The suitcase and passport are packed away, I have no travel plans for the rest of the year. This is not really much of an achievement since we are nearly one week into December. But there are no trips planned for January (yet) either. After the Frankfurt Bookfair, the Cheltenham Screenwriters’ Festival, The World Conference of Scriptwriters in Athens, a terrific wedding in the north-west of England and the Black Nights’ Film Festival in Tallinn, all in about 6 weeks, home does not seem to be where you lay your hat.
This is further confounded by December being a short month. We always close the office for a couple of weeks and already demob fever is starting to surface as all the jobs that have been put off for ages jostle on the inevitable list.
The first of these is always reading articles in the papers that I rarely have time for. So I started this weekend to get into training. I wanted to catch up on what has been happening in French cinema as I am due to meet Philippe Carcassonne soon. So I read the interview by Jason Solomons with Jacques Audiard with great interest.
It was full of inspiring thoughts, ones that are repeated by many great teachers but so seldom seen in spec scripts one is forced to wonder what those writing the scripts read or study. “…cinema is all about…monumental figures, icons, male or female, people who are emblematic of their time, who are in their time and who define their time.”
The genius of great writing, in whatever format – film, television, the stage or novel – is that it enables us to experience that which we might not otherwise. Solomons describes Audiard’s films as “…intimate studies that draw the viewer in to the characters until we’re thinking like them, until we almost inhabit their skins, no matter how morally suspect their actions or intentions may be.”
Macbeth immediately comes to mind, as does Lady Macbeth. Audiard says: “The audience must fly with me, must go where the images take them. The film, as all good films should be, is rooted in realism, but you must not ignore the poetry, the fiction, the story. Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream.”
No wonder films are hard to write.
The article ends up quoting Audiard again: “…every time you make a film these days, it’s a political gesture, like it or not. Every director must be conscious of the power of this tool we’re using. It’s a very shocking tool, cinema, and you have to ask yourself what you’re using it for.”
I ended last week attending a gathering organized by Amnesty International, focused on stopping the abuses of human rights by corporations. There was an inspiring discussion of real cases fought and won and even a quiet discussion about running a competition for scripts that focus on Amnesty campaigns. “Save the human” is one I am sure Audiard would agree with.