Finished Greatest SciFi Films (Movies sorry. It’s American in sensibility) Never Made yesterday (author David Hughes). What struck me, as ever when reading these types of books is how difficult it is to get work made. I pitched for a SciFi film a couple of years ago which I got some support to develop as a feature through a BBC WritersRoom and Royal Court scheme. I was clear that the project was very ambitious and that it required a ‘leap of faith’ by the commissioners to move it on. The discussion about the films were really more about ‘development hell’ as opposed to films that were never made so the different levels of leaps of faith required to get work made struck me. This isn’t really about the funding levels of the projects the book describes but more how work is commissioned and developed.
The other major thing that I’m reflecting on is how difficult it is to get a script that ‘works’. This challenge is what I love about writing. The script is both a technical document and a literary piece of work and getting this balance ‘to work’ on the page is the motivation that keeps me writing.
Now as to the title of this post- I have moved on to now reading Emanuel Levy’s biog about Vincente Minnelli. He always struck me as someone who tried to make ‘different’ films inside a very particular creative system.
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