Collisions of the mind
Characters, casting and change
Like many great filmmakers, my rambling ideas can’t be contained to just one episode, so part two of this post (about characters that got away from me) is coming tomorrow.
I’m quite comfortable admitting my mind has been more of a mess recently. There’s enough uncertainty, horror and epochal change in so many different directions that feeling unsettled and unsure seems like the only sane response.
And when my mind is like this, it starts firing strange connections and developments. Half thoughts spiral into oddly-formed identities. Memories start emerging of events that I hadn’t thought about for decades.
The other night my daughter had a friend sleepover. Before bed they’d been acting all secretively, so when they woke me up at 2:30 in the morning, I wasn’t particularly surprised. But then my brain decided to attach their earlier sneakiness with my own memory of running away as an 8 year old.
I’d been planning it with the girl who lived next door for quite a while I think. Long enough to steal about £2 from my dad’s drawer, one coin at a time. The night we decided to do it, we spoke over the fence about our plans, then went to bed. I pretended to go to sleep, waited a while and then crawled downstairs, past my Mum in the kitchen (chatting to her new boyfriend), out the side door and into the garden. I made it to the back gate and let myself out. There in the alley, I waited for my fellow escapee who came out seconds later. We didn’t have much of a plan beyond that though. Just walk to the local corner shop to buy some polo mints with the money I’d stolen. Some sitting on a wall. Then we wandered back through the alley behind our houses, where our now frantic parents were yelling for us and looking understandably panicked.
Instead of going back to sleep, I could only think about all the holes in this memory. The name of my neighbour for a start. What we had planned to do and how we timed meeting in the alley at the same point. Whether I was punished and whether I crawled along the garden, or just ran. I tried to picture the time of year and what we were wearing - pyjamas? A coat?
After I gave up trying to remember, and the panic of my daughter and her friend running away subsided, other worries and ideas started to collide. And I lay awake thinking about how two of my projects both have large questions over central characters.
I have two films that are bubbling up into real things. At the moment I’m both casting the lead in a fiction feature, and making a documentary where one of the main characters is proving troublesome.
From the first moment I start thinking about a film, I’m thinking about how the main characters exist. How they move through the world, their psychology, their physicality, their voice. This starts when the idea is crude and I’m walking around seeing if it will shake out, and it only grows from there. When I’m daydreaming, doodling, or talking about the project the characters start becoming solid in my head and I have to make sure they aren’t too set in stone.
In both fiction and non-fiction I think of it as casting. The processes are different, but the aims are really the same;
Who will be the emotional connection for an audience so that they are invested in the journey you want to take them on? Who will be the person who lets us in to a new way of seeing the world, leads us into a new set of feelings and helps us experience something that changes who we are, even if just for 90 minutes.
I love this process. It’s full of excitement and possibility and wonder.
And it’s also an existential threat to any movie. Without the right lead in a fiction film, you have no chance getting it made. And without good central characters in a doc, there is nothing to make the film about.
Everything that you have built and dreamed of for all those years comes down to who you can get to be in front of camera.
These two tricky roles are pulling me all over the place.
The lead role I want to cast for my fiction script is elusive so far. Without someone that financiers can get excited about, the film can’t get made. Without someone I am excited about, the film will be terrible. And navigating that balance of power takes months and months and months.
I draw up lists. Of attainable, unlikely and impossible actors. And for each of them I lose myself imagining what they might be like as the living embodiment of a character carrying a huge part of me inside. I watch incredibly talented performers mired in bad scripts or reductive roles.
I watch films trying to dissect performance from direction. I daydream of what they might be like as my star. Or as a person to spend long, deep, time with. I start making mood boards of them, searching for the right frames that feel like precursors to my film.
I read about what they’re drawn to, what shaped them, what their backgrounds are. What parts of their real selves might surface on screen? What can I pull from the real them? After all, didn’t Godard say “Every film is a documentary of its actors”?
And then I try and convince my producers that they’re right for the role. That they can help get the film made. And then we wait.
And wait.
With my documentaries I haven’t found a way to shortcut this process. But it works in a different way.
I’m making a feature documentary at the moment about people around the globe searching for language in birds. It’s really a film about the power of empathy and curiosity, told through three wonderful characters.
It all started when I read an article about a scientist who was working on syntax in birds. I fell in love with him and his process and this window onto a world of wonder and joy and discovery. We spoke for hours on zoom and it was clear he was a brilliant character.
So I spent a year talking to hundreds more scientists in this field. To find out more about the subject, what it might look like as a film and who might be the characters we could place at the heart of this story.
Who would be the scientists who had charisma, doubt, openness, nuanced lives, the right visual world, the desire to make the film, work that is full of possibility and potential?
I love this research into character depth and psychology, and I’m really fucking good at it.
I found two more incredible, warm and detailed characters that are so alive and unique, yet utterly universal in their sense of curiosity and magic. We started shooting and the film is going to be beautiful and simple and layered and impactful. I’m sure of it.
Only my first character has disappeared on me. He no longer answers calls or emails. He no longer seems to want to be in the film.
I still love what he stands for and know that what we could create together would be special. But how long do I wait? The film is moving now and the other characters are active and everything I’d hoped for.
Dropping him would mean reimagining one third of the film. My opening images. Certainly my pitch deck, my budget, my production plan and the way I talk about the film to everyone. (I’m planning a brief series of posts about how you present your doc as it’s being made with another filmmaker which will be candid and revelatory I hope).
Changing him would shatter how I have been seeing the film in my mind for the past two years.
Is that the necessary step? Is that what I need to do? I haven’t lost anything with the time spent so far, it’s just more depth to my knowledge and understanding of the film. But it hurts, for sure.
Do I cling on desperately? Or do I move on and start the process of re-dreaming and shifting what this film will be?
Because the potential in this moment of confusion and chaos for something beautiful to emerge feels full of possibility.
Tomorrow’s post will be about the character’s that got away and that I got utterly utterly wrong….
"Only my first character has disappeared on me. He no longer answers calls or emails. He no longer seems to want to be in the film." that's a frustrating one. time is generally a filmmaker's friend though!