The second script report arrived in November 2008, and this is where things started to get tricky.
4th Draft
Many of the problems of the previous draft had been addressed. Calum’s character arc was now clearer, well written and more intriguing; the central relationship between the two main characters was working better; and the dialogue was much improved.
My task now was mostly about clarifying emotional details and backstory for all the characters, getting some depth into the characterisation. The bad guy subplots still needed more work – I was really struggling with that. I just don’t know many drug dealing pimps, thank goodness, and I was desperately trying to avoid the obvious and clichéd. The end result was a confusing, underwritten mess.
Fenella also felt I should make the script read more poetic, especially in the woodland scenes. The script jumps back and forth between the harsh, urban reality of the bad guys and the countryside, and Fenella described the tone of the film as otherworldly and surreal. This got me thinking, as I didn’t really see it that way. I felt I was being realistic throughout.
The modern (and post-modern) world and the myth of progress alienated individuals from their natural selves, their roots, casting them out of Eden into an industrialised wasteland. Calum lives closer to nature than most, but he is isolated, cut off from his emotional life. Perhaps our tendency to see the natural world as surreal, poetic and ‘other’ is a result of our alienation from it. This also gives rise to a certain amount of sentimentalisation of nature and the wild.
It is the urbanites who are truly surreal and otherworldly, disconnected as they are from nature and surrounded by concrete. The natural world is the real world. ‘Civilisation’ (in its modern/post-modern forms) is unreal and distorted, dehumanising and destructive, where life can be sold.
This is what the Eden brothers and their nefarious organisation represent in this story. My upholders of society and civilisation are criminals, and my hero is a recluse who lives alone in the woods, in desperate need of love but terrified of it at the same time.
Whatever our feelings about the natural world, I couldn’t see that it would hurt to up the poetry a tad in the sequences with Calum and Anya as they slowly danced towards each other, finding love in a violent universe.
Back to the rewrite… What I was starting to find difficult was that I had more or less nailed the structure of the story by this point. Everything else now was about making what I had better. Rather than making big, sweeping changes, which are relatively easy (you just hit delete); you tweak and cajole. It is incredible how taking out one word, or changing one verb can completely alter how a scene reads.
I needed to look at individual sequences and scenes and find ways to up the drama. I was still underwriting some of the dramatic sequences, so this rewrite became all about milking it, getting as much conflict out of every situation as possible. Of course, it’s also important to remember you can’t have everything going wrong all the time – you’ve got to get lucky occasionally. But in a script you must be very careful how that luck falls.
There were two sequences in particular that I needed to address. First, Anya’s escape from her captors in act 1 was a bit underwhelming – she simply slipped away while backs were turned outside the brothel in Newcastle. Not very dramatic. Fenella suggested that Anya should escape from the doctor about to perform a caesarean. This would be more dramatic and would also make it very clear exactly why she was running away. The rewritten scenes worked so well I was slightly annoyed with myself that I hadn’t thought of doing it that way to begin with.
The other sequence was Tam’s search for Anya which stretches over most of act 2. The whole thing needed to be plotted more carefully, making it much harder and less repetitive. Tam needed to stalk Anya through the countryside.
Here I hit a huge stumbling block: how do you write a chase sequence where a man in a BMW is chasing a horse and cart? How do you keep them apart and yet maintain suspense and momentum? Even with Calum driving the horse and cart down labyrinthine bridlepaths, I struggled to get this right and I’m not convinced it works completely even now in draft 7. I’ll keep trying…
I finished the rewrite in January 2009 aware I was nearing the end of my development process with Euroscript. The next report would be crucial, and we’ll look at that in part 4.
