SusannahScreenplay Workshop - The Lady in the Water
October 24th 2006 03:39
Screenplay Workshop - The Lady in the Water.
M. is the one Writer/Director above all others whose work I wish I could get my hands on. I wish that I could seize his ideas and tear them apart, putting all the pieces back together in some new order. His ideas are fascinating. It was in the execution that the whole venture turned to custard. Early profiles of Lady in the Water suggested the kind of epic fantastical piece that could fill the void left by the death of Jim Henson. I thought it could be such a departure for M. It could be a way for him to truly test himself as a film-maker, to push himself out into uncharted waters. What he gave the world instead was an undercooked stinker of a vanity project.
So…if I had been given a treatment of the script this is what I would have done to it:
First of all…the myth behind it all.
Now, I don’t think I’d want this delivered in voice-over while a bunch of stick-figures dance across the screen. I’d probably want this worked into the script itself – oh and bits of it are going to be totally the same as what M. had.
In the beginning there was only one world. It was a world of magic and waves and glorious things. This was the Blue World. Then a handful of people from that world left the ocean and walked out onto the shore. Two worlds were created - the Blue World and the World of Humans. But something else came into existence. It grew out of the blank space between those divided worlds - the emptiness there. It was called the Rift. And it grew wider, growing deep and dark as all the ugliness that spilled out of the human world fed into it. Things began to emerge from the Rift. Monstrous creatures who slithered into the Blue World. They began to devour it.
In many years there will be no Blue World anymore. It will be utterly consumed. Then the creatures from the Rift will make their way to the human world. They will not stop until everything is gone. Until there is only the Rift. The only thing that can prevent this is the two worlds coming together once more.
This is why a girl will be sent from the Blue World. This is why her message needs to be carried.
Now to the characters.
You’ve got Paul Giamatti, right – now, this guy is good. He has a rare talent for lending a simple everyman character such pathos and potency that you believe in them…really believe in them. He doesn’t need any over-cooked back-story about a dead wife and a bunch of dead kids.
Cleveland Heep. He’s shy, withdrawn. A little sad perhaps. He draws away from people, crippled by his stutter. He’s an introvert. He has no tragic past and he has never been a doctor. He’s just lonely - the world is full of people like this. He writes in his spare time. He keeps journals that he scribbles down random thoughts in. Maybe even the odd poem. And he’s got this extraordinary talent that he doesn’t realise he has, he can make words dance. The film becomes about him discovering this side of himself.
Heep’s the writer Story is looking for…not some guy hammering away at a philosophical treatise about race and division and such (the time of Marx and Nietzsche is long gone). Throughout the course of the film Heep gets inspired by what he sees and experiences. He writes it all down. He tells the tale of a frightened girl that slipped from her world into ours looking for help. He tells of the magic he glimpses in her. Heep writes a children’s book and upon its publication it is a huge success. A copy ends up in nearly every house. A whole generation grows up knowing his story and because of this the division between worlds draws closed.
But there are terrible creatures that come through with Story. But they don’t come for her. Instead they come to kill Heep before he writes a single word. These creatures enter through the same portal that Story uses (it remains open as long as she is in the world of the humans and will only be closed once she has returned to the Blue World).
And we’re not just talking about a hedge-dog with a lame name here. That particular creature could just be the start. I’d want a real escalation of threat here. I mean, you don’t just stick your protagonist up a tree and then leave them there for a bit before telling them that they can get down. You’ve got to throw stones at them.
There’s no healing mud and no stupid bird – the Blue World is aquatic, no eagle could get you there. Instead, a portal will open in the swimming pool, and the protagonists (and the audience) will get just the briefest of glimpses of the Blue World.
Oh, and Story needs to be a bit more than an ethereal Bryce Dallas Howard. Her skin should be paler, her eyes stranger. Her hands and feet should be webbed. Most of all – at some point in the film she has to make some active attempt to save herself. Onscreen.
Story needs the help of a few people to get her back through the portal. There should be three helpers. Three. That’s a fine number – a number of power. Western audiences will recognise it instantly from the Trinity but it occurs in various mythologies as well. Seven is a powerful number too, but it’s just too large. Three is good, three is enough.
