So it’s finally happening. After winning 11 awards at film festivals around the world, a feature I’ve written is getting a cinematic release through Soho Studio this coming Friday, Sep 30.
The film is called A Bird Flew In, and it has a starry cast: Sir Derek Jacobi, Frances Barber, US star Jeff Fahey, French actress Julie Dray, Sadie Frost, Morgana Robinson, Charlotte Rutherford and Bill Fellows, to name but a few. On Saturday I did a Q&A at the New Renaissance Film Festival (the audience loved the film, though there were enough sniffles – in the right places – that I apologised for upsetting them on a Saturday afternoon), where I talked about some of the challenges involved in writing it.
For a start, I was given less than three weeks to write the first draft. But as a journalist by trade, deadlines are in my DNA.
Then there’s the fact that it’s an ensemble movie: a dozen-odd intertwining characters in half a dozen loose pairings. There’s no set road map for this sort of film, so I rewatched a couple of Robert Altmans for inspiration. His style was too freewheeling for me, so in the end I imagined the structure as a series of concentric circles rippling out from a central life-changing event, as from a stone dropped in a pond. Every two weeks between March 26th and June 1st 2020, I would explore what each character in turn was up to on that day.
Why those dates? Because the film is set during lockdown, which began on March 26th. In fact I started writing it the day after lockdown restrictions were first eased on June 1st, and A Bird Flew in became the first UK film to be shot after restrictions had relaxed enough to permit film production, in July.
The premise came from the director, Kirsty Bell, who is also the founder and head of Goldfinch Films. That March she had been shooting a film when she discovered that the first lockdown was about to be declared.
So they scrambled to cut scenes and locations and lines to get the final ten days finished in just 48 hours. At the end, Kirsty turned to her fellow producer, Philippe Martinez, and said, “Phew, that was like a film in itself”. He agreed: “Why don’t you make it?”
That became the opening scenes of A Bird Flew In: a busy, tight-knit crew wrapping a film, and then being sent home, alone. I loved the idea of these show-people with no show, actors without a script, forced to confront themselves in the mirror. But only one couple lived together. The rest would have to conduct any romance or even conversation remotely – and that was the biggest dramatic challenge of all.
So I gave Peter, the writer, an internal monologue; Rebecca, an unravelling actress, a teddy bear to talk to over her vodka (lead pic, above) and fans to talk to on a video stream; David, the ageing and ailing thespian, a carer. And I added a couple of new characters to Kirsty’s roster who were inspired by a scene in Altman’s The Player, in which Tim Robbins’ film exec holds a flirtatious phone conversation with Greta Scacchi’s artist character while – unbeknownst to her – watching her through her window.
This became the obsessive compulsive assistant director, Miles, who spends his lockdown watching and mirroring the actions of one particular girl on his laptop via the security cams in her home. I can’t say why – that’s a spoiler. Watch it and find out. But it fulfilled a dramatic need for two people to be visually together while still isolated by lockdown.
Writing the first draft, of course, was just the beginning. I made many changes as a result of intelligent notes from Kirsty and her talented young producer Ben Charles-Edwards (with whom I had previously collaborated on several successful shorts as well as some abortive features), as well as new developments in casting – the Russian character became French, the romance between two men changed to two women, the British writer became American, the veteran American actor became a British thesp! But I embraced every one as an opportunity to improve the screenplay.
Seeing the finished feature film (for the third time on Saturday) is also to appreciate fully the collaborative joy of film-making. As well as Kirsty and Ben, there’s the cinematographer, Sergio Delgado, who decided it should be filmed in black and white. The composer, Al Joshua (also a talented screenwriter), whose score gives the film its emotional heart and whose song lyrics, stripped of music, provide some of the poetry spoken in the film by Peter the writer. The universally brilliant actors who brought the words I had written to heart-rending or comic life – and, in the case of Sir Derek Jacobi and Frances Barber, improved on my dialogue through improv’ing it. The location, props, costume and lighting crew who performed wonders on impossible deadlines and tight budgets. And after all that the editor, John Smith A.C.E., who rose to the challenge of creating a polished mosaic from the fragmented scenes.
I’m exceptionally proud of the finished film, as should be everyone involved. And, from a selfish point of view, I particularly love some of the lines I wrote for Peter, the character in the film who is most like me:
“If we’re not reflected in someone else’s eyes, do we really exist? If there is no one to laugh at a joke, is it funny? If we are alone, truly alone, are we really alive at all?”
“Social distancing. What an invention. It’s the opposite of what we need as a species. But somehow I feel I’ve been practising for it all my life. Then along comes Anna, dusting at the cobwebs of my heart.”
“Nought point one millimetres. That’s all that separates us: the thickness of human skin. Ten ounces: that’s all a human heart weighs. So why can it feel so heavy? We are all of us prisoners of our flesh. Trapped in our rib cages. Alone in our skulls. It’s love that sets us free…”
London, Hollywood 