Saturday afternoon + evening: to Wanstead for a screenplay writing session with Stuart N. Never done this style of writing before: two people in a room throwing ideas about, writing them down. It does force you to get something done: I refuse to leave until we’ve plotted out the rest of the story and given it an ending. And we do.
The distraction with two-person writing sessions is, of course, to just sit and chat about shared interests, or gossip about friends or people in the news, or show the other person a book or film or internet article that they’d like. We do that too, but just about manage to keep it in its place. The sense of needing to get back to work is doubled, and harder to avoid. It’s easier to work than not work.
We both chat about the excellent film In Bruges, for instance, but Mr N also praises the deleted scenes on the DVD, which I hadn’t seen. So he shows me them on his TV – but only AFTER we’ve finished writing. And indeed, there’s two memorable cut scenes which are frankly better than some entire non-deleted movies.
One scene stars Matt Smith, now known as the next Doctor Who. He plays the younger version of Ralph Fiennes’s Kray-like gangster in a flashback to the early 70s, strolling casually into a London police station to enact revenge on a detective. The revenge itself is violent, surreal, highly unlikely, and really rather brilliant.
I can see why the scene was cut, but given the expense and effort that went into it – period hair, clothes and locations not used elsewhere, actors hired purely for that one scene – plus one special effect – it must have been a pretty hard decision.
Another quick scene features Ralph Fiennes on the Eurostar, quietly dealing with an irritating passenger via a fantastic put-down straight out of Derek & Clive. Like the Matt Smith scene, it justifies the invention of DVD extras, those digital alibis of the cutting room floor.
Tags: In Bruges, Matt Smith
