Good luck to your friend; though the money/production bit is where it
happens. Film is usually compromised because it involves so much money and
so many people. I know a number of people who write film scripts, including
my husband Daniel: he's written a number of screenplays, including one for
Hollywood (an adaptation of a David Malouf novel) which was never made, an
experience he says involved more bullshit and money than he has ever before
or since encountered. He loathes the film industry, and will only work with
one director here, Alkinos Tsilimidos, because he likes their collaborative
practice (even so, he maintains, rightly I think, that films are made by
directors, not writers). The director is - ideally - part of the creative
team, and the "cynical pressures" are applied by the money people -
including here the state-funded financing people - who all have input into
the script, because they own it. When you have a dozen people, all of them
with different agendas, many of whom are only interested in return on their
investment, and who all must be satisfied, you easily head into this
audience-pacification stuff, and it takes a will of steel and lots of smarts
to resist. Alkinos is admirably uncompromising, and works both inside the
structures of the industry (such as they are) and outside them. Last night
he finished shooting a film on digital based on one of Daniel's plays, made
with entirely independent money. He swears he's never doing it again (which
means he'll probably make another next year), but it meant that he hasn't
had to argue about the script.
Best
A
On 20/2/05 12:32 PM, "Rebecca Seiferle" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I don't know, I have this friend, a poet, who has written a couple of
> screenplays,
> the first after a somewhat unusual director contacted her after reading a few
> of
> her poems and being struck by the different voices in them, her vivid sense of
> particular intersections of landscape, history and social pressures, etc. She
> and
> the director were engaged in an intensely collaborative project, each bringing
> their own 'necessary imperatives' to the work, a stubborn insistence in each
> upon his or her own vision, way of engaging with art, each's differing
> responsiveness and intensities of preoccupation, and though I haven't read it,
> I've heard that other readers find it brilliant and compelling. Whether it
> becomes
> altered due to the pressures of budget, marketing, and filming, all remains to
> be
> seen, those other cynical pressures. But in terms of collaboration, it seems
> to
> me the measure is whether one's real art results from it, if one engages in a
> collaborative project and writes real poems or real script or what has real
> value
> to one's work than an honest engagement has occurred. It would have been
> relatively easier for my friend to view the director as a cynical pressure,
> one that
> she should try and please or write toward or somehow fit his expectations, an
> audience she should try and please in hope of pleasing some imagined, further
> down the road, audience. However she has a stubborn sense of her own heart,
> and so naturally at first infuriated him.
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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