Premiere

Yay! My wife and I attended the private premiere of The Man Who Married Himself at BAFTA's Princess Anne Theatre yesterday, and it was brilliant.

The film looked great on the big screen. The music added a whole new dimension, emphasising the tragic elements of the main character's loneliness. People laughed in the right places, clapped plenty... there were even one or two heckles. :)

I'm generally not great at schmoozing at those kind of events, but it was fun to chat to Warren Clarke (he praised the film, and offered me one piece of advice for the future: "Write bigger!"), and Mark Joseph who I'd met on the set, and Film Four people, and some of Garrick's friends and family.

It's incredible how many people were involved in making an 11-minute film. Everyone worked so hard on it, with such an incredible amount of goodwill, mostly for little or no money - what other industry (apart from the charity sector I suppose) can claim that kind of dedication?

So, soon the film will be touring festivals and I'll be persuading all my friends and family to go see it. You too! Go!

10 Rules For Writing

My wife sent me an article about various writers' ten rules for writing fiction. It's fascinating to read how disciplined, intelligent and well-read everyone else is.

These are the ten rules I seem to live by:

1. Do anything - anything - to put off starting to write. Read about the bystander effect on Wikipedia. Play Scrabble on your iPod Touch. Just sit there and stare at a blank screen for forty minutes.

2. Leave the house. A cafe or a pub is a more productive place to write, particularly one without a wireless internet connection. Start by drinking Cokes, because 2pm is too early to be drinking alcohol. After a couple of litres, when the sugar buzz is making your eyes shake, start on the beers to calm yourself down.

3. Stay up ridiculously, self-destructively late. Several nights in a row. You'll know you've had the right amount of lack of sleep when you're barking at passers-by on the street for walking too close to you.

4. Dwell on a particular line of dialogue for at least an hour without moving on. Then realise how long you've been stuck on it, put in a placeholder, and end up cutting it later anyway.

5. Edit, edit, edit the first ten pages before you've written anything else. Editing is so much easier than writing more.

6. Bring your laptop everywhere with you in the utterly misguided hope that you'll pull it out to snatch a few minutes of writing on the train or wherever. Having to carry your microchip-brick all over town is a useful kind of penance for being a lazy writer.

7. Deadlines are essential enemies. It is perfectly natural to leave it just a little too late so you end up writing in an antisocial blood-sweating panicked frenzy. Face it, that's the only state in which you ever get any writing done anyway.

8. When you've finally finished a first draft, assume that there's nothing wrong with it, and refuse to listen to any constructive feedback for at least three weeks.

9. When a project is at last finished and out in the public domain, rest on your laurels. For goodness' sake don't do any more writing until you've milked all the mileage you can (to mix metaphors) out of what you've already written.

10. Remind yourself that you enjoy writing. It's fun.

Honestly, it's a wonder I ever get any writing done.

Website

The website for The Man Who Married Himself now has some content on it, including the trailer. I'm excited.

I was looking forward to introducing my wife to Richard E Grant at the premiere, but she attended the premiere of Food, Inc. on Monday as an ambassador for the Fairtrade Foundation, and he was there - so she's met him already! Apparently, they had an awkward conversation along the lines of:

"Who are you?"

"My husband wrote The Man Who Married Himself."

"Oh! It's a good story. Will I see you at the premiere?"

"Yes."

"..."

"Bye!"

We're clearly not cut out for this hanging out with famous people malarkey.

Back to the Future

#74 at time of writing.

"Where we're going, we don't need roads."

There are a few films that create their own mythology. A mythology so complete it's as if it's always existed. Back to the Future is one of them. H G Wells might lay claim to the time travel book, but there's no doubt Robert Zemeckis created the time travel film.

Doc Emmett Brown, the quintessential mad scientist, invents a time machine and Marty McFly inadvertently gets stranded thirty years in the past. Watching this is like a journey through time in itself - it's so wonderfully Eighties. The script is very clever and layered, executed with a rich dose of slapstick humour.

Some good music too, including The Power of Love (Huey Lewis and the News not Frankie Goes to Hollywood, nor Jennifer Rush). Huey Lewis himself is in the film, playing a High School band audition judge. And there's a suitably stirring and catchy score by Alan Silvestri.

