Lost in Bristol

Just got back from a relaxing, technology free, week down in the West Country in a lovely little cottage just outside Chipping Sodbury.

During the week serendipity gave me a little nudge, guiding me to the closing down sale of Bookends in the Yate Shopping Centre, where I found some useful books on Spielberg and Lucas, as well as an awesome couple of books by Cicely Berry who was/is the voice coach at the RSC.

These books are all about the voice, as you might expect, are mainly for the stage, but there’s a whole lot in there to be taken for the film director.

One of the books is especially interesting as it deals with the Actor and Director relationship as it relates to the script. She argues that too much emphasis these days is put into finding the emotion of the scene without really paying due attention to the actual text itself.

One thing I noticed while I’ve been making my shorts, and Cicely also notes, is that there is a lot on the printed page that the writer never knowingly intends (this happened a lot in House of Donn especially) where the right brain is allowed more reign to get into the flow and slip in deeper meanings and even meanings contrary to the logical or obvious one’s the writer may be thinking at the time.

The book deals with ways of working through scripted dialogue to find its rhythms and metres, regardless of what emotion the actor thinks they should be portraying. In doing so, a richer relationship with the material can be developed.

Much of this deeper layering will almost certainly not be spoken out loud, more likely inflected in the rhythm of delivery or just acted out (see Tim’s recent post), but just finding ways to mine these extra nuances is very exciting.

I’m only a third of the way through the book at the moment, but I’m intrigued to learn more, as I feel that too often dialogue is seen as a means to an end, that’s certainly how I’ve seen up until now. It’s quite an eye opener to suddenly find this whole new ocean of meaning and depth that can be plumbed.

I also did a fair bit of writing while I was away – and managed to sketch out the outline of a fantasy film, much in the vein of Neil Gaiman. I’ve been a Neil Gaiman fan for years (I have most, if not all, of the Sandman comics – I also managed to get the Mirrormask illustrated screenplay and Anansi Boys in hardback in the Bookends sale), and now Matthew Vaughn is making Stardust, a precedent for original fairy tale type material is being set.

I also did a lot of thinking about my current screenplay, and after after going round the houses a few times realised that perhaps I’d still not kept it simple enough. I worked on stripping it down a little further, and, after an initial panic that all I had done so far would be in vain, I realised that not much would need to be done after all. So the plotting and the writing continues in earnest.

Back to the grindstone…