An update on my latest script
14.05.2021
Some people by now will probably know that I’ve been trying to write a feature-length script this year to sort of prove to myself that I can do it and also tell the story that I personally think is fairly interesting.
The story follows a young man caught between a series of brutal killings within the quiet village in which he lives and a crisis of identity and livelihood infecting the heart of his family. The
Here’s a little bit of digital art I made in my second year when I originally came up with the premise of the script. It’s supposed to be somewhat Francis Bacon-esque but, uh, yeah.
It’s a psychological thriller inspired by some of the reading I was doing at university concerning identity, self-hatred and the big ol’ topic of masculinity.
Will – the young man – is caught in a sort of liminal space, just at the end of his time in university and deciding what the next move is, where the traditions within his family are pulling him in a direction that he’s not sure he wants to go. Will’s mere doubting his desire to follow the family’s lead results in his spiraling downwards into a deep pit of resentment – towards himself, his family and all those he sees as complicit in his frustrations.
The script was in large part influenced by more literature than film, which some might take as a bit of a negative. Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf was a key part of the psychological makeup of the story, and recently my slow, trudging readthrough of Crime and Punishment has also aided in how I might want to execute some key sequences.
The first draft was completed in late January and was around about 133 pages long. I took some time to edit the script into a more interesting state, but this brought the total up to something like 151 pages long. It was at this point I felt I needed to get some fresh eyes on the thing and sent it to some close friends who provided a lot of invaluable feedback.
There were some issues with pacing, a bit of a lack of clarity at certain points, and some of the scenes felt slightly redundant to some.
So, I got to work on the third draft, which is what I’m working on presently.
Obviously, this would be the draft closest to completion I will have written, but I wanted the fact to be more than tautological. I wanted this to be the one where the final structure, the final scenes, and dialogue were all in place – such that all that would need to be tweaked in the future were minor little things and I’d feel comfortable enough that this was my vision to submit it to more general viewing. What this means, though, is that this will probably be the most rigorous set of edits I’ll have made to date.
The first thing I did was to take the feedback I got, write up some general points and then start to create a list of specific edits that might achieve that.
These general areas obviously were closely tied to the feedback I got, but also related to some other things within the script that didn’t sit entirely right with me. The areas I came up with were:
Pacing.
Character consistency and related dialogue.
Sense of cohesion.
The ending (this one was a biggie for me.)
All in all, at the present moment, I’ve managed to cut the script back down to 138 pages, and am hoping to cut it further before releasing this draft. It may not seem like a lot, but there have been other edits that have had a negligible impact on the page count going on behind the scenes.
Pacing
The pacing was a tricky one because a lot of the time – unless you’re going off a strict structural guide, which I only sort of am – it has seemed to be a fairly intuitive thing to wrangle with. This is to say, you either have it or you don’t have it and at some points in the script, it seems I most certainly do not have it.
Generally, three-act or five-act structures will have certain beats that need to be hit and link quite closely with the main protagonist’s journey or arc. These will involve the establishment, escalation and resolution of a central conflict but can be altered pretty heavily.
My issue has been that the conflict within the script is fairly internal, or at least pretty below the surface. It was crucial for me that the conflict matched the kinds I’ve known or experienced in my own life so as not to feel entirely contrived.
Generally, where I come from, big, dramatic moments do not happen. Emotion rarely comes readily pouring out of the tap and a lot of the time conflict is repressed in order to reduce the need for direct confrontation or – god forbid – uncivil behaviour. And that theme of repression is a big one for Wolfmen.
So, what to do? With literary influences that depend on internal dialogue not expressed outwardly, and with a conflict that often goes on beneath the surface – how do you film that?
Well, my solution has been to use a kind of elliptical storytelling to mostly only allude to the drama going on behind the scenes.
What this means is that there’s more of a focus on the fallout of the drama rather than the drama itself. The underlying feelings towards the big events are the conflict, not the events themselves.
These feelings can be teased out at crucial moments in dialogue, and to a large degree what isn’t said will be important in establishing exactly where a character is mentally at any given moment.
Further, with some of the devices I use, I’m hoping the conflict becomes readily apparent with not a lot actually going on on the screen.
But I’ve yet to mention pacing, apologies. Here we go.
Pacing comes into this in the way that the film slowly builds to a crescendo of pent up emotion finally being released. At the moment, this is way too slow, however. You’ve probably heard of a slow-burn, but this is more like a slow-sizzle – it’s interminable. At least that’s how I see it.
My thought is that it’s likely in the second act that I take too much time to establish what Will is struggling to deal with. A large part of this is him experiencing waking nightmares and honestly I’m not sure it’s terribly interesting. A lot of the time scenes need to work on more than one axis – they need to further a couple of different lines of conflict at once – and these dream sequences (for all intents and purposes) just seem to further one thing: Will’s feelings of guilt.