But for me the highlight is the over-the-top dramatic tension of the climax, with Doc Brown hanging from the minute hand of the clock tower (which I went to see as a child as part of the Universal Studios backlot tour a couple of years after the film was released). By the end of the film, you will be grinning from ear to ear.

Michael J. Fox was working on the sitcom "Family Ties" during the filming. Apparently, every day during production he drove straight to the movie set after taping of Family Ties was finished, allowing very little time for sleep. The bulk of the production was filmed from 6pm to 6am, with the daylight scenes filmed on weekends. The whole thing was wrapped in less than ten weeks.

Using a DeLorean seems like the perfect choice now, but the device originally considered for use as the time travel machine was a refrigerator. Robert Zemeckis said in an interview that the idea was scrapped because he and Steven Spielberg did not want children to start climbing into refrigerators and getting trapped inside.

The Wedding of the Year

Today I received an invitation to the wedding of Oliver and... Oliver. The premiere of the short film I co-wrote last year, The Man Who Married Himself, will be at the end of this month at BAFTA in Piccadilly.

Extremely exciting. Another chance to hobnob with the stars and feel terribly important. Also, hopefully a chance to introduce my wife to all the great people who helped make this project happen.

But I'm not going to deny feeling a shade nervous as well.

OK, deep breath...

Bring it on.

Secret Agent

Jeremy Sheldon provided me with an introduction to a guy who works for Curtis Brown, the pre-eminent UK literary agency.

I'm meeting him next week to get some advice on the perks and pitfalls of breaking into screenwriting. I'm excited.

Nomads

I'm part of a writing group called the Nomads Literary Movement. Well, I like to add the Literary Movement bit.

We've been meeting every week for over a year now, usually in the Bell & Compass pub at Charing Cross. We take turns submitting a piece of writing so the group can critique it. Most of us are currently working on a novel.

I met most of the Nomads in the first year of my MA Creative Writing course (I'm now halfway through the second/final year). For me, the writing group is the best thing to come out of my MA so far. They're such a dedicated, insightful, and lovely bunch of people. They will keep me writing, and keep me writing well, for years to come I'm sure.

Recently, a couple of new members joined us (now we are eleven), including a guy called Felix who is also interested in screenwriting. Check out his awesome short film. He's keen to try collaborating on a screenplay so we're going to stay on next week after the Nomads session to bat some ideas about. I'll tell you how it goes!

Rocky

#210 at time of writing.

What a great film.

Rocky Balboa is a thoroughly likeable underdog character. Poor, uneducated and ungraceful, but a real good guy. When he gets a once-in-a-lifetime wildcard opportunity to fight for the World Heavyweight Champion title, he begins a life-changing battle with his own self-doubt. A battle I - and possibly everyone - can identify with.

The small-time domestic scenes that build the story up are contrasted by the tense and unflinchingly brutal climactic fight. Sly Stallone admirably puts his all into the character. You would believe he used to be a boxer, rather than a beauty school dropout. (True!) Stallone deserves extra credit for having written the screenplay himself as a remarkably successful attempt to kick-start his acting career.

The story was inspired by a fight between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner in 1975. Chuck was thought to be a no-hoper, but he defied all expectations by lasting 15 rounds against Ali - even succeeding at knocking him down at one point. Stallone saw the match, and turned it into a piece of cinema legend.

The scene with Rocky running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art was one of the first uses of a Steadicam. It's probably the second most famous steps scene in movie history after the Odessa steps in Battleship Potemkin. The steps are now known as the Rocky Steps, and feature a permanent statue of Rocky at their base.

What makes a good writer?

You are a writer whether or not anyone has read your work yet. You are a writer whether or not you have been published, or won awards, or got good reviews. There is never any badge or certificate you'll get that will say you are a writer. You just have to believe it and it's true.

If you believe it for long enough, and finish enough stuff, then you will gradually transform from being just a writer into being a good writer. The publication, awards and good reviews will follow - in direct proportion to the strength of your belief.

(If you can't bring yourself to believe you're a writer, pretend. Act as if you are and, actually, that's all it takes. Acting like a writer makes you, in fact, a writer.)

There are many different kinds of good writers. Some are popular, some are deeply insightful, some are just good for passing the time in an airport lounge.

