Christina
I’ve always been obsessed with the Romeo and Juliet story. Perhaps it the Baz Luhrmann film that came out when I was in school. More likely it was the girl I was in love with at the time. I doubt I would have seen the film if it wasn’t for her.
Whatever the reason I loved the film and have been really interested in two things that it did. One, setting Shakespeare in a modern setting. Huge fan, and Luhrmann handled it brilliantly. Second, the star-crossed lovers bit really did a number on me.
So at uni, after I’d been writing for film for a few years and had a couple of shorts under my belt I decided to have a crack myself. Two waring families, two lovers, who don’t know each other, get caught up in their families shit and bad things happen.
Time to stop thinking about it and just do it.
So I mapped it out. Normal film development stuff, the big 5 etc. Got to plot points about twelve months later. It was my final year and I was busy working on our Feature Film – Icebound. I finally got there. All the major beats were in place, everything was flowing as it should. The pacing seemed good. I really liked it.
Then I started on the treatment (script minus dialogue). As I was going through this I started jumping around and writing out the action for the scenes I was really pumped for. I often do this, mainly because I can’t wait to get these visuals that have been in my head for years down on paper. I think it helps interrogate scenes on their own merit as well.
There are two things that writing the treatment like this help with: first, entry and exit of the scene – you want to get in and get out as soon as possible. Everything in the scene has to be important. Second – as you write a few of the scenes out you begin to see them as the vignettes they are supposed to be.
The film wasn't a short and it wasn't a feature
Is was at this point I began to realise two things. Well that’s not entirely true. One thing that was confirmed for me here was that the film was too long. I had know that for a while. There’s a formula to it. Finished script is about a minute a page. Treatments and plot points sort of work in a similar way. There are obvious excemptions to this – for example if you have a lot of talking then your plot points and treatment aren’t going to give you the best idea of the length of the piece.
I now realised that I was looking at about a forty minute film. This wasn’t a length that I could do anything with. I’d been working on short films of around five minutes, ten and fifteen been the absolute longest. I was aware of the time and cost that a forty minute film would take to make and none of my production group would be interested in that – I sure as hell wasn’t.
Don't make characters that you don't like
The second issue that I found is that I had, in me two leading roles, created two completely unlikable characters. Alex (Romeo) was rough and a bit bloodthirsty. I could work with that. Loved his friends would do anything for them and the woman he loved. Yep this could work. But Christina (Juliet – And the name of the script) well she had fallen into the exact hole we had dug for our female protagonist in Icebound – she had lost her femininity (I’ll do another article on this as I fell it warrants further discussion – https://www.writermuses.com/can-women-be-heroes/).
The problem was that I had created a character that had to sacrifice their humanity to get where they were. They weren’t likable – I didn’t like her and I’m not sure Alex did either. How could my heroine have turned from the great love interest into this thing. So I made some notes and continued with the treatment.
By the end of this process I was certain that I had turned Juliet into Brunhilde – not exactly unlikable but certainly not what this film called for. I also realised that with all the gun fights and car chases there was no way that me and my team could make this film – it would be too expensive.
What can you do with a film of this length?
What made this all worse was the length. There isn’t much that you can do with a forty minute film. No major company is going to want it because it cannot get a theatrical release and no smaller company will want it either. For similar reasons as well as a film of this length couldn’t be part of entry for the short film circuit – at least as far as I am aware.
But I wasn’t going to let that stop me. There were some awesome scenes and I could see the trailer already. So, after uni I took a year off. I was working on a lot of projects, this just been one of them. I finished the first draft and a slightly more polished second draft. I let it sit and revisited it later.
I had made a really bad film
I realised at this point what I had since the plot points had first been written. This was a bad film. The lead character was unlikable. You cared for her struggle but if you didn’t care for her it was for nothing. All the narrative elements were pretty spot on and the pacing was good. The film would be great if there was a market for a forty minute short – and if my hero wasn’t the worst.
Having said all this I don’t think it was a waste of time. It gave me some good experience and I think that been able to see what is wrong with a piece of work you have created is important. Unfortunately with this one it isn’t fixable, even though there are now plenty of markets for this length of piece now.
