Aaron and I had a meeting with Paul about the first draft of our screenplay and he had some very interesting things to say. I didn't get the impression that he was overly keen on the film, but it's obviously early days yet and he never explicitly said as much, so maybe I'm just reading too far into it.
- He said that the film was structurally very clear, which is a relief because Aaron and I put a long time into planning the film, so it was good to see that that time paid off.
- He said the film is too expositional and that there's not enough subtext. This is entirely fair and I think we already knew this. A lot of the dialogue is currently very functional. In fact much of it is there as a placeholder. We wanted to get it down on the page and then we can worry about polishing it later.
- He wants us to make the geography clearer. I understand this. In fact it's something I've been criticised of before. So perhaps I need to get better at writing screen directions in the future.
- We need to strengthen Sonny and Ellis' relationship.
- He seemed to really like the way we used the keys at the very start, but he said we could probably play it up even further, so we'll need to go back and have another look at the opening scene.
- Kane is a little bit inconsistent. One moment he's jokey and the next he's violent. We'll need to put in some more work to smooth over this transition.
- Paul suggested we develop a moment with Sonny after Ellis has been knocked unconscious. I see where he's coming from, however we've always wanted to tell the story entirely from Ellis' perspective and this would obviously break this rule. We'll need to have a discussion about this moment.
- He suggested that we try to rewrite the scene in the forest between Ellis and Sonny without ever even mentioning killing. This seemed like a silly idea at first, but actually it might be quite interesting to give this a go. This is likely what he was talking about when he said we need more subtext. Not only do I think we can remove many of the references to killing, I actually also think we can remove much of the dialogue from the beginning of the scene as well.
- We need to make Kane more of a threat at the end. I'm not yet quite sure how we'll go about doing this yet, so I'll need to have a discussion with Aaron. I think I might have a look at some murder ballads to see what they do.
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