The full transcript of my latest “podcast”. Inverted commas because this is my third test podcast and it exists – at present – only on YouTube. You can see/hear the podcast by following this link – or scroll to the bottom of this post to find the embedded video.
Today I want to talk to you about films and the lessons I find myself learning, as a story writer, from viewing them. To do this, here I am sitting in my snow-covered local park.
This seemed like a good idea earlier. The sun is shining, and I thought how good it would be to sit out in the snow to record this. An outside broadcast no less!
But here we are now and I realise how cold it is.
At least the wind isn’t blowing. Yet.
The Gothenburg Film Festival
Snow and the movies. I’m trying to make a sensible connection, but I’m having difficulties. It would help if there were snow in any of the films I want to talk about, but no.
The association, in my mind, comes from the Gothenburg Film Festival, our great winter event here in west Sweden. The biggest film festival in the Nordics. It takes place at the end of January, at the beginning of February. There’s often snow in the air, snow on the ground. We walk through snow covered streets from one venue to another, from cinema to cafe and on to a new cinema again. We weave from one story to another, one environment to another, and our travels are punctuated by snow.
In some years.
Not this year so much. This year it was more a cutting wind and iced grit underfoot, and cinemas – one of them in particular – where I sat with my deep-winter coat on throughout the showing and still felt bone chilled by the end.
I love the Gothenburg Film Festival. I attend every year I can, and see more cinema films in the ten days of the festival than I see in ten months the rest of the year.
Hmm. Maybe that’s hyperbole nowadays. But it was certainly true when I was younger, with time on my hands and I could see up to three films a day. This year my tally was more modest. I saw eleven films over the ten days of the festival, and three of them were on-line. (There’s been an on-line programme ever since Covid.) But that’s still eight films in eight cinemas across the city. I’m happy!
Watching films as a writer
What do I look for in my film festival films?
I look for stories from different cultures and in different languages than I would normally experience. I look for films from different parts of the world. This year I saw films from South America, Africa, East Asia and Europe, and in Arabic and Gaelic, French and Danish, Portuguese and Japanese, Nigerian English and Spanish.
I also heard Amanda Seyfried speaking Mancunian English, which was fun in its own right.
Nowadays I see films not just as a viewer, but also as a writer trying to understand how visual stories work. In films you don’t need to describe the snow. You just show it. But when you write, you have to find the words to make the reader see the snow in their mind’s eye.
The same is true for audio books and radio plays – and for podcasts. If you’re viewing this on YouTube, my words are getting helped along by scenes of snow-covered slopes, snow drifts, and me struggling through them. (I filmed these scenes after an earlier snowfall here in January.)
But if you’re listening only to the audio, then I must hope my words are conveying the weather to you.
I look at films and my writer’s mind says – yes, but how would you write that?
The other thing films give me as a writer is a whole story in 90 minutes or so. Beginning, middle and end. Condensed. Compacted. Reading a novel at the snail’s pace I now manage, it takes me on average 11 days, and I can’t always manage consecutive days at that.
Admiring how script writers work
It’s not that I want to write film scripts. I don’t. I want to admire how script writers work. How they can show emotion, conflict and setting without exposition. (Mostly without exposition.)
The over-used admonition to writers, “Show, don’t tell!” That comes from script writing. Novelists, storytellers, we need to tell – not least because sometimes showing is just not possible. But often, yes, we need to dial it back. Seeing how film-makers do that (or, sometimes, fail to do that), it’s educative.
I could talk about so many of the films I saw at the festival this year. There was a version of this script with a laconic Argentinian cop on the run, hiding out as a cheesemaker in Uruguay. Another with a walking ghost and two small boys in Lagos. But in the end I choose to confine myself to two films from different ends of the earth, because they share a theme and a time period: coming of age in the pre-mobile phone era.
The films are Little Creatures, from Brazil, and Renoir, from Japan.
Both films are set in the 1980s, both have a young child as a protagonist, both handle themes of loneliness and coping in difficult situations. Both films have elements of magical realism or childhood fantasy.
In both films the writer is one and the same person as the director, and the programme notes suggest the stories, though fictional, are very personal to them.
Let me start with Renoir, by Chie Hyakawa.
Renoir by Chie Hyakawa
The setting is suburban Japan. Eleven year old Fuki lives with her mother and elderly father in an apartment block. Her parents both work in different professional jobs in different companies. Her mother is in some sort of management position, her father in a senior capacity, apparently in accounts.
Fuki already lives a rather isolated life – she doesn’t seem to have close school friends – when her father is diagnosed with cancer. He moves from home to a hospital (where his colleagues visit him, bringing him accounts to check).
Meanwhile Fuki’s mother, after complaints about her abrasive behaviour to colleagues, is obliged to attend training to become a more empathetic person.
Fuki writes a school essay about being or becoming an orphan, which causes her teacher to summon her mother for a meeting. (“You’d better not try to kill me,” her mother tells Fuki as they leave the school together.)
The film covers the summer months, from spring at school, over the summer holidays and into the next autumn’s school term.
Episodes
In the course of the film Fuki makes a friend (an exceptionally tall girl) and loses her again, is fascinate by magic and the supernatural, reads up on hypnotism and tries out her skills as a telepath. When her mother lets herself fall for the teacher on her empathy training course, Fuki tries a magic spell to break up the relationship. At the hospital, Fuki overhears her father’s colleagues talking about him disrespectfully and understands they expect him to die, so she takes him out for a day at the horse races. Alone at home, Fuki explores the options of a phone-in dating agency. This results in her going home with a 26 year old student, who clearly has interests in her that are not wholesome. She escapes because his mother comes home unexpectedly.