The difference between a good writer and a bad writer is that a good writer finishes things and moves on.

If you've been working on an idea for the last five years to the exclusion of all else, or you've started ten novels but they all trailed off somewhere around chapter thirteen, then you are a bad writer. It's not about the quality of your prose, it's about what you do with it.

A good writer knows that ideas don't fail. If he's writing something that doesn't feel right, he finishes it anyway, and moves on.

A good writer has faith that more good ideas will come.

A good writer produces enough material that he's not afraid to shelve the crap.

A good writer says, "I am a writer," without qualifying the statement.

A good writer accepts praise and rejects criticism.

At least, all that's what I keep telling myself. I'm still working on being a good writer.

Alan Parker

Alan Parker, director of Evita, The Commitments and Angel Heart, watched the rough cut of The Man Who Married Himself yesterday.

He called it "Original, out there, and stunning to look at," and said it was "unexpectedly wise at the end."

Finding Time

Towards the end of last year I made an effort to reduce the amount of time I was spending on extra-curricular activities (ie anything but writing). I was running a film club, volunteering at Brixton Prison, regularly attending a go club, indoctrinating myself into the Common Purpose cult, and a bunch of other stuff. I gave all that up.

But I'm still finishing my part-time Creative Writing MA, and I still have a full-time job and a full-time wife. So when do I find time to write?

I don't.

If I was truly disciplined, I would do what they say in all the books - I would get up earlier each day and spend an hour writing before going to work. Ha! There's no getting me out of bed in the morning any earlier than I have to. Or I would dedicate Sundays to writing, forsaking all social engagements for the greater good. Nope.

The truth is that I often carve writing time out of sleeping time. I stay up until 3am on a school night four nights in a row, usually driven by a deadline.

What's worse, it takes me literally hours to squeeze out a few hundred words. My wife can spill a thousand words onto a page in an hour, and I'll still be staring at a blank page. It's a wonder I'm as productive as I am.

Should I be making an effort to develop better habits? Or is this a dirty secret that most writers have?

Blade Runner

#110 at time of writing.

Blade Runner is thirty years old if you can believe it - and it still looks fantastic. At least as good as, say, The Fifth Element. It could almost have been made yesterday.

This cyberpunk vision is the best kind of science fiction film. A rich world, layered characters, and a story that makes you stop and think.

A police assassin called Deckard is pulled out of retirement to hunt down and kill four rogue replicants - robots almost indistinguishable from humans. The ensuing story successfully explores the dehumanization of people through a society shaped by technological and capitalist excess, the roles of creator and creation, personal identity and self-awareness and other such complex issues.

The sets are wonderfully detailed. Amusingly, some of the buildings in the meticulously built model city are pieces of spaceships from earlier science fiction films, including a model of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, a model of the Dark Star, and piece of the spaceship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

There are a bewildering number of versions of the film, to the point where I'm not even sure which one(s) I've seen. The original print was thought lost until it was rediscovered in 1989 by sound preservationist Michael Arick while he was hunting through the Warner Bros attic for footage from Gypsy. It was one of the first ever films to be re-released in a "Director's Cut", in 1992. And there are five other versions too.

This is easily the best Philip K Dick adaptation, although Total Recall will always hold a special place in my heart (omigod it's being remade!).

Money

I've never yet earned money from screenwriting. That's what my day job is for.

Surprisingly, there are standard rates of pay for screenwriters, courtesy of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain. I didn't even know there was a Writers' Guild of Great Britain.

It seems I can expect to receive at least £2700 for writing the treatment, at least £9450 for a first draft script, and at least £3240 for a second (or fourteenth) draft.

(For interest, compare the Writers Guild of America rates - almost double on average.)

Backstory

I am in the process of writing a feature-length screenplay. How did I come to be writing a film script?

The short answer is Garrick Hamm.

The long answer? Where do I start...

All my life, I've been writing short stories.

In about 2005 I discovered Terry Rossio's Wordplay, a series of columns on how to write successful screenplays. I was so inspired that I wrote a feature-length script - about an entrepreneurial student trying to get into a morally ambiguous secret fraternity. The script was, shall we say, deeply flawed.

Over the next few years, I started getting more and more emails from people asking permission to adapt my short stories into short films. Occasionally, these people wanted me to collaborate, but I always felt too busy to say yes.

