Rewatch: opening of Magnolia

Our most recent script discussions included this fantastic opening of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia.



One of our characters sees the world through rationalisation, making things make sense, quantifying experience into formulas. Our note of caution was this: we don't want it to be like the opening of Magnolia. The reason was this: it's simply too good to mess with.

Two guiding stars...

The film I've been working on with Tobias for over a year now has been rather hard work. Most of that work has been mental, a processing of ideas and various attempts at gathering them into a coherent whole. I suppose that is the work of all writers. This has been more difficult though.

The reason it's been so difficult is not really to do with the story. It is about style, and as such should perhaps not be given the notoriety I am giving it here, but nonetheless it has been my biggest - and most consistent - problem. It is this: my attempt to reconcile my admiration for two (apparently) mutually exclusive styles. A documentary-like realism and naturalism and a visually-arresting magical "other"-world. I like each as much as the other, and find it difficult to focus on just one when writing. The result is writing a scene in whichever style I feel I'm "in" that particular day, then doing away with it the next.

However, I think I've managed to achieve some form of synthesis, thanks to two guiding stars, who both, in their entirely separate ways, manage to reconcile these elements: Krzysztof Kieslowski and Michel Gondry. Both manage to ground their stories in a believable, emotionally honest reality whilst acknowledging the magic of everyday life, Kieslowski in his almost spiritual mise-en-scene and pacing, Gondry in his rabid visual imagination.

Of course this voyage of discovery wouldn't be complete without a new problem at the end of it: how not to write a Gondlowski-Kiesry rip-off!

Writing as ironwork...

The word "playwright" comes from the word "wrought", as in wrought iron, to "work into shape by artistry or effort". I can't think of a more apt etymology! When you write something, you are starting out with something rough-edged and clunky and attempting to fashion something coherent and beautiful out of it. And it's no more glamorous than whacking a bit of iron with a big hammer. In fact it's less glamorous, as you have to create even the lump of iron! Ironworkers have it made!

You have the initial excitement of inspiration, the lightbulb moment, then the awful, exhausting, anguish-inducing transfer onto a blank page, then the happy-go-lucky editing process. At uni a teacher said that the biggest artist on a film is the editor. I've kept that in mind ever since.

I think of it like a sandwich, a sort of reverse-sandwich really, with the flavoursome bits either side. I love coming up with the initial ideas and thinking them through, I HATE the middle bit, and love the 2nd, 3rd, 4th drafts. I could be a professional drafter for that matter, I'd be quite happy drafting away, creating multiple versions of things.

Rules for Writing

On my walk down to the bank today two rules for writing popped into my head. Once they had, I thought about coming up with a framework that makes me write more than I do at the moment. My own personal set of rules, that whilst not useful to everyone, might make me more productive. As it happens, the last few days have been very productive, so perhaps I have been subconsciously adhering to these rules before I realised I'd thought of them.

1. Don't second guess yourself, go with your instincts.

2. Get it on the page; edit on paper not in your head.

I'm going to be editing and changing this but I think those two rules (or guidelines, if you prefer) are between them a lot of percent responsible for my lack of finished product.

Creating an atmosphere...

Whenever I spend a long period of time on a piece of writing over the course of a few months, I always find myself listening to certain songs and pieces of music over and over again. They create a soundtrack not necessarily to the work itself but to my writing of it. When I was at university and making my third and debatably most successful attempt at a novel (last time I checked it, it was forty or so pages and some of it wasn't that bad) the soundtrack was Interpol's first album "Turn On The Bright Lights". I don't know what came first, the writing or the music, but soon enough both were inseperable. The content of my novel seemed to fit perfectly the atmosphere of the album.

I've been working on this soulmates-themed film now for seven months or so. As I was sitting down to write this evening I thought I'd take a look at the playlist I've gradually accrued over the last half a year. Some of them seemed strange choices and when played seemed to be sounds from another era, when the film was something else entirely. Those were swiftly deleted. Others appeared to have cemented their place in my mind and in the film. The LCD Soundsystem track "All My Friends" seems now a classic evocation of parts of the script, and when I hear Som Tres' jolly "Homenagem A Mongo" it conjures up a crystal-clear image in my head of one of the club scenes. I can even see the characters dancing to it, each one dancing differently, for all the world as if they were actual, living people.

I've read about this before. A writer, a famous one (I can't remember her name, but I seem to remember it was a woman), wrote of similar feelings. In her case, it was a particular album that seeped into the writing of her novel (I think it was a novel) and its tempo, the rythmn, the way the singer delivered the words all found their way into the novel in the guise of style and even word choice. Something completely unintended and apparently unrealised until the final drafting. I suppose it's unremarkable in the sense that the music you listen to forms part of the fabric of your life, and that is all writers have to put into their work. But on the other hand, its an incredibly mysterious thing, perhaps unexplainable.

More than expected...

Sometimes it's good to take stock. On opening the various scenes of our ever-changing script, I began to get a little confused. We have two realities to play with and it was becoming increasingly uncertain where and when we were switching. Whilst that can be an effect created for the viewer, if the writer shares the same confusion then it's generally a bad sign. I always try to keep hold of the near-maxim: The writer needs to know everything about every character at every minute.

To make more sense of it, I put all the scenes together (we have three "Parts" and each Part has numbers, so we have Part I - 1 but also Part I - 1 - 1) in their logical order and to my surprise discovered (a) it makes far more sense than I thought it would and (b) we have a third of the film. It made me think that we are actually getting somewhere. Every time me and my writing partner Tobias talk, we come up with more ideas, stripping away excess scenes, dialogue, ideas and coming up with newer, more streamlined ones.

Sometimes the end seems to be getting further away, but there's always something to spur you on. Confidence is one, I really think we can come up with a good script and make a good film from it. Excitement is another. We talked at the weekend and tackled the problems posed by the confusion detailed above. In simultaneously making it more rigid and flowing, I think we've achieved some sort of balance and hopefully the structural problems are more behind us than in front of us.