Wednesday, December 15, 2004

PASS FOR EMOTION

My dear friend Jamie is one of those few development people who can actually point you to the problems in your screenplay, rather than the symptoms of the problems. She wants me to do a pass on Unseen, the feature, for emotion. Also the finale needs to be more climactic -- I'd tried to make it produceable, which is always risky.

I find my first passes are always a little short on the emotion. The emotion's there in the scene, inherently, in other words the scene could be directed quite emotionally. But I tend not to sell it in the first draft. I'm too anxious to get to the end to see how it turns out. So I have to go back in there and sell the emotion so that the screenplay reads the way it should.

I used a bag of clever tricks to keep the big action sequence of Unseen offscreen, but Jamie felt cheated, and I she's right. I think I will put the big action sequence onscreen and let the producers freak out about how to produce it. A story has a certain scope. You can tell a small story, but if your story is not inherently small it is very hard to tell it in a small way convincingly. Just look at the BBC's version of Neverwhere, with the Great Beast of London looking remarkably like an ox with a rug thrown over it. It's still waiting for a proper treatment from Stan Winston.

9:37 PM

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