How I Almost Filmed A Movie
On the very first post of this blog, I detailed what my attitude to writing was before I graduated school. In the face of a snazzy Instagram reel of Charli D’Amelio dancing to 34+35 by Ariana Grande, I’ll spare you the self aggrandizing details. To wrap it up : I didn’t really do it.
However my first foray of writing was through scripts. I don’t know why I picked a craft that requires such patience and grit. I don’t call myself a movie fanatic. My attitude to movies is the same with that to books, passive and without any strict schedule. I never watched big name directors like Kurosawa or Haneke. I watched high-school flicks and whatever got nominated for an Oscar.
Everyone has a pet project that they either finish or abandon. This film script was one of them. For the longest time I wrote into nothingness, just me and my words bouncing off walls.. I used Celtx(the first scriptwriting software I found), watched a couple Casey Neistat videos and away I went. In the midst of this inspiration boost, I started reading scripts of movies I liked. I just read a couple but the one thing that stood out to me is how each were so different. I used to always assume that all scripts are based on the same structure just with different words. The best scripts I read tried to get away from this structure without truly breaking all the typical screenwriting rules. “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind” comes to mind, where Kaufman writes everything in such vivid detail it feels like you’re watching the movie again.
I remember, when I started writing “Okay” I had only one thought. That your fantasies in daily life can be a powerful thing. Cheesy, I know. This was before I watched La La Land and realised that Hollywood had already poached my idea to wrap up a film that received praise and won multiple Oscars. During some part of the writing process, I started to fantasise about finishing it. I didn’t have the tenacity or the ability to dream that I’d film it because my aim was to get that vision in my head onto paper so my ambition was limited to putting it on paper.
Then ,somehow I finished it. It was a shitty first draft but I had all the plot points. I had officially written 20 pages and over 4000 words of something . Every iteration felt like an improvement over the next. I showed it to a couple of friends, for the sake of receiving praise more than anything else. I achieved the goal I set out for which was writing an ambitious project and more importantly, I wasn’t embarrassed of it.
Then, I tried to “film” it. This is where things started to go downhill. I called on a few friends who read my script and figured that I could direct as well as just write. I believed them and went with this, more peer pressure induced than anything else. I wanted people to know that I wrote a script all on my own. The final call was mine though and I’m glad I tried to do this. Filming a 10 minute short felt like I was trying to film a feature length short. After my little directing stint, I had massive respect for filmmakers who shoot big projects with a minimal budget.
I got a clip of audio for a climax sequence from a school friend of mine which I really liked. A friend of mine shot a couple of filler shots on a metro. Those days I remember, where you’re so way in over your head you don’t have anything else left to do other than keep moving forward.
The day we tried to film some filler shots, we forgot which metro station we got on because we were too busy trying to set up for a shot where the protagonist, Amit does nothing but reminisce about his college self on a metro ride from work. Oddly, this scene still remains in the latest iteration of the script. A one hour event devolved into multiple, where we had to figure out which stop looked like the one that we got on. This whole charade went on for over 2 hours and I think towards the end we had not more than 2 minutes to show for it.
This was one instance. There are many of these titbits, swirling around in my head from a time that I thought I could film a movie. It’s been nearly 4 years since I wrote “Okay” and almost 3 years since I tried to film it. Whenever I have no motivation to write or do anything other than college and work, I go back and read through it. It helps me realise that if I can write that, I can write anything I want to. This sounds really melodramatic but at 17, a part of me really believed I’d shoot a film and be a “director”. That naivete has for the most shifted into cynicism and self doubt which is the anti-thesis of any creative project. I like to revisit “Okay” mostly as a reminder that this version of me had existed and thrived.
If you’ve gotten this far, I do think there’s merit to trying to do that creative thing that you’ve always wanted to. I don’t really write scripts anymore but I still keep the ones I wrote. All in, I wrote 2 short film scripts. One was “Okay” and the other was for a competition titled “Modern Love”.