Then in late 2008 I started a Masters degree in Creative Writing, and chose Screenwriting as my optional module. I wrote a 30-page script - and this time it was damn good.

I replied to one of the keen amateurs who had emailed me looking for a collaboration, and we got to work making the script into a short film. But, as is the way with so many such projects, it stalled and fell into the eternal limbo.

None of the above has anything to do with Garrick Hamm.

He emailed me in Feb 2009. He'd just finished producing a short called Lucky Numbers, which was touring the festivals, and he was looking for a story for his next short. He picked one of my stories to adapt: The Man Who Married Himself. I volunteered to collaborate.

By May, we had a first draft. It must have been good, because by June, Garrick had persuaded Richard E Grant to star. By October we were up to version 14 of the script. By November filming was wrapped.

The short is still having the final touches applied. Soon it will be launched and start touring the festivals. At best, it'll win lots of awards, at worst it'll raise a lot of smiles on filmgoers' faces.

Avatar

Unranked at time of writing.

James Cameron (or at least his marketeers) claimed that Avatar will change cinema forever. Having watched the preview in front row seats at IMAX last night, I finally understand what he means.

Avatar is a stunningly beautiful, comprehensively realised vision that absolutely must be experienced in a cinema. That’s the kicker – I doubt this film would have anywhere near the same impact on a TV screen. Two dimensions would not do this movie justice.

So if Avatar changes cinema it will be by making it more like going to the theatre – you have to see it live. More likely, I think, is that this movie - which is James Cameron’s first outing since 1997’s record-smashing Titanic - will precipitate the advent of 3D in our living rooms (for one thing, they might have to sell a lot of DVDs to break even – the production is rumoured to have cost $300m and as much again is being spent on marketing).

3D films often feel fairly flat, apart from the occasional thing jumping out at you, but the 3D in Avatar has an incredible depth of field. The landscapes of the planet Pandora seem to stretch away for miles. Another bar raised is the CGI. The attention to detail is breathtaking.

Yes, the story uses every trick in the Hollywood book to hook you in, but – wow! – Mr Cameron is a master of those tricks. The pace and interest don’t flag for a moment in the 162 minutes running time. It’s truly epic; it feels like the three Lord of the Rings films rolled into one.

You might argue that the characters and the plotting are a little close to formula, but as an aesthetic and dramatic experience, Avatar is – without exaggeration – the film of the decade. Truly hypnotising.

A Serious Man

Unranked at time of writing.

The Coen Brothers have a unique style, and this film is a prime example. It is confident, surreal, knowing, and darkly funny.

Joel and Ethan Coen love to break all the rules, and it doesn’t always work. Yes, they’ve made some truly excellent films, like The Big Lebowski and Fargo; but sometimes the overblown characterisations and quirky storytelling just don’t work – like O Brother Where Art Thou? and Burn After Reading.

Well, somehow, A Serious Man hangs together. Despite an opening sequence that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the film, and an ending that resolves exactly nothing, I enjoyed it. I left the cinema feeling satisfied.

It’s a hard movie to pin down, but it helps to know that it’s based on the biblical book of Job (in which a lot of bad things happen to a good God-fearing man without much explanation), transposed to 1960s suburban America.

If you like the Coen Brothers, you’ll love this. If you don’t know their style, be prepared for a weird experience.

Oh, and the Jefferson Airplane soundtrack rocks.

The Man Who Married Himself

Remember a few posts ago I said that a film was being made from one of my short screenplays?

I've been a bit quiet about it because it seemed to good to be true, but a couple of weeks ago I visited the set during filming - so now I know it's really happening!



The short is called "The Man Who Married Himself", and it stars Richard E Grant, Emilia Fox, Celia Imrie and Warren Clarke. Directed by Garrick Hamm (who co-wrote the screenplay with me), a big-time designer who's hoping to break into filmmaking. It's currently in post-production.

It was awesome visiting the set and seeing dozens of people haring around with lighting equipment and odd props and things, all working to make my story come to life. I tried to keep a low profile, but it was nice that whenever I introduced myself as the writer I was treated like a VIP (which is not the Hollywood way, I reckon, so I appreciated it even more).

