Armando Ianucci's "The Thick It" (although Peter Capaldi as the demonic
Malcolm Tucker is the only character the show and the film have in common).
It is Ianucci's take on how America and Britain might have ended up
going to war together, and it is genuinely laugh-out loud funny, without
ever losing sight of the fact that these screw-ups are finescing
decisions that will lead to the deaths of thousands of people.
Anyway, to the point - in the QandA afterwards Ianucci said the first
cut if the film was 4.5 hours long. The final version is 90 mins.
And in editing, you finally discover the story you are going to tell,
based not on what was written before the first day of photography, but
on what was achieved with it by everyone involved - director,
cinematographer, cast, crew, caterers.
The story of a film created not by what is said, but in the images,
looks, tics and twitches caught on film like flowers between the pages
of a book.
That's what attracts me to film (and before that, in a previous
existence to theatre) the "creative failure of control", (which is not
the same thing as a "failure of creative control")
You still need the best script to make a film.
People have made crap films out of good scripts, but its pretty nigh
impossible to make a first rate film out of a piss-poor script.
But I'm not the director, I don't have to keep control of the story -
just provide enough material for other people to do what they do to
create a 4.5 hour cut, which might emerge as 90 mins of story, which I
hope will surprise me.
Now I just have to work out how that translates on the page, and where I
can put the bit where the hero and heroine meet for the first time
without sending the reader to sleep
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