Right after STALLED Stuart and I attempted to adapt a short story called ‘Prolapse’ written by our friend Alice Nixon into a 20 min short. At first this seemed pretty straight forward but after a while we realised it wasn’t so easy.
Our main problems seemed to be resolving where the main point of conflict was for the protagonist. We had too many plot threads and the character’s goal didn’t seem clear. The fact that our protagonist was of questionable sanity didn’t help and made for a confusing script that never really seemed to finish.
Mike Cowap from AFC was very generous in giving us a great deal of his time and script advice. Again he identified that the narrative was missing clarity in terms of the protagonists need and seemed to have too many competing themes. We drafted and redrafted but it just didn’t seem to gel. Mike stopped returning my emails.
I was thinking too big, wanting to put too much into the screenplay, dealing with too many threads in an area I had little or no experience with. It was all too easy to steer towards cliche in the absence of tangible experience with the subject matter. Also some of the elements started to seem to be in pretty poor taste. Not at all what we were after!
We pretty much put the script down for a few months, not in, but certainly next to the too hard basket.
Months went by and the project was pretty much dead. Stuart went on to write another film and I kinda just sat around thinking about writing a feature. But Lapse was kinda sitting there mocking me and I ended up coming back to the script a number of times, this time working solo, just chipping away… there was something there, I just needed to grab the essence and build on that.
I took another crack at writing the story, this time playing with point of view and flashback, using the characters point of view as a narrative device, yet still it didn’t gel. All I knew was this, the protagonist is stuck somewhere and she wants to get out. This was pretty much the essence and no amount of technique was going to cover the fact that I wasn’t clear in my mind about what that was. She’s stuck somewhere and wants to get out.
Finally, using this as the mantra I set about stripping everything out of the screenplay that didn’t reinforce this notion, I had to change the settings, the characters, pretty much the entire story, stripping it right back to 10 minutes. In fact I pretty much wrote a completely new story in the end that has nothing to do with the original short story besides the name of the characters. it seems trite but I had to simply define the problem – create conflict – raise the tension – resolve. Seems so easy but it was like chipping at stone for a while there.
Lapse, as it’s now known took a year or so to get to this point but it was good discipline and now the film has been funded I can say it was worthwhile. We are going to post an early draft of the film and the draft that got funded so you can see just how much changed from inception to completion. Hope it’s useful!
Scott