The summer is punctuated by events that may be real or may be figments of Fuki’s imagination. Towards the end, Fuki sits with her father at breakfast as her mother serves them eggs. Then, suddenly, her father is no longer there.
Talking with her school English teacher, answering the question – what did you do over the summer? Fuki asks for a word in Japanese. “Funeral,” says the teacher. “I went to a funeral,” Fuki says. “My father died.”
Little Creatures by Anne Pinhero Guimarães
Little Creatures, by Anne Pinhero Guimarães is set in Brasilia, the futuristic new capital of Brazil, in 1986.
Here we have another family on the cusp of breakdown. The father makes a brief appearance at the beginning as he sets off on a business trip leaving his wife Helena with their two sons to move into their new apartment in the new city. They know no one and their rooms are still stacked with cardboard moving boxes.
This film has three separate protagonists. Apart from Helena, the mother, there is André, about 14 years old, and Dudu the 7 year old. Each of the three has their own story arc.
Helena’s Story
Helena’s story involves a great deal of driving around the city, sometimes alone, sometimes ferrying her boys. Early on, she discovers her husband’s absences are occasioned at least as much by his infidelity as by his job. She phones him at the hotel where is staying only to find herself talking to his mistress. Later she has her own fleeting affair with a man who helps her fix her car when it breaks down. Later still, out driving again, she runs over a dog and takes it home to nurse it, as it dies.
André’s Story
André’s story has him robbed of his new bicycle by a gang of local boys. He finds a friend in a lad who lives in the same apartment block and goes with him on a housebreaking spree that leads to him stealing a hidden pistol. With money from the robberies, he buys a moped, runs the bicycle thieves off the road and regains his stolen bike before throwing the pistol away in a lake.
Dudu’s Story
Dudu, meanwhile, is obsessed with Science Fiction stories and the Planet of the Apes in particular. He owns a gorilla mask from the film and often wears it. Playing scenes from his favourite film among the removal boxes in the apartment, he falls and breaks his wrist. He spends most of the film with one arm in a plaster cast. Dudu collects lollipop sticks and bottle caps. The local pervert – Milton – tries to win Dudu’s friendship with a bag of bottle caps. At one point Dudu finds himself locked into Milton’s apartment, but is able to leave without any significant consequences.
The film ends with a celebration of Dudu’s birthday at a drive-in cinema that is supposed to be showing a Star Trek film. UFOs appear from behind the screen and the film ends in a white-out flash suggesting the characters have all been kidnapped by the aliens.
Comparing Little Creatures and Renoir
By chance I saw Little Creatures and Renoir in that order on sequential days. It was interesting to compare them.
Both films were well made and the actors – especially the child actors – were very good. What I have to say about them – the films – relates to the story of each as it was written. As I perceived it.
Little Creatures
I came away disappointed from Little Creatures on two counts.
First, I thought the film lacked focus. Each story – Helena’s, André’s and Dudu’s – was given equal weight and pulled in different directions. They didn’t contribute to a satisfactory whole.
Second, I thought the ending was very weak and showed that the writer hadn’t seriously thought about how to end the film till she got there, and then panicked. Yes, the UFOs were trailed in the film. Secondary characters talked about having seen them. Yes, the film used the futuristic architecture of Brasilia as a backdrop and there were references to Science Fiction. But nothing significant enough to justify the alien kidnapping conclusion.
Renoir
By contrast, Renoir felt much more satisfactory even though the ending was again rather ragged.
The film did not end (as it should have, I think) on the hug the English teacher gave Fuki after the revelation of her father’s death. Instead there were several scenes in which the little girl and her mother seemed to find a better relationship and in which Fuki found joy – whether reuniting with her tall friend and learning to surf with her or, in a fantasy, dancing on a yacht with actors out of an American soap drama. I could see the writer was trying to give the girl – and the film – an up-beat ending.
But Renoir worked despite the ending.
Although, like Little Creatures, it was built up on incidents and separate stories. Although the father and the mother had their arcs. Still the focus was always on Fuki. Everything circled back to her and the different incidents along the way all served her story.
My take-aways
So what are my takeaways from these two films?
One: A scattered narrative that tries to be too even-handed can leave the audience adrift, while a clear single protagonist anchors the story even in ambiguity.
Two: It’s a good idea to have a clear ending in sight for your story while you write it. Or, if you write by the seat of your pants, make sure there is a clear ending firmly woven into the story during your re-writing process. Don’t think of the story as complete till the ending feels like the natural conclusion.
Valediction
Listen to me pontificating! I think about my current work in progress – too many characters and a ragged ending. But then I’m still deep in the editing process and no end in sight.
And how am I, now, going to finish this script? Desperately, that’s how!
It’s about fifteen minutes since you started listening – if you’re still listening – but 48 hours since I recorded the introduction. It was too cold to be out so long and I hadn’t anyway written the script to the end. The clouds came up, the sun went away and now I’m indoors again reading you the last of this.
I hope you’ve found at least some of it interesting. This podcast is still at the experimental stage, but I hope to have positive developments to report soon. If you’re interested, you could subscribe for more, or at least give me a thumbs up on this!
But for now, that me done.
Cheerio till the next time.
