Directing a film I didn’t write (Part 2)

One of the challenges I faced with this project was visualising Niall’s words. It’s grand when your writing for yourself because it’s already in your head and in some cases writing with a particular location in mind, or at least you have an idea of what you are looking for.

For instance, Kitchens. Maybe it’s the country boy in me but when I think kitchens, something like this will pop into my head and certainly not something like this.

I had great visions on what the kitchen scenes would be like until I saw the location, in fact on first visiting the house it took me some time to figure out where the Kitchen was. You had the Living room and Dining room down stairs as well as that hallway leading out to the backyard. Oh, that hallway IS the Kitchen!

When I used to receive earlier drafts, I would read it and then start to visualise how it would look, even come up it some really cool sequences only to find by the time the next draft arrived, that whole part had been written out! I then realised I’d have to wait until we were closer to a locked script before I would do that, we had to get the story right first.

The updated draft finally arrived in my inbox in early February. After reading it, I felt the rework we had discussed worked better than what was there before. What we now had, was a solid script. A script someway different from the one I first read in June the year before. The two main characters remained, but other characters were gone completely, some replaced by others.

But this was all a good thing. We would have made a mistake in shooting it six months earlier, I’m sure we would have had a fine film, but what we had now was better, it had evolved into a much improved piece. The new ending worked so much better as it got rid of the concerns we had before.

By the end of February the script was locked down, from here on in only minor changes would occur, mainly after read through’s with the actors.