As such I’ve been steadily taking them out and using a bit of the time saved on other scenes that could use emotional development.
There are plenty more little kinks with the pace that need ironing out, but this area is probably one of the bigger ones and one I’ve tried to remedy first.
One way I’ve done this is to incorporate the dream-like aspects of Will’s experiences into the scenes that were originally entirely lucid.
Characters and dialogue
Character is another area I think the script, in the form of its second draft, really fell short. Honestly, I don’t think I put enough time into fully fleshing out each character, so that has become a priority for this third iteration.
Examples of the ways I think the characters fell short are mainly tied to the side characters, who I feel were just window dressing for the main protagonist.
Will’s friend, Ellie, is a prime example of this.
Her story is intended to illustrate the pressures and effects of the world she and Will inhabit in a different light. If anything, Ellie’s is probably the more tragic story – but it’s one I don’t know personally and felt wrong in attempting to fully portray in my own writing.
My concern before has been that Ellie, being gay but closeted to her family, was tokenistic or something similarly problematic. Because of this, I simultaneously wanted to flesh her out as a person and to also make it clear that I’m not intending to draw neat parallels between her situation and Will’s.
Will is struggling with an issue that stems from something somewhat within his control – his reactions to his own mental health issues and refusal to acknowledge them properly – and facing the repercussions, but Ellie cannot control her sexuality and so her repression and self-loathing – a reaction to her father’s views on homosexuality and her own dropping out of university, resulting in her continued reliance upon him – take on a whole other dimension.
The original point of bringing Ellie’s sexuality into things was never to draw this parallel but to illustrate just where the kind of conservative environment Will and Ellie are brought up in can lead to. To suggest that it’s bad enough with what’s going on with Will, think about what Ellie must be going through.
Now, this is all well and good, but Ellie also needs to be a person.
My sense with Ellie in previous drafts is that she handles everything a little too perfectly and Will’s leaning on her so much doesn’t really amount to anything. It made me a little uncomfortable that she just seemed to exist to comfort Will, especially when Will rarely seems to do anything for her.
So, to flesh her out, I’ve given a her a bit more bite and bit more weakness – not in the sense of being meek but in the sense that she too lashes out then retracts into herself when pushed.
Ellie’s personal arc through the story is a little more interesting now, I feel. She’s frustrated with Will and wants to help but doesn’t quite know how when he refuses to do anything to help himself. Will’s repeated callousness towards himself stirs an annoyance in her.
However, she too is struggling with the aforementioned dilemma of coming out or alternatively just moving out. Much as she is, in all likelihood, justified in her reactions to Will, she is also somewhat projecting her frustrations at herself and her situation.
My hope in doing this isn’t to denigrate her or her impossible problems with her father, but to turn her into her own person and to remove her from Will’s orbit as a protagonist.
It’s a similar case for Will’s mother. Will and his father’s own discomfort with themselves flows, in some sense, from their inability to look after the matriarch of the family, whether she needs to be looked after or not (she doesn’t, as Will’s sister, Laura, points out.) Richard, the father, feels he needs to provide for her and the family and when he is unable, he implodes.
Will, on the other hand, feels as though his not following the official family line may lead him to becoming like his father – who he sees as having failed the family somewhat. Because of this, his relationship with his mother is to see her as somewhat symbolic and not as a full person.
I had always sort of perceived this in Will and Richard’s psychology, but I’m not sure it was ever communicated, and I have been concerned that Helen, the mother, comes off as a caricature.
My solution to this has come in the form of Laura, who has always tangled with her mother, even from the earliest drafts.
Laura is probably one of the most likeable characters in the story, I feel, and I realised that her relationship to her mother, completely the opposite to Will’s, is a good way to communicate that neither Will or Richard see Helen in the healthiest of ways – simply a reflection of their own shortcomings as a son and as a father respectively.
And now I realise I haven’t touched on the dialogue in all of this.
The dialogue essentially stems from the characters, as it should but often, for the very reasons I’ve listed above, it falls short and comes off as a clunky to me.
I write dialogue in a bit of a flow state at the best of times, but this too often just comes off as my own voice, not that of any one character.
This is something that appears a bigger issue than just this script, but I think having gotten it down in the first place is probably an okay place to start editing it to sound the way a character should sound.
Nevertheless, the hope with the fleshing out of the characters is that it will be reflected not just in certain story beats but also how they communicate and interact with one another.
Sense of cohesion
The sense of cohesion is a weird one. A story generally needs to appear unified. Everything needs to work in harmony. However, there’s a kind of style that I’m going for that necessarily eschews this in order to appear more like reality than a film.
