The Writing Process - or what shape was that wheel again?

So, Act One (of the process...)

I'm writing a new film script - which is rather silly because I have several other perfectly good scripts in development which I don't seem to want to finish.  This one I am writing because it feels more obviously accessible idea, but mostly because I want to document the process from early on. Not sure I want to say much about what I'm writing till I'm most of the way through a draft.

My instinct so far is that the idea is a good one because it involves a protagonist who has a lot of difficult moral and existential decisions.  I think one of the key elements of a good story is that there should be forks in the road - that your story might head in one of two completely different directions depending on what the character chooses to do.

I've become aware that I am working to a theme across most of the scripts I'm working on. This theme is to do with the ambiguity - confusion even - of decision making. One of the defining aspects of most film protagonists is that they seem to know not only what action to take, but when to act. The moment is clear cut, the choices obvious. Mostly, once we leave the movie theatre, we find it a lot more difficult to know when to bend the world a little with our actions.

So far, I'm using Story View to block out acts, sequences and some scenes. Act One is very clear, Act Two seems to have come together more easily than I'd anticipated. The second act is to some extent driven by a secondary protagonist who seems to fall in the archetype represented by Jouvert is Les Miserable, as well as the antagonist in The Fugitive, and also the Edward G. Robinson character in Double Indemnity.  This type is the dogged pursuer who never, ever gives up.

Act Three is tricky...

I'm also beginning to write some scenes, just to begin to get a flavour of the characters, the setting - the world/genre of the story.  At this stage it's important just to have fun with the scenes and also to begin a dialogue between the energy of the scenes and the more managed process of structuring.

Looper - Two Bruces Willis

Or one Bruce really, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt done up to look like the younger Bruce.
This is sci-fi in the near future dystopia sub-genre. One of the refreshing aspects of the film is that it soft-peddles the technology.  The future looks a bit like the '50s, which works okay considering today looks like the '80s.

The film is written (and directed) by Rian Johnson and manages to get away with a bit of a scriptwriting no-no - it has a premise complicated enough to require a lengthy voice over exposition. The complication is that it is set in a future which is in contact with a slightly more distant future. 'Loopers', such as the protagonist, are executioners who knock off whoever is looped back to a pre-determined time and place. This is rather dangerous territory for a protagonist - the least we usually expect from such a character is that he should need to carry out his task with skill and guile, but this guy just pulls a trigger.

To make matter worse there is a disturbing reference to body looting, as the targets carry payment of silver (yes, I think 30 pieces...) strapped to their backs.  What makes this protagonist stand out from his colleagues is thrift. He saves his pieces of silver while his buddies blow it all on party drugs and questionably wardrobes.  Our hero dresses retro, and in fact the film has a strange 1950s feel to it.
There are also resonances of the Terminator films with the mother and child saviour/anti-Christ type scenario. It's hard to know if the reference is intended, or perhaps the Terminator scenario has entered the mythography of time travel story-telling.

Of course one of the requirements of a good time travel story is that it has to play with the metaphysics of paradox.  This does so quite well.  One of the tasks the loopers face is to execute their future selves (it's complicated...) and this is explored well.  The film uses a fairly standard character device here, where only the protagonist and one other have the insight to see that this particular hit - lucrative as it might be - is not in their own long terms interest.  The way it works of course is that the One Other crosses this particularly threshhold (sorry, Joseph Campbell ref) first and doesn't have the heroic qualities to prevent a sticky end.  And let me say, the end for this character is particularly sticky - cloever, but deeply disturbing.

Bruce does some quite good suffering in this film.

Stuff About Scripts

I'll resist the urge to constantly rewrite the opening line for this blog by highlighting - in a self-referential way - the difficulty of  an opening line for such a nefarious thing as a blog. The shifting nature of such a thing is familiar ground at least for those of us immersed in the script process.  The thing is not a thing itself, but a thing in a state of becoming - even the most abandoned of scripts still calls to us softly from the bottom drawer.
So this blog site is a collaboration involving post-postgrad script students and one sometimes employed academic (that would be me).  We don't know what this thing is, but we will take it where it wants to go. We might post bits of script, links to interesting script sites, films, theatre productions and the like. 
So maybe we could all say a little about what we're working on...
Me?  I have a few too many scripts in development. The only thing I've managed to finish in recent times is a radio play called Under the Forest, which you will find a grab from on my website... There is a lot to be written yet about the process of making this play.
Patrick

This is a great idea...

Except I'm not really sure what to put here.