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Training
The Script Factory Masterclass with Nigel Cole, Tim Firth and Penelope Wilton following a preview of Calendar Girls
Screen on the Hill, Hampstead, London
Monday 1 September 2003
An extract from the conversation between Nigel Floyd (director), Tim Firth (screenwriter) and Penelope Wilton (actor), chaired by journalist Nigel Floyd
NIGEL FLOYD (chair)
When I saw the film the first time, I’ve seen it twice now, I was a bit puzzled by the over-all structure of it. When I went into the movie and as it developed, I got it into my head that I knew exactly where it was headed, that it was going to culminate in a kind of Full Monty fashion, with the eventual publication of the calendar and that kind of ‘moment of triumph’. But what you’ve actually done is you’ve chosen to go quite a long way beyond that point, and that seems to me to be quite a brave thing to do. Can you explain why you resisted that, if you like, ‘American Formula’ of having the third act just build up to that climactic moment?
TIM FIRTH (Screenwriter)
I don’t think it would have been a film if it had ended at the calendar, because actually there would have been no conflict. Nothing unpleasant, except the death of John, would have happened. They would have had this great idea, and it worked, which is a hard pitch for anybody. Right from the off I knew that the point of the calendar is what it did to the lives of the people who were involved in it. Now of course, up to the success of the calendar, that hadn’t happened. It was only in America, when things started to become darker, so the third act is so desperately important I think to the story because that’s where the conflict in the film actually lies. I was lucky because I came into this situation later, and up to the point before I came onto the film, the conflict between the women which had happened in real life, hadn’t really happened, and of course the well publicised split between the women over the calendar provided the film with its own third act because the notion of becoming a celebrity through the most tragic of circumstances was the extra ingredient that the film needed, and that ingredient comes in the New York sequence. I really hope that when people see this, they don’t feel that the films goes to America just because there was an American production company involved, or that it was just a change of scenery. It was vital for the women to be taken out of the area where we love them best, where the film loves them best, Yorkshire, and expose them to a different set of codes and systems, and them we recover them from that position. So America is as vital to the film as the calendar.
AUDIENCE QUESTION
Can you talk a bit more about the writing process, how it evolved, how you first came up with the idea of doing it, how many drafts and how long it took?
NIGEL COLE (Director)
It came about because Harbour Pictures, the two producers who are here [tonight], Nick and Suzanne originally had the idea. And they worked with a writer called Juliette Towhidi, and together did four or five drafts. I came in for the fifth of those drafts, then Tim took it over, and we then did I think three or four drafts with Tim. It was a long process and you know, it’s deceptively simple this film. It really seems like a simple English comedy, but it’s one of the most complicated and difficult scripts I think you can imagine. It took a lot of backwards and forwards, a lot of soul searching and tearing things up and starting again, just trying to find the rhythm of it. We went over it again and again. The weird thing is, and I promise you I’m not just saying this because the executive producers are here, everyone thinks that because it was a Disney, Buena Vista film, the pressure was to make it a feel good film, a jolly film. Actually Buena Vista were pushing us the other way, and they kept saying “there’s real drama here, we need to up the drama, find more conflict, we need to make it a more moving, a more powerful film.” And that was the hard thing, trying to balance the comedy and the drama, and I think that’s why it took so long and why it took so many drafts. When we were playing around we’d get the comedy right, and the drama would go to pieces, or we’d get the drama right and the comedy would disappear. And also this business, which relates to your first question, of The Full Monty moment being in the middle of the film, and finding a way of keeping the story going. To carry on what Tim said to answer that question, when I first met these women, that’s what they talked about, what it was like after they became famous, that’s what struck you after you met these women. They’d had this extraordinary roller coaster ride, this amazing experience, but 90% of it was after the calendar had come out, after they were famous. And also, all through that development process, everything we looked at, every time we picked up a newspaper or turned on the TV, everything seemed to be about instant celebrity. It was during the first series of Big Brother, Pop Idol, Fame Academy. This seemed to be what everything was about, so we felt we had to find a way of including the instant celebrity that they had, and it was really hard. Sometimes I feel we didn’t quite pull it off, sometimes I think we do, it was a really tricky job to do.
TIM FIRTH
I didn’t meet the women at all, until the script had been green lit and was going into production. Deliberately so because I never read the original writer’s scripts, I read a beat sheet which Nigel had put together of how he thought the structure should be, and I’d never done a re-write before, I’d never been very interested in doing re-writes for films and with this one there were lots of reason I thought I could do it, mainly because my Mum was in the W.I., I used to go on holiday to this area, and I’d bought a calendar from one of the women the year before, and it all felt sort of close. So I literally just shut myself in a hotel, and started again, from ground level, from Nigel’s beach sheet. And wrote very very quickly, wrote the first twenty minutes of the film in the first day, and quite a lot of that actually ended up staying in, just because I knew that to write it, actually in the space of time we’d got, would take speed. And it’s very interesting that now, on other projects that I’ve done since, I’ve tried to recapture that same speed and brutality because I was going in and saying, “this isn’t working, and it’s not working because of this, and it’s not dramatic enough and it’s not funny.” I was much more ruthless than I’ve ever had to be, and then I finished the film and thought, “well, why don’t I do that on my own ideas?” So it’s kind’ve revolutionised the way I work myself. But I didn’t feel I could have been as hard with the women in the third act as they needed to be with each other, if I could see their faces when I writing it. As so I deliberately didn’t want to meet them, didn’t know the story, and wrote it based on my Mum and her friends and the people I knew in the W.I. And I hope these women have ended up quite close to them and their people, and their own mentalities by starting from a completely different standpoint.
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