White Whale (Short Film and Screenplay)
I started writing the script for White Whale at the end of the summer term of my second year. I continued to develop the script throughout that summer and at one point I was volunteering at the Sundance Film Festival in London. The whole time I was there, I’d been talking to a good friend, Marko, about it. Telling him about ideas, why I was writing it, the various anecdotes I was using to help write it. After a while Marko, probably in a bid to get me to shut up about it for the time being, told me that in the coming year we should try to get the film made, me and him.
Initially, we’d planned to make the film ourselves with some friends but I managed to talk Marko into working with KTV - the student union’s production and media company. My rationale for this was that we’d have support for the areas of production we were less confident with, such as casting and the legal aspects, and also have our final cut showcased at the KTV Film Festival. This being said, obviously given the circumstances, the festival will no longer take place.
Production was an incredibly exciting time but it was also pretty tumultuous - Marko was directing (and doing innumerable additional jobs on set) and I was producing. A big struggle was finding times in the cast’s schedules to both rehearse and shoot since we were all also studying full time. We also struggled to get all the locations we wanted and a large reason for that was the micro-budget we were working with. We got it done though, and we learned a lot.
The script and the film have been influenced by a lot due to the long, collaborative process of getting them finished. The impetus for the whole concept originally came out of a song by the British band Everything, Everything that goes by the same name. The song deals with the main character’s doubts and pessimism surrounding their political and social situation and their desire to feel okay again. When a love interest offers that to them, they latch onto them; ultimately comparing them to the white whale of Moby Dick - the grand prize and also the guarantee of oblivion. Another large influence was Paul Schrader’s writing and his concept of God’s lonely man - though I seem to have dispensed with the theistic aspects. I liked the idea of one existentially-challenged individual sitting in their room, trying to come to terms with their feelings of wrongness and alienation. The main character, Matt, does this and then tries to venture out to make sense of himself in relation to others, but in doing so latches onto another in the hopes they’ll fix him and out of a very emotional desire for someone else’s affirmation. Beyond the script level, we had to make sense of the film in a visual sense and so ventured back into the territory of film. Marko showed me the film Comet, which depicts the falling apart of a relationship between two characters who seemingly don’t fit but really want to. It was a nice expression of our feelings on our romantic situation not quite matching what may be best for us in the long run. To add, other films that challenged the typical RomCom format were really interesting to us, Lost in Translation was a big influence, (500) Days of Summer really helped us get over the worry that if our main character wasn’t likeable, he’d never be sympathetic and the premise of the film would fail. I think, in the final film, you can see a bit of the visual language of these films translate too. Large empty spaces construct Matt’s room, bright colours in other scenes emphasise the repression of his frustration and desire. For Marko, a lot of the films aesthetics were also influenced by the film Comet.
Anyway, this feels like one of the first scripts and films I’ve written that I could really feel proud of - it seems to be one of the first I’ve written that expresses something I really care about and though it’s very clearly not perfect - maybe not even good - I’m proud of myself for getting on with it and getting it made.