And those people should be:
The Healer – now this should be the woman that they first thought it was in the actual film. She’s a sweet soul, a faded flower-child that cares for stray animals. She’s someone out of step with the world. She should have many cats and the audience should see inside her apartment. Heep should go to her when Story is first injured instead of messing about with healing mud and whatnot.
The Guardian - this I wouldn’t change. It’s got to be Freddy Rodriguez with his abnormally muscular right arm. The scene of him facing off against the Scrunt in the rain…that was pure poetry.
The Interpreter – now as much as I loved the kid reading the cereal packets it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. We know M. likes to be clever so how about this…the Interpreter is the film critic. The language by which he interprets events should be the language of film (and thus of story-telling in general). Hell, M. already did this in the actual film but it was only there so that he could get a dig in. Think how cool that would be…a fantasy tale where all the characters realise that, it being a fantasy tale, it has to conform to certain rules. It also integrates this rather unlikeable character into the plot so that he never seems like a Deus Ex Machina. He can still be killed. Once he’s no longer useful. Everyone likes a good on-screen killing. It’s this role above all others that should be played by M. Night Shyamalan. That would mean that the characters of his film would be able to go to him for advice on the plot. How Meta- would that be?
No Guild. No man-with-no-secrets. No man-of-respected-opinion. No false climax where it turns out that all the apparent helpers are in fact wrong. No random dudes in leafy gorilla-suits. None of that crap.
Oh…and I’d change those damn names. I mean Narf, Scrunt, what the heck?
It’s supposed to be an Eastern myth, yeah - so give them Asiatic names. And why does the young Asian woman dress like Bai Ling? Young Asian women only ever dress like that in American films.
Just remember to keep escalating the tension. Keep jacking the threat higher and higher until it’s almost unbearable – put in lots of fantastically horrid creatures to keep the FX department happy (and the people that manufacture plastic replicas from movies…Todd McFarlane, I’m thinking of you).
And make it at least half an hour shorter.
And give it a Third Act.
And either aim it at children or at adults. Choose a side.
So that’s my two cents (although at all those words I reckon it must be worth a couple of bucks). Thanks for reading my little film rant, all those that made it this far.
M. is the one Writer/Director above all others whose work I wish I could get my hands on. I wish that I could seize his ideas and tear them apart, putting all the pieces back together in some new order. His ideas are fascinating. It was in the execution that the whole venture turned to custard. Early profiles of Lady in the Water suggested the kind of epic fantastical piece that could fill the void left by the death of Jim Henson. I thought it could be such a departure for M. It could be a way for him to truly test himself as a film-maker, to push himself out into uncharted waters. What he gave the world instead was an undercooked stinker of a vanity project.
So…if I had been given a treatment of the script this is what I would have done to it:
First of all…the myth behind it all.
Now, I don’t think I’d want this delivered in voice-over while a bunch of stick-figures dance across the screen. I’d probably want this worked into the script itself – oh and bits of it are going to be totally the same as what M. had.
In the beginning there was only one world. It was a world of magic and waves and glorious things. This was the Blue World. Then a handful of people from that world left the ocean and walked out onto the shore. Two worlds were created - the Blue World and the World of Humans. But something else came into existence. It grew out of the blank space between those divided worlds - the emptiness there. It was called the Rift. And it grew wider, growing deep and dark as all the ugliness that spilled out of the human world fed into it. Things began to emerge from the Rift. Monstrous creatures who slithered into the Blue World. They began to devour it.
In many years there will be no Blue World anymore. It will be utterly consumed. Then the creatures from the Rift will make their way to the human world. They will not stop until everything is gone. Until there is only the Rift. The only thing that can prevent this is the two worlds coming together once more.
This is why a girl will be sent from the Blue World. This is why her message needs to be carried.
Now to the characters.
You’ve got Paul Giamatti, right – now, this guy is good. He has a rare talent for lending a simple everyman character such pathos and potency that you believe in them…really believe in them. He doesn’t need any over-cooked back-story about a dead wife and a bunch of dead kids.
Cleveland Heep. He’s shy, withdrawn. A little sad perhaps. He draws away from people, crippled by his stutter. He’s an introvert. He has no tragic past and he has never been a doctor. He’s just lonely - the world is full of people like this. He writes in his spare time. He keeps journals that he scribbles down random thoughts in. Maybe even the odd poem. And he’s got this extraordinary talent that he doesn’t realise he has, he can make words dance. The film becomes about him discovering this side of himself.
