2.Main Content
Training
The Script Factory Masterclass with director Damien O' Donnell, writer Paul Fraser, and producer Richard Jobson
Damien O'Donnell's Heartlands
The text below is an excerpt from a Masterclass which followed a preview screening of HEARTLANDS at The Odeon Covent Garden on Tuesday 29 April 2003. The session was chaired by Nigel Floyd, freelance journalist and commentator.
NIGEL FLOYD
Thanks to all of you for coming. I hope you enjoyed the film as much as I did. Let me kick off with a question for Paul. You come from this part of the UK [Blackpool], so I wondered how much of this comes from your experiences of the people you grew up around, and also how collaborative was the process of developing this screenplay?
PAUL FRASER, writer
As a child I remember that period of darts with Eric Bristow, Jockey Wilson, Keith Deller and those sorts of names well. I always wanted to do something about darts and so gathered together the recollections, thoughts and ideas I wanted to pull into some kind of story.
I gave Richard [producer, Richard Jobson] a script, which was essentially the basis for what Heartlands became. When Richard came on board we talked about the journey, because it was to Brighton, initially. Richard told me to think about where I was from and where I would go and what I would do and that led to the change to the Peak District. The Peak District is the back garden to Nottingham, and back garden to Sheffield - it’s the regional front. Working on a script is a constant development process. I’m used to writing with a guy called Shane Meadows, and the process that Shane and I have is one of constant, ongoing development and constant changes…you know, most of the stories that Shane and I write never really get made. We did a film called A Room for Romeo Brass, which started out as a western in America. We realised it was a problem when every scene was ‘exterior, prairie’ and we had no idea what America was really like so we changed it to something we knew about. A road movie for me would naturally be in a Honda 50. To do a road movie, particularly with a Honda 50 - just seemed perfect for what Richard and I were talking about when we started to develop Heartlands.
NIGEL
Richard, can you pick up the story from there, and explain a little bit how that process of working with Paul on the script moved you forward to the stage where you could then start looking around for a director and sign up Damien?
RICHARD JOBSON, producer
Yeah, Paul sent me a spec script, which we worked on pretty closely. Paul is, I think, one of the great young writers of dialogue and character in British cinema at the moment. I really think he’s fabulous at that. Sometimes his stories ramble in all kinds of directions a bit like his answer a minute ago! So I think what we try to do is just tune it up and work out what the story is and what the themes are that interest us. And essentially I think what interested me was a kind of Englishness that I like, a quality of Englishness that I kind of admire, quietly. It focuses on the kind of person who’s really always at the periphery of a film, not the person who’s at the centre of a film. I think in the UK, in screenwriting terms, we’ve got a terrible problem of writing extraordinary characters that go on very ordinary journeys. I was quite interested in creating a very ordinary character that went on a quite extraordinary journey - emotionally. I think the story that Paul and I created became somewhat over heightened in that way, and I was pushing it more towards caricature, obviously a failing in me both as a producer and writer, perhaps. But I thought it was a way to go and make it more almost Capra-esque, so the people he met in the Peak District were not very real, it was much more fantastical. So by the time we had finished the draft, most people had turned down our idea and weren’t that excited about it. Damien came along and saw something in the script that was very special, which I think essentially was Paul’s eye for character and language. He took all the rubbish that I’d brought to the script, which was the heightened qualities, and got rid of it immediately, and made it into the kind of beautiful, charming story that it is.
NF
The thing that interests me most is that you like to have a lot of rehearsal time and you like to work through the ideas in the script, get the actors familiar with the characters. Now, it strikes me that there might be an interesting trade-off there, and perhaps you could talk about it in relation to this film, which is that, yes, they become very familiar with the characters and maybe the story develops in certain ways that you weren’t expecting before you actually start shooting, but how do you retain the freshness then, when you get on set, if you have that long (period of) rehearsing and going over the lines?
