According to the good people at WordPress dot com, this is my 300th post, which I see simultaneously as an amazing thing and also an awful lot of words that no one’s ever going to read. As ever, though, I write this mostly for myself; it helps me to clarify my thoughts.
I’ve written before about my experiences with The Pitch. As one of the runner-ups, I was awarded a small production fund to do something with. After spending much of the last year not really knowing what to do with the budget, I’ve moved increasingly to the thought of making a short film myself; in and around Kendal, working with the talented people who live here, keeping the whole thing as local as could be. Without having a clear idea of what to work on, I started mulling on single images and scraps of ideas:
A hanging tree high above a valley.
A stack of flat stones on a riverbank.
A kite, bobbing, soaring, sliding on the wind.
A man with an axe, walking towards a small house.
This was an experiment in free-writing as much as anything else, letting ideas move through association. And there was no story and there was no story and then suddenly there was a story: The Potter’s Field.
In the Bible, after Judas betrayed Jesus, he tried to return the 30 pieces of silver, but the Priests wouldn’t take back the blood money. Instead they used it to buy a potter’s field for the poor of Jerusalem. A potter’s field is an area of land where all the seams of workable clay have been extracted, leaving a chaos of rocky trenches and holes. These fields are no good for farming, but all over the world they’ve been turned into pauper’s graveyards; burial grounds for strangers and destitutes. After hanging himself, Judas was buried in the same field his blood money paid for.
I found this utterly extraordinary. There’s a circularity to it, a Zenlike completeness, a sweeping up, a recycling of something wasted. It shapes a terrible betrayal into a coherent future: not righting a wrong, but filling a void: what’s broken can always be fixed, and what’s fixed will always be broken. I couldn’t find a moral in it, and that ambiguity sung to me. The ideas began to tumble, spilling like dominoes: a woman betrayed. A guilty man. A child. Two children. A river, a farm. Chickens and eggs. And a kite… the joy of flying a kite.
After months of chewing through images like puzzle pieces, suddenly and sharply the whole picture hung together. I wrote my first draft of the screenplay in about an hour, and was on my tenth draft in a week. It’s probably the most personal story I’ve written, and though I’m not in it, I’m also in every single line. Ultimately, the story is really simple: it’s about someone trying to say sorry, and someone else who isn’t quite ready to forgive.
Now I need to make it. I want to make it. That means producing and directing: the organising, galvanising, driving and delivery of a project from first idea to final edit. Finding a crew, casting actors, sourcing locations and kit, props and music. Insurance. Catering. Scheduling. There’s so much to do, it’s sometimes hard to know where to begin, and so I’ve built myself an armour of spreadsheets and lists. Spreadsheets for each of the schedule, shot list, budget, props list, costumes, research sources. There’s safety in those numbers. Making sense of the mountain; single steps on a journey.
I’ve surprised myself with how much satisfaction I’ve discovered in the budgeting, in the planning. At the moment I’m working out menus for a three-day shoot. How can I feed fifteen people with healthy food and snacks and teas and coffees and keep it on budget? These challenges are testing different parts of my brain, and I’m really enjoying the new processes. It’s good for me to learn. And I love cooking. Just like this guy:
Along with the pragmatic work, I’m constantly divining a creative language for the story, thinking and feeling my way through how I want it to look. I’m lucky to have the gifted Dom Bush as my Director of Photography, and I’m already so excited at what we’re going to cook up. Dom has such an eye for a face, for a moment. The story is very intimate and I’m looking for emotional spontaneity in the scenes; I’ve been studying Normal People and Sound Of Metal and Beasts Of The Southern Wild, trying to better understand how those moments have been captured so wonderfully.
I’m still a writer, or trying to be. I’ve never wanted to be a director, but I want to direct this. There’s magic in film. It does things no other medium can do. This story is personal, and there are truths in it I want to tease out. In so much of my work, all of that happens in my head, my notebook. It’s a new experience for me to open it up, to share the process with others. I’m learning a lot. It’s good.
I’ve called this pt.1 because I’ll wrote more about this along the way. Same Bat time, folks, same Bat channel.
Simon Sylvester 