I chatted to Richard and Emilia - they were both very friendly and complimentary about the script. Richard even asked me to send him the novel I'm working on! He's been asked to be a Booker judge (although he said he's not sure if he'll accept as it involved reading about four books a week for six months), so it's a great honour if he wants to read my stuff.

Pardon me for effusing, but I'm excited!

Now I am working on a feature length film script to try and take advantage of the momentum from this short. Watch this space...

Zombieland

#185 at time of writing.

This film is heaps of fun, but Shaun of the Dead did it better. The first half of Zombieland feels like a sit-com, and only in its second half does it get into its stride - gently teasing and subverting the zombie genre conventions. Indeed, the script started off as a TV pilot, and I'm sure it would have made a cracking series.

Having said that, this film delivers more laughs per minute than most, so I'm all for it.

You can guess the story: There's been a zombie apocalypse, and a few remaining survivors coalesce and go on a quest to find some purpose in this broken world. And - ahhh - they find each other. Meanwhile, in the background, lots of dead people are walking around spewing black blood and threatening to eat them.

Of course, the characters do all the things we all know we shouldn't do in horror movies, like go into dark buildings, leave your car to dash up the open road, and other such tropes. But the result of such acts generally defies the expectations of the genre, with comic effect.

Probably short-term Top 250 fodder.

No Country For Old Men

#110 at time of writing.

This film's antagonist, Anton Chigurh as played by Javier Bardem, is the most uncompromising character ever to grace the silver screen. The story isn't about him - it's about the cop who chases him and the crook who's running away from him - but it's Anton Chigurh and his cattle bolt-gun that linger in the mind after the credits roll. He is the ultimate bad-ass. It must be true, Vanity Fair says so.

I've said before that I find the Coen Brothers variable, but this reasonably faithful Cormac McCarthy adaptation bolts the nail in the head. It's the most heavily Oscared Coen Brothers film, and deservedly so. (In fact, only two Best Director Oscars have ever been split between two directors - this one and West Side Story.)

The story is simple: A hunter in the middle of the Texan desert stumbles upon some dead bodies, a stash of heroin and more than $2 million in cash. He takes the money and runs, with a jaded cop and a motley crew of criminals in pursuit. The result is a wide-open Western-style film - full of deserts and death. It's bleak, violent, tense, blackly funny and meditative, with a creepy sense of fated inevitability. Pure cinema.

Kids In Mind

The MPAA and the BBFC give films age ratings so you know if they're appropriate for your children. And recently they've started giving a brief bit of consumer advice alongside, like the laughable "Contains mild peril" (Finding Nemo), or the ridiculous "Rated PG for non-stop frenetic animated action" (The Powerpuff Girls).

But Kids-In-Mind reckons that's not enough - parents need better information so they can make up their own minds rather than the MPAA deciding for them. Kids-In-Mind claims to provide "Ratings that work".

To this end, they've condensed all worldly vices into three categories: 1. Sex & nudity; 2. Violence & gore; 3. Profanity. And they've given every film a score out of ten for each. (Apparently, other morally dubious activities such as drug taking, theft, racism, etc. don't matter so much.)

So, for example, the recent remake of Halloween gets 10.10.10. The 10 for sex/nudity is for a variety of reasons including, shockingly, "A husband and wife kiss."

The Muppet Christmas Carol gets 0.1.0. The 1 for violence/gore is because "some of the ghost scenes are a little scary and may bother younger viewers."

Year One gets 8.7.5 - a high score despite being only a PG-13. The Favor gets 3.2.3, a very low score for an R.

For me, this just serves to highlight the absurdity of any supposedly objective ratings system. The idea of a bunch of indignant puritans subjecting themselves to ghastly movies just so they can warn other pious parents that there are 398 instances of the word "fuck" in Casino strikes me as hilarious.

This is all very harmless and amusing, but the fact that the official ratings organisations routinely cut material out of films before we can watch them is something else. Why should I be allowed to watch some of the rapey sex and wincey violence in Ichi the Killer, but not all of it? How is anyone qualified to draw that line for all sixty million of us Brits? What's the point if I can just get the uncut version anyway? Isn't the whole system deeply flawed and deeply hypocritical?

Kids-In-Mind might not be the right solution, but they're raising good questions.