closer2
MatthewFiled under: development
This idea is meant to be life affirming – freeing us of the weight of moments, forcing us to understand that life just happens and our preconceptions of how things should occur just get in the way. And this is affirming, for most of the time. Unless you are already weighted down so much you’re on your knees and these knees are beginning to crack the concrete they rest on. I guess those cracks can be puttied up or something.
The dilemma – the exciting thing – about the film we are writing is the very dilemma the characters are facing. When you only have one day a week, one moment in a whole life of a week, in a relationship (to tell a story of a relationship) how do you construct a meaningful experience (narrative), which has the natural ebb and flow of something that allows us to deeply connect . We all seek to understand the story of our lives. We all want to understand it as a story, as a narrative that flows from one event to another. What if it is all a game for them? What if it is a desperate game of trying to connect and build these dispirate, controlled, segregated moments into something meaningful? It would be so easy to connect and disconnect and then connect and then disconnect, if what we only saw was only one day a week, every Tuesday. What kind of story is this?
In a podcast I listened to recently, John Patrick Shanley was talking about his play and film ‘Doubt’ with the lovely folks from Creative Screenwriting magazine:
“I had a recurring fantasy about a guy on a raft in the ocean who was shipwrecked and could find his way by the stars and then the clouds came in and obscured that and he had to go on faith that he was going in the right direction in the hope that he remembered correctly the insight that he once had when the stars were visible. And I had that fantasy over and over again for a few years…. Which I think was sort of my feeling about insights that I’ve had in my life where there’s been moments when the path became very clear to me and I knew which way to go and I started down that path. And then the feeling of certainty evaporated. And yet I was going to go down that path and I just hoped that that insight that I had was correct. And that’s still very compelling to me – just the human experience.”
Shanley talks about doubt as a necessity, as a necessary part of being human, and to name it in us brings us strength. As we have set this thing off – the raft, if you like – a year is a long time to keep the stars clear in the sky, and as I write this film and as we make this film and as the characters live out their lives over year in the film, there is no doubt all will lose sight of the stars.
Anyway, I guess I’m just reminding the story that what we have set out to do will always change. The control we place on life and our relationships will always waver. Is it just a matter of how well we deal with all our wrong moments, if there is no right moment? Make the most of our eternal, infernal Tuesdays…
Pity it’s not Tuesday today. We should start blogging every Tuesday. Tuesday 13/10: “Tried to write film but made pasta instead. Too doughy. Try more egg next time.” Tuesday 20/10: “Pasta was perfect.”
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sometimes everything is so cloudy
Comment by sophie hyde October 14, 2009 @ 8:47 pm