DAMIEN O'DONNELL, director
Well, rehearsal isn’t going over the lines in my opinion. We had about 10 days of rehearsal, which I think is about average for a feature film. I think the big mistake you can make is not rehearsing in advance of shooting, because it throws up so many creative ideas, suggestions, it clarifies so much. It certainly did for me in a lot of ways. I think casting of this film was the crucial thing, and the crucial decision was casting Michael Sheen. It was actually Paolo Reich, who suggested we meet Michael for the part. I actually thought he was too good-looking, which he is in real life, if you ever see him, but he embraced it. Part of the rehearsal process was to hear the words being spoken, and to develop a confidence in it. I myself was completely charmed by a lot of the moments in the screenplay, but there were moments I was hesitant about. Rehearsal is not about going over the lines, and over the lines, and over the lines - it’s not at all. A lot was improvised. We’d say, “this is the scene, let’s read the lines, does everyone understand the lines? Okay, let’s do it without the script and see what happens; let’s swap places and see what happens”. It was just about exploring the characters, getting everyone comfortable so there was no loss of spontaneity. I have this thing, if I have niggles I just keep at them and at them, even when shooting them, even when shooting the master to see if something comes along that’s inspiring. If it does, then you throw that master away and do another master with the improvements. The scenes were always getting better, because people were always coming up with new ideas or new twists or embellishments. I have to say, as a film, it’s been the most spontaneous experience (I’ve had). We had a window of opportunity to do this film. That meant we had to ask prospective financiers to sign off on the script despite the fact I don’t think you could say it was fully developed as a script – by any means.
Because of this your traditional process of development had to be set aside. Instead the development happened between myself, Paul and Richard - and the cast - when we were rehearsing. I think the script grew from that in a lot of ways. A lot of details were changed.
If you put the original script in the state I had it prior to shooting, through your average development process for financing a film, I think (the film) probably might still be in development. There were things that needed to be ironed out, and under normal circumstances you wouldn’t be satisfied to go into production until they had been ironed out. But I think that would have destroyed Heartlands as a film. What we had were things that needed to be ironed out but we were ironing them out, knowing that we were going to be shooting it in a very, very short period of time, and you either got it right or you didn’t. Certainly you ended up with a very different film than if you’d tried to get the script to the stage where, yes, they were happy to shoot it. In a typical development process, I think you’d still be sitting there looking at pages, you know, text on a page rather than looking at celluloid on a screen.
RJ
Of course from a creative point of view, I think Gina Carter who was the main producer on the film was fabulous. It’s a kind of nightmare experience really as a producer, because what you’ve got is a script which is quite malleable, there’s lots of space there for the director to invest that kind of spontaneous creativity. But of course the bottom line is that you’ve still got to deliver a story based on a particular schedule, and I think there’s an art to that kind of film-making, and you’ve got to support a director like Damien and a writer like Paul who want to do that kind of work and have that kind of creative experience. How do you produce that kind of work in the current market in the UK? I think it’s a very, very difficult task. Heartlands was shot all on the road exteriors, a lot of location moves. So there’s another art to this kind of filmmaking. I think, led by Gina, Damien was backed up very well by a team working behind him. If you don’t have a very strong producer, how do you make this kind of work? You haven’t got a chance in hell of getting that far.
NF
Paul - a question for you more specifically about the film. The thing I loved about the movie was that the character of Colin at the beginning is very much an innocent. He seems almost chronically naïve. But as the movie moves through its various stages and particularly in the final scenes - there is a very strong sense that he comes of age. It is as if Colin is a child at the beginning but by the end he is beginning to realise all the things he’s missed. There’s almost a sadness that exists for the life he hasn’t lived. And that was the thing that really, really moved me in those final scenes. I was dreading the fact that he was going to end up back with his girlfriend, and thank God he didn’t do that. In a way it was almost as if he couldn’t go back there any more, he’d now moved on somewhere. Can you say a little bit about that?
PF
Yeah - with Colin’s journey, Damien first said about it being a man’s odyssey. For me, it’s Colin’s road movie; his journey of discovery, him going off and discovering things he’s never discovered before. For me, it was a story about a man who has spent his whole life in one place, one town, met someone when he was 14, married her, and not seen any more of life than that. Colin is given an opportunity, under unfortunate circumstances, to get out and go and explore and see the world. And that’s what he does. I think what you see at the end is the fact that he is going to carry on, and he is going to go on and he is going to go and see things.
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