MUSING ON FIGGIS
Just a couple of posts below I mentioned Mike Figgis’s blog on the FilmInFocus site. Over at his Movie City Indie, Ray Pride gets inspired by Figgis quotes on character and narrative in today’s filmmaking.
From Figgis:
I guess I’m in a period of thinking about film and filmmaking. I made a feature last year, it’s called Love Live Long but everything about [it] was far removed from the what cinema has become… I have read lots of scripts and written a couple for other people. The ones I read were not interesting and the ones I wrote all ended up in studio type confrontations. Executives who had big ideas about character and plot and particularly the 3rd act…. [T]he main thing that strikes me is this – Plot has killed script. Back in the day plot was a slightly sketchy framework for character development. The scripts I read now, the characters are there to supply the plot. It’s all to do with a misguided idea that the function of cinema is somehow to be realistic. I think the function of cinema is to be poetic and magic and original.
The blog post sparked a reaction in Pride. “My revelation: I worked a couple years on a script with a New York-based director about watching,” he writes before launching into a description of that script, some of its challenges, and a different way the material might be handled. He then adds a two-minute clip from the project in question. It’s worth reading both posts to see the way inspiration is pinging across the Atlantic by means of the blogosphere.
