I’ve been working away at this short film, Queen of Queen Street. It is only ten minutes, but it seems to be eating up a lot of my time at the moment. The script has been somewhat modified from the original by Ahmad Ndao. It is now a Hong Kong story rather than a Dakar story. I’m sure Ahmad was frothing at the mouth when he saw the changes I’d made to the script but changes had to be made to make the shooting possible. The basic story idea is still there, only there’s an extra sub plot and the locations and characterizations are Chinese. It is also a musical!
A short film is nothing if it isn’t impossible to pull off. I’ve seen plenty of short films, even major award winning shorts, and merely wondered whose friend was on the festival selection committee. But the films that have stood out in my mind are those with clever plots, amazing production values, and sheer chutzpah. Not all of these things require huge budgets to achieve.
So I’m working on the chutzpah theory of film making and making it a mini-musical. Not a pop video, I hasten to add, but a musical where the music and story line interweave. Oh, did I mention, I’ve added a 70’s period sub plot? Worse, it’s in flash back, which is a technique I warn all writers against.
Having given myself something impossible to achieve, at least not something easy to do well, I have only myself to blame when I have a nervous breakdown. At the moment I am struggling to brief the musicians I have co-opted onto the project. It is not that I can’t tell them what I am looking for, in as much as I want something fantastic and great and marvelous and moving and far better than they have ever thought of writing before in their entire lives! But they are all on a hiding to nothing as they tentatively submit me snippets of ideas and I go, well, mmm, dunno… I sympathise with them. They are working within the void of my own mind and this is hard enough for me to fathom, let alone anyone else.
But bit by bit some thing is coming together and my idea of what this film should become is gradually emerging. As a writer I am always absolutely certain as to what I am doing and what the end product will be, i.e. so many pieces of paper with readable text! On the producing side though one is trying to gather together various talents that can work together and because people are unpredictable quantities one is constantly shifting one's ground to accommodate new possibilities that arise. And then it is the director’s job to work with these talents and fit the puzzle together while pleasing the producer, staying true to the writer's vision, and of course expressing their own aesthetic.
Conflict is built into all these roles. The writer has various ideas that in reality are hard to realize. The producer only has so much budget. And the director always wants more of everything and as far as the writer is concerned is always a tasteless hack who really doesn't understand. And if you are playing all the roles then you are forever kicking yourself and wondering whether one is compromising for real reasons, or simply exhausted beating oneself up.