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Making JAKE, Part 3: Finding The Foundations
25 March 2010
There's a book by Anne Lamott, one of the best books on writing I've ever read, called BIRD BY BIRD. One of her key tips? "Shitty First Drafts". Don't worry about it being great - just bang it out. Is it shitty? That's fine. At least you've got something to work with.
This was great advice when I wrote my first screenplay, and second, and third. When you're starting out - hell, even now- there's nothing like the sheer giddy feeling of completion of 80-110 correctly formatted pages that could be a movie. I know that finishing the first draft of JAKE was one of the most fulfilling, satisfying moments of the entire process.
But I am getting very far ahead of myself. The problem with this method, for my brain, is that the result is quite messy, and re-organizing it structurally is pretty difficult for me. I don't find changing narrative structure difficult when I'm working with material in an editing suite, moving footage from one place to another to restructure things, but when I'm editing a 100-page script, making changes to reset and move the structure is relatively hard for me.
A disciplined, organized writer would systematically approach the structural issues, dissect them, and proceed accordingly. At least, I suppose that is what they would do. As I am not one, I did what I know how to do - put the problems in the back of my brain and think about them when I wasn't thinking of anything else, or bore friends with discussions about them.
As mentioned last time, the problem I was having was this: how do you make a movie about a person who is so unlikable that they have been recast in their own life and make them the protagonist without alienating the audience?
Like any problem, there are usually a couple fundamental underlying assumptions, and this one has a couple. And questioning those assumptions is a good way to find solutions to seemingly intractable problems. The first assumption is that alienating the audience is a bad thing. Now, I definitely don't always feel that way - some of my favorite movies are antagonistic towards the audience, from HOLY MOUNTAIN to CACHE, from CLEAN SHAVEN to LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD. But this wasn't what I wanted to do here - I wanted to follow the emotional journey of somebody who'd been recast.
And then I found, accidentally, the other assumption. I don't remember how, but one day I realized what I'd been assuming - that somebody would have to be unlikable to be recast.
What if he wasn't THAT unlikable?
What if it wasn't that everyone was happy to have him replaced, but rather just didn't care much? Or didn't notice?
And in my brain, things started to unlock, and I started to have a dim idea of where, finally, this concept was going, and how it was going to get there.
First Jake Teaser Trailer Online!
21 March 2010
We're very pleased to announce that our first full teaser trailer is now online! If you haven't already, check it out above - you can even watch it in high definition by clicking on the "HD On" button in the upper right hand corner.
Making JAKE, Part 2: Scriptwriting (Take 1)
16 March 2010
This is the second in a series of short articles about the process of writing and directing JAKE, by Doug Dillaman.
I don't keep a diary, but I have a document on my laptop that was last modified in September 2007, which is when I must have given up on my first attempt at writing JAKE. It's not a very impressive document - about a page and a half, giving varying details on the first 11 scenes. I must have revised it a couple times, because I have a "Scene 3.5" nestled in there.
My writing process is not particularly systematic. It involves a lot of vague notes, long walks, and slowly plotting out things in my head until I can see the first third of the movie and the end. Once I have that, I'm normally ready to start writing. Historically, I've literally started writing the script at that point, just starting at page 1 without an outline and working my way forward, watching the movie in my head, almost literally transcribing it. Inevitably, I find that there's scenes that I'm missing, and so they work in, and then the characters or elements I've introduced there start changing the story in an organic way as I go. I'll write til I'm not sure what's supposed to happen next, walk away, then get back to it. Sometimes in a matter of an hour, sometimes days or weeks.
As I recall, this time I thought I'd try something different, and map the story out scene by scene before writing the script. I say "different" as if it's novel, even though outlining is something every writer is supposed to do before they write. But it was novel.
One of the interesting discoveries I made doing this is that you can see a lot more of the story in one gulp than you can see when you're writing a script. A quick look at the page and you don't see 45 seconds, you see 5 to 10 minutes. And the more I looked at the page, the less I liked it.
The problem was this: how do you make a character that is undesirable enough that somebody would want to recast that character with a different actor, without making that character so unlikeable that you don't want to spend time with him?
Now, I'm definitely not somebody who thinks that every movie has to have a conventionally likable protagonist. But there has to be some reason that you want to spend 90-150 minutes in a dark room with them. And I knew I didn't want to spend even five minutes with "Jacob McWorthington", as he was named then.
And so I put JAKE aside for a few months, not sure what to do with this confusing mess of an idea I'd created.
Jake's lead actress Anoushka Klaus on Shortland Street tonight
15 March 2010
We're proud to announce that Jake's lead actress, Anoushka Klaus, is making her Shortland Street debut on TV2 tonight, playing a recurring role as nurse Frankie Hull. Tune in at 7pm!
Making JAKE, Part 1: The Idea.
5 March 2010
This is the first in a series of short articles about the process of writing and directing JAKE, by Doug Dillaman.
Everything starts somewhere, and JAKE, the sixth feature film script I've written and the first one that I've directed, came from the combination of two ideas which I had near simultaneously.
The first: Sometime in 2007 - I think it was June - I was not having a particularly good day, and was in a bad mood, and as I laid in bed that night, exhausted, I thought about the elements of my life, and as I considered them, I realized that all the raw material that was there - the people I knew, the family that believed in me, the job I had, and so on - was a good foundation. And that perhaps the problem, my unhappiness, was not with the elements of my life but what I was doing with them, and that perhaps somebody else, if given the opportunity, would do a much better job.
The second: Maybe that night, or the night before, or the night after, again, lying in bed, I thought about Jake Gyllenhaal. Why? I have no idea. I had seen ZODIAC recently, and he was on the cover of terrible magazines, the kind whose covers are plastered in enlargements on the outside of every dairy in New Zealand, because he'd recently started dating Reese Witherspoon. And I wondered what his life would have been like if he went by Jacob instead. Would he get big movie roles? Would he date movie stars? Or would the very fact of choosing a less tough-sounding name change the very way we perceive him - not only that, actually, but the way he perceived himself? It seemed likely.
This business of how we choose to name our selves - why I go by Doug instead of Douglas, why some of my friends go by Dave or David, Robert or Bob, and so on - has something to do with how we perceive ourselves. And that choice then bubbles out into the world.
And so, those two seeds cross-pollinated, and I imagined Jacob and Jake, and how they would take the materials of a life, and what each of them would do with it.
And thus began the 18-month gestation period for the first draft of JAKE.
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