Pretty often, a film needs to have everything neatly tied up. Its themes, its style, its setups and payoffs. My issue with this isn’t that it doesn’t work but that often times it gives the topics depicted a kind of resolution that sometimes isn’t warranted. This will be discussed a little more in my final section, below, but I wanted to address it hear in a broader sense.
Oftentimes, an interesting or complex question doesn’t really have much of an answer or at least not an easy one. As mentioned this answer can often come in the form of an ending, but this ending is also the unifying point for all other strands within the text.
What I mean is that everything within the film is usually working towards this point of unification, even when it doesn’t seem that way. The characters are usually sides to an argument. The setting is probably tied in contextually. The story beats are probably related to a thematic revelation. A subplot is probably going to be intermingled with the main plot and do so in a way that sheds new light on the subject being discussed in the film. All of these things matter.
My issue with this is that, in life, things really aren’t that neat and I think you can have drama and conflict and resolution without things needing to be all that neat.
This isn’t to say that sloppiness can be excused, but I think there’s an argument to be made for certain dialogue to go nowhere, to see characters doing things that aren’t entirely necessary for the plot but to just breathe a little bit more life into things.
There is a distinct joy I get when I see in certain films the stuff below the surface staying below the surface. The unspoken quirks of two characters’ relationship remaining unspoken or buried in subtext. The use of the red-herring without an actual payoff is a particularly gruesome one that I just adore. The feeling of being led astray not getting any kind of answer you were looking for but that you would indeed go back through just to see everything play out again.
That to me is life being depicted in film. It’s the common theme across many of my favourite films.
However, there’s a real skill that is required to pull it off successfully. There is a risk with this kind of storytelling that you’ll just keep setting things up and end up cluttering the script. You need some resolutions to certain elements or, by the end, you’ll just be stuck with a whole batch of loose ends.
This to me was an issue with the earlier drafts. I knew where I wanted the main story to go, but kept adding things to get it there and never really tidied it all up. My hope was that it would allow the world to breathe a little if some of it was kind of messy, but I think it just ended up as an overabundance of disparate elements.
So, the hope with this new draft is that I can declutter things a bit and focus on what matters – the people, and what’s really going on in their heads.
A lot of these concerns actually arose when I tried to describe the film to a friend one night and I realised just how many different threads there were.
As a result, I went back to basics and drew up an overview of the narrative events and colour-coded it according to which narrative thread it was intended to connect to. I think this really allowed me to go back through everything and shave away what isn’t necessary such that now I have three key narrative threads:
The murder mystery.
Will’s deteriorating relationship with his family generally and his father specifically.
Will’s issues with his mental illness and sleepwalking.
I’m hoping this overview approach will also help with achieving a narrative control that will allow me to successfully maintain that ‘just below the surface’ feeling without having things just be frustratingly ambiguous and obfuscated.
The ending
Finally, we’ve reached the ending. Not the end-end, but the ending. Almost the end-end though.
As mentioned, the ending is generally the place where everything comes together and we finally get some answers. The tricky part is, when you’re dancing around issues that don’t really have many good answers, it can be a nightmare to wrap things up without just glossing over the nuance you’ve worked so hard to address.
As such I don’t think I ever really intended on wrapping things up fully – at least the things that aren’t important to the overall theme.
But it’s always a balance, as mentioned. Certain things will always need to come to fruition and there needs to be a palpable sense of growth or at the very least change.
My concern with Wolfmen has always been that the climactic revelation could be seen as a bit of an anti-climax and just a ploy to be a bit clever, without any substance behind it. A climactic revelation like this one needs to happen for a reason and so what comes after needs to emphasise this reasoning, I feel.
The issue I had with the ending I had already written was that it didn’t really address anything or expand the scope of things as need to happen. Nothing really changed, even though we had a new perspective. It was probably a little frustrating to read.
Consequently, I’ve decided the ending needs to change the perspective of the narrative to the other characters. Throughout the story, we follow Will with such great intensity in order to fully align the audience to him.
When the climax occurs, it is revealed that part of the reason things have played out the way they have done is that Will has been so intensely focused on himself with a certain negative self-image. His perspective is incredibly biased on a low level. His deep-seated disdain for himself refracts everything he sees and everything he does.
As such I wanted the epilogue-style finale to open things up a bit and suggest a need to move away from this perspective. Secondarily, my hope is to also suggest that Will is now heading down a potentially healthier path without fully concluding that everything is automatically okay. The contextual reasons Will’s issues in the first place are unresolved, after all. They’re contextual and bigger than any one person.
I feel as though this is also a great way to address Ellie’s dilemma a bit more head on and also to sympathise slightly more with Richard and his own struggles, since he is such an antagonistic force throughout.