I have to write them down if not they disappear.” Her film Unintended is available on Amazon and several other platforms. All the links are in my previous blog.

STORY is not anything we can get into in much detail in a blog, but if anything I write serves as a trigger to get you writing, or rewriting, as the case may be, or it turns a formerly held perspective into a fresh one, I will have set out to do what I hope to do in writing a Blog. For you to really get into the meat of a screenplay I suggest you get in touch with me so I can give you the help you need.

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See you next time!