Heep’s the writer Story is looking for…not some guy hammering away at a philosophical treatise about race and division and such (the time of Marx and Nietzsche is long gone). Throughout the course of the film Heep gets inspired by what he sees and experiences. He writes it all down. He tells the tale of a frightened girl that slipped from her world into ours looking for help. He tells of the magic he glimpses in her. Heep writes a children’s book and upon its publication it is a huge success. A copy ends up in nearly every house. A whole generation grows up knowing his story and because of this the division between worlds draws closed.
But there are terrible creatures that come through with Story. But they don’t come for her. Instead they come to kill Heep before he writes a single word. These creatures enter through the same portal that Story uses (it remains open as long as she is in the world of the humans and will only be closed once she has returned to the Blue World).
And we’re not just talking about a hedge-dog with a lame name here. That particular creature could just be the start. I’d want a real escalation of threat here. I mean, you don’t just stick your protagonist up a tree and then leave them there for a bit before telling them that they can get down. You’ve got to throw stones at them.
There’s no healing mud and no stupid bird – the Blue World is aquatic, no eagle could get you there. Instead, a portal will open in the swimming pool, and the protagonists (and the audience) will get just the briefest of glimpses of the Blue World.
Oh, and Story needs to be a bit more than an ethereal Bryce Dallas Howard. Her skin should be paler, her eyes stranger. Her hands and feet should be webbed. Most of all – at some point in the film she has to make some active attempt to save herself. Onscreen.
Story needs the help of a few people to get her back through the portal. There should be three helpers. Three. That’s a fine number – a number of power. Western audiences will recognise it instantly from the Trinity but it occurs in various mythologies as well. Seven is a powerful number too, but it’s just too large. Three is good, three is enough.
And those people should be:
The Healer – now this should be the woman that they first thought it was in the actual film. She’s a sweet soul, a faded flower-child that cares for stray animals. She’s someone out of step with the world. She should have many cats and the audience should see inside her apartment. Heep should go to her when Story is first injured instead of messing about with healing mud and whatnot.
The Guardian - this I wouldn’t change. It’s got to be Freddy Rodriguez with his abnormally muscular right arm. The scene of him facing off against the Scrunt in the rain…that was pure poetry.
The Interpreter – now as much as I loved the kid reading the cereal packets it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. We know M. likes to be clever so how about this…the Interpreter is the film critic. The language by which he interprets events should be the language of film (and thus of story-telling in general). Hell, M. already did this in the actual film but it was only there so that he could get a dig in. Think how cool that would be…a fantasy tale where all the characters realise that, it being a fantasy tale, it has to conform to certain rules. It also integrates this rather unlikeable character into the plot so that he never seems like a Deus Ex Machina. He can still be killed. Once he’s no longer useful. Everyone likes a good on-screen killing. It’s this role above all others that should be played by M. Night Shyamalan. That would mean that the characters of his film would be able to go to him for advice on the plot. How Meta- would that be?
No Guild. No man-with-no-secrets. No man-of-respected-opinion. No false climax where it turns out that all the apparent helpers are in fact wrong. No random dudes in leafy gorilla-suits. None of that crap.
Oh…and I’d change those damn names. I mean Narf, Scrunt, what the heck?
It’s supposed to be an Eastern myth, yeah - so give them Asiatic names. And why does the young Asian woman dress like Bai Ling? Young Asian women only ever dress like that in American films.
Just remember to keep escalating the tension. Keep jacking the threat higher and higher until it’s almost unbearable – put in lots of fantastically horrid creatures to keep the FX department happy (and the people that manufacture plastic replicas from movies…Todd McFarlane, I’m thinking of you).
And make it at least half an hour shorter.
And give it a Third Act.
And either aim it at children or at adults. Choose a side.
So that’s my two cents (although at all those words I reckon it must be worth a couple of bucks). Thanks for reading my little film rant, all those that made it this far.
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Comment by Anonymous
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by Anonymous
The term 'scrunt' has various slang usages: in the Caribbean it is used to mean "strapped for cash". Other definitions are mostly obscene and intended as insults.
Narfs are sort of Selkie rip-offs - but without the ability to shape-shift (usually into seals).
Comment by Anonymous