How to and How Not to Make a Film by Aubrey Reynolds

Daddy’s Little Girl – In August 2009 I had a dream-slash-nightmare that involved a werewolf, a British roundhead soldier crossing through time and getting hit by a car and a secret government think tank creating super soldiers. I woke up at 2am and fever dream wrote it down (it included the best worst line of dialogue I’ve ever written “those aren’t car injuries!”) Sent it to Tim the next day as an oddity and we forgot about it.

I also had a recurring image in my head – a tough son of a bitch man with a girl chained to a table whose legs have been amputated. He’s keeping her their because she’s a werewolf and he’s a werewolf hunter.

This then got sat on and pondered whilst I worked on three different scripts for submission (two of which would never have been accepted as I hadn’t read the guidelines and they were going to be resubmissions so – read the guidelines!) and somewhere along the way “Daddy’s Little Girl” a torture porn horror film about a farmer who is keeping a girl chained up in a shack and kills people, butchering them, with a twist that made it a family drama, with a werewolf, came about.

The first draft had about 5 lines of dialogue; was a genre horror film, and also had a twist at the beginning (the roundhead running through the woods being hit by a modern day car. The script was my best chance of being funded I thought so with Tim as producer, and me to direct we decided to go for it. We knew it was our last chance to get funded, and if we got funded that we had to knock it out of the park and that we both had to be completely in control of the project – that we would live and die by our decisions.

Application – It got through and got to the development weekend at Vision and Media – 30 projects all knowing that only 6 will get funded; 30 writers all believing that they have written the best script and should be funded; 30 writer/producer/director teams all trying to score points in the eyes of the funders and sound ‘better’ than everyone else in the room. It’s insane – a room of mostly 25 – 40 year old white balding men (of which I fit into), all desperately wanting the funding and all trying to act like they don’t really need it.

A few choice moments from the ‘speed dating pitching’ where – after delivering my storypitch getting this response: “aww, is this the first thing you’ve ever written?”; being told one story by the director, a completely different story by the producer and a very different story by the writer of the same project and being informed by the producer of a project that his director was a visionary genius and the most talented person in the room and that their film was about Palestine all represented through a woman climbing an endless ladder.

The development session was also the best I’ve ever been on; the tutor had worked on massive projects for Hollywood, the type I dream of writing, and I learnt some very important things. What an associational narrative is (and why I never saw 3 act structure – or any structure sometimes – in successful shorts but was always told to put one into my ideas) and a lot about the economy of screenwriting. I was also given two great script notes – have him butcher the body in the room with her (racks up the tension); and change the title, it gives the twist away.

To read more of Aubrey’s blog you can visit Inside the Mid of an Evil Genius