Greetings, gentle reader, and welcome to my epic journey: the writing of my very first feature film screenplay.
A little background is in order before we begin, I suppose. I'm a 32 year old writer / producer / musician / general creative type from Melbourne, Australia, and I've been making arts-based stuff since I was in my late teens. Writing was always what I loved doing the most, but being a natural control-freak I fell into producing pretty quickly. Not to say that I don't love it, but it's certainly much easier to find a job as a producer than a writer in Melbourne. Anyway, as the years have rolled on, I've produced some awesome films that I'm incredibly proud of (you can find most of them here), but have also come to the realisation that producing tends to totally drain any available brainspace I have for writing (or doing anything else creative, really).
I've spend the last three years or so slowly nutting out / writing a TV show with two very awesome collaborators, so it's not like I've been totally lax on the writing thing... but my goal of writing a feature film script has remained on my 'to do' list since 2009. For some reason, writing 90 pages of content seemed incredibly intimidating (although nutting out 8 hours of TV content wasn't, for some reason) so my feature ideas have always been a big half-baked; I've had concepts I've liked but I've never taken the time to actually block them out properly. And until very recently, I hadn't even read any of the 'classic' screenwriting books that other 'serious' screenwriters seem to be able to recite inside out and back to front.
I was working on a supernatural thriller idea for quite a while, but I could not for the life of me work out what the ending should be (a minor detail), so that one started to stagnate a little for me. I decided that, to make things easier on myself, I should stick with what I was comfortable with for my first feature script - something in the comedy-drama kinda field.
The actual plot for this film was inspired by a number of events - the general initial idea was that I'd like to do something fish-out-of-water-y, possibly involving a road-trip, and utilising some of Australia's crazy landscapes. Several months later, I saw a comedian called Ray Harrington at Filmapalooza in LA, whose work in this particular film inspired the beginnings of my lead character. I decided that I liked the idea of an American finding out that his real father is an Australian stockman / outdoorsy type, so I started brainstorming in that direction. This was then followed by a facebook callout asking for feedback on a very minor story point (if you were trying to track someone down these days, how would you do it? Would you really just facebook / google them?) that turned into an incredibly insightful and revealing discussion about family and fathers that turned my whole story on its head. Finally, I took a trip to the very isolated El Questro in Western Australia, where my parents were working temporarily, and suddenly realised that this is where I wanted my film to be set (and that the character of the estranged father was, in fact, almost eerily similar to a guy I met up there). After six months of general, floaty ideas, I suddenly had a complete vision for a feature... and I even knew how it ended!
This was followed by about two months of reading books, plotting the story out, and then eventually being convinced by my good friend Pete at Opening Act Films that I should set myself a goal of three months to get a rough draft out, and six months for a polished draft. This conversation was in November 2013, but I managed to push the starting date for this challenge back to January 1, 2014 - the date on which I resolved to start actually writing dialogue.
And indeed, I actually did. And if feels freaking fantastic to finally be doing it.
So, to give you an idea as to what this film is, here's my brief pitch:
Currently entitled 'Kimberly Rose' (which I'm reasonably sure I'm gonna change), it's a coming-of-age / Golden-Fleece story of a quiet, bookish insurance broker from New England named Ellis. He's grown up in a small town with Rose, his single mother, whom he's incredibly close to. As far as Ellis knows, his father was Rose's college sweetheart, who left when Ellis was a child and has had virtually nothing to do with him ever since . But Ellis's world is turned upside-down when Rose, hospitalised with a brain tumour, reveals to Ellis that his biological father might actually be an Australian horse-wrangler she had a brief affair with whilst she was teaching English in Europe. Desperate that Ellis not be left alone after she dies, Rose wants to at least give Ellis the chance of reuniting with his (possible) father and his half-siblings on the other side of the globe, should Ellis decide to seek them out. Convinced by his outgoing best friend Scott that tracking down his real father is an absolute must, Ellis and Scott embark on an adventure to the other side of the world that will change their ideas about family, friendship, and what it means to belong.
Anyway, I have a very long year stretching out in front of me, but I'm excited to see where it all goes...
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