This year I’m drawing from a wide variety of different resources for my grad film. The film takes a lot of inspiration from genres such as westerns and film noir, while also examining various works of literature and philosophy.
I am co-writing the film with Aaron Ross and I plan to direct, while Aaron will focus on cinematography. It seems to be quite uncommon for the director and cinematographer to write the screenplay together, however I’ve had previous experience doing this and I’d like to experiment with it further this year. I find that from incredibly early in the writing process, the visuals become an integral part of the storytelling. It can be easy to treat a screenplay as a work of literature, and I think working with a cinematographer can prevent this from happening. I believe film should be a collaborative medium, so I like to collaborate with other creatives at every opportunity I can.
The film we have come up with goes like this: A world-weary hitman finds himself entirely at the mercy of the man he was sent to kill. As he comes face to face with his own mortality, he begins to see his ‘target’ as a real human being, forcing him to question the morality of what he does for a living.
I’d like to play around with genre this year. Genre films have certain rules and expectations. You can choose whether you want to follow these rules or subvert them, however it provides you with a sandbox to play in with parameters the audience is already very familiar with. You can create a new effect from an old genre simply by twisting what the audience is already familiar with. Narratively, a film like Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973) is very typical of the western genre. A law-abiding man is hired as sheriff to hunt and catch a dangerous outlaw. However, the film subverts the genre by not focusing on ultra-masculine heroes, but rather the characters are somewhat broken and drained; like we are only encountering them long after their ‘glory days’ have ended. The hero is an anti-hero and the morals are ambiguous.
Some characters I’ve been looking at are Brad Pitt’s portrayal of Jesses James in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941). These characters are full of doubts about what it is that they do and present a tone of weariness and a fatalist outlook that I would very much like to collaborate with an actor in order to cultivate.
Opposite this weary character, I’ve been looking at Nicholas Cage’s performances in Raising Arizona (1987) and Wild at Heart (1990). This would be for the hitman’s target. This character is much more innocent. I love how in these films, the character has a very flowery, almost philosophical style of speaking.
For both of these characters, I think their costume design will contribute a lot to their style and tone. I’d like to look at the style of clothing used in these genres and really lean into their stylisation.
In Bruges (2008) uses religious imagery to drive home the character’s feelings of guilt. He considers religion and forgiveness, searching for a way to escape how he feels about what he’s done. I’d like to experiment with the use of religious imagery and this line of questioning to achieve a similar effect. I’d like examine things like the lyrics of Leonard Cohen for this kind of imagery. Also, I’d like to look at the writings of Flannery O’Connor, particularly her book Wise Blood and the short story A Good Man is Hard to Find. In her work, there is a conflict between religion and nihilism. The characters are regularly caught between to two outlooks, leaving them feeling entirely lost. I find her style of writing fascinating and I think it could be hugely influential for this film.
I think framing and editing could be used together for the audience to identify with the main character as much as possible. In Alfred Hitchcock’s films, he regularly makes extensive use of POV shots. We see a character looking at something; we see what they were looking at in a POV; and we see how the react to it. This is about as basic as film editing gets, however it can be very effective, and I would like to experiment with it in order to create a stronger sense of identification with the main character.
The film is very stylised and draws inspiration from genres with loads of imagery and tropes, but it’s very important to me that the focus stays on the characters and their related themes. I think this will require a large amount of experimentation and testing in order to pull it off, but I’m confident that this film has the potential to be both entertaining and meaningful.
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