Pretty major developments in our film.
We don’t have a whole new draft of the script yet because most of the changes are conceptual and have required lengthy discussions and a lot of research, so we haven’t finished putting everything on the page yet.
The working title for the film is The Hollow Men, which is from a poem by T.S. Eliot. The poem is originally about soldiers returning from war, but I think it’s really interesting to recontextualise it for this film. In their own ways, Ellis, Sonny and Kane are all Hollow Men.
The structure is remaining basically the same.
However, there is a whole new underlying meaning behind the film. We also want to ask ‘What happens after we die?’
The film has shifted so it’s much more subjective- we see everything from Ellis’ perspective. The characters are faced with their own mortality and they impossible question of what happens next. The characters don’t have any answers, and we don’t want to give the audience any answers either, but we do want to suggest. We want to keep things vague and open for interpretation, but one way to look at the film is that the entire day over which the film takes place is actually Ellis’ purgatory. This was Ellis’ last day alive and he is stuck in it. Stuck in that moment. And it just repeats over and over and over again, with no escape.
The film opens with a few lines from Ellis over a blackscreen. We haven’t pinned down the wording yet, but it’s where these lines are from which is interesting. We open the film with the character seemingly lost in thought, so at first the logical interpretation would seem to that this is just Ellis’ inner monologue, but if that’s the case then what he was thinking wouldn’t make that much sense at that point. However, the film ends when Ellis dies. If you take those lines from the beginning of the film and put them onto the end, they suddenly make a lot more sense as the first thoughts of a man who has just died and yet found that he is still there. So why put them at the start of the film and not the end? Well because that creates a loop. Whether due to purgatory or more metaphorically, the characters feel they are trapped in this moment and for the film to be a loop, this only emphasises it by literally trapping the characters in an eternal endless loop.
These ideas have always been baked into the film, but we’ve just decided to go all in and explore them much more deeply. It is still very much a noir-y western and it’s important to us that at it’s most basic level it still works as a drama between those characters. Even if someone doesn’t want to take the time to really dig deep and appreciate these layers of ideas, questions and meaning, our intention is that they can still enjoy getting to know the characters and their little earthly drama.
The film is thick with so many questions and so much obscured meaning and I think this is an honest reflection of the characters. They are filled with so many questions and a search for meaning. So in theory the audience should be able to relate to the charcters’ struggle because they are resented with a similar one of their own.
We’ve taken a lot of inspiration from folk music. Particularly people like Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan. In many ways, this is a folk song put to film. And I don’t think it’s any accident that the film is a Western, drawing from those similar folk traditions.
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