Station Zero

Prairie Rascals poster by Sarah McIntyre This post contains some minor SPOILERS about Prairie Rascals , so you may want to watch the film first. You can find it here. WAGONS ROLL When Sarah Reeve and I started making our little films here at Bonehill, it wasn't because I was eager to get into screenwriting. I'm much more interested in the other bits of film making, like finding costumes and locations, working with the actors, and editing. But before you can get to those parts of the process you do need a screenplay, and since I'm the cheapest writer available, I write those myself. Writing a screenplay - at least for the sort of micro-budget productions we're making - is not like writing a book. With a novel the problem is that there a thousand different paths the story could take. With a screenplay,  998 of those paths are blocked by large signs that say YOU CAN'T AFFORD THIS, so in a way it becomes much easier: your choices are made for you. * When I set out to wr...

  Poster by Sarah McIntyre I didn’t really approach Gwenevere as a writing project. It was the practical side that appealed to me - finding the costumes and locations, making props, and actually shooting the thing. But before any of that can happen there needed to be a screenplay, and nobody else was going to write one for me, so I set to work.  I’d decided to go for an Arthurian story while watching loads of Arthurian films and TV shows for this blog a few years ago. Historical but not demanding historical accuracy, often silly yet still deeply serious, they felt like something we might be able to achieve on our pocket-money budget. Once that decision was made, the writing process went something like this: 1. I can’t adapt an actual Arthurian tale because I can’t afford loads of knights and battles and a round table… 2. So what if it’s a film about women? That would be a bit different, and frocks are cheaper than armour… 3. Who’s the first female character who springs to m...

I got thinking in the night about the early versions of Mortal Engines . I don’t have them any more - they filled an ever-growing stack of notebooks all through the ‘90s and you can’t hang on to that stuff forever - I just keep a few scraps, which I’m reproducing here. So I’m quite vague on a lot of the details now. I remember the world was quite different from the world I eventually ended up with, but I can’t recall how the story worked (or didn’t work) within that. It was called Urbivore or Hungry City in those days, and the most obvious differences were that it wasn’t set in the future and London never crossed the North Sea (which was still a sea, so how could it?). Every version started with some variant in the same first line - it was a nice day and London was chasing a small town of some sort.  The setting was a sort of parallel world where Traction Cities had arisen fairly early in the industrial revolution. I can’t remember if it was set in Victorian times, or in a presen...