Anti- or Pro-metheus?

My wife and I managed to get out and finally see Prometheus today.  If you are unaware, the film is director Ridley Scott’s first foray into the science fiction genre since Blade Runner in 1982.  It is also a prequel of sorts to the first sci-fi film Mr. Scott directed, Alien.

I’m not going to spoil anything in here, but needless to say there were a lot of questions raised by the end of the picture.  Now, the immediate reaction is to blame it all on sloppy screenwriting, which may be the case.  However, with news of a longer cut coming out on DVD in the near future and interviews with Scott himself saying that the film is based on other historical ideas and concepts about humanity’s inception, it makes me wonder whether or not the film is actually a lot smarter than it initially appears to be.

I can understand this line of thinking as I tried to do something similar with Dark of Winter, in that we leave a lot open to interpretation.  We don’t spell everything out and treat the audience like morons.  We give them room to think, theorize, and draw conclusions.  All the information is there; it’s up to the individual to use it.

Needless to say, after thinking about this for most of the evening, I’m actually anxious to see Prometheus again.  Perhaps, by delving deeper into the rabbit hole, so to speak, more shall be revealed to me.  I’d like to think that is the case and I would gladly take that over shitty screenwriting.

Double the fun…

…oh, yeah…who’s the big idiot today?

That’s right…I am!

Or rather, I’m the big idiot a week ago, because I wrote a new post but never published it.

I could blame it on technology, but I won’t.  I know, taking the responsibility for my failure…how incredibly un-American of me.

I jest…or do I?

So, then, tonight the world gets two posts on the HWIC blog.  Happy Father’s day to your Dad.

You can go read about the prologue to the film below, or you can stay here and listen to me ramble.

I recently finished the first draft to the screenplay which will no doubt be our next film: Swing Lowe Sweet Chariote, adapted from the novel by Stella Hall.  It’s my first official book adaptation, and it was an extremely interesting experience.  Usually I run on whatever my brain comes up with, or suggestions from friends and colleagues.   But this was something else entirely.  Everything was laid out for me already, but I had to pick, choose, and disseminate all of that information to convert it to another medium.  It was easy and difficult at the same time.  Obviously I can’t make a 4 hour film out of the book by including everything (well, I could, but who would want to watch it?!) so I had to decide what went and what stayed.  What bits were most important to further plot and character arcs and what could be thrown out.  What’s nice is having access to all those ideas.  It’s almost like having unlimited fuel to inform the script.  I could use anything or nothing and, in some cases, I attempted to distill things into new ideas of my own that would keep the same tone and feeling of the book.  I didn’t do this often but it was something I had to resort to occasionally to solve problems.

Would I do it again?  Sure!  Why not?

 

A new twist on an old favorite…

So, I had every intention of shooting a short film that would tie in with the feature film Dark of Winter, almost like a companion piece.

But then, inspiration struck, that dirty bitch, and, as always, I started to think about actually re-working the opening of the film so as to include the short as a part of it.

Thus, the “prologue” was born.

So we shot it and I started re-thinking the structure of the feature.  Would this work?  I knew that I would have to establish something in the new opening that would carry through to the original film so that the new prologue would fit and not be a distraction.  So I found breaks that were already in  the picture and added “Chapters” to them.  Executive producer Andrew C. Schwabe suggested we go one further and add quotes from well known people under the chapter headings.  Excellent idea!

So now we have a prologue, two chapters, and an epilogue.

But does it work?

I like to think so.  The tone of the film is still the same.  The big difference is now that some of the motivations have changed.  It’s an interesting exploration into the bizarro world that we’ve created, and I think it also opens things up for further exploration.  And that excites me as an artist.