Recap: This series chronicles my wide-eyed and crushingly insecure processes that pulled back the curtain on my ideas about filmmaking – revealing what it really takes to write and direct my movie, Recess. Occasionally I gain productive insights that plant me on less insecure ground. Others I still talk to my therapist about. Perhaps the most important insight I’ve kept – from teething as a writer – the idea that creating detailed, well-drawn characters with original voices can make even a script about a haunted doorknob compelling. I realize there may be infinite approaches more resolute but, for me, the haunted doorknob concept puts character development into perspective.
Of course, the doorknob thing hadn’t graced me yet when I sat before my laptop to write my movie, convinced I possessed all right tools: My plot was solid; I could clearly see my principal characters and the world they were to inhabit. Plot or character, which should my focus cultivate first? I obsessed tirelessly over this before it came to me: A character driven piece requires great characters (Haunted Doorknob); this hard fought disclosure put me in motion.
I can’t recall too many details but after typing for just a handful of seconds my scalp started to itch. The same ringing I experienced when my uncle discharged his antique musket too close to my head when I was twelve suddenly packed my ears. Then I probably stood up and walked away from my laptop to lie down.
Later, I realized what had really happened: I could see my characters with great clarity but I had no idea who they were, like strangers in a photograph. This troubled me. A lot.
I spent the next few weeks brainstorming career changes before deciding to man up, sit down and open my Recess file again. This time, before abandoning my laptop to scour Craig’s List, I had a revelation. Osmond, my principal character, an orphan navigating foster care, group homes and a broken child welfare system just might need some factual context. Perhaps at least a good place to start? This took research. Compared to writing it was heaven.
Research took weeks… then a few more weeks. During the process reflections of my favorite movie characters, particularly Don Logan, the abrupt and nerve-racking gangster Ben Kingsley rendered in Sexy Beast, began stabling between my ears. I kept them groomed and fed them well. Like horses to the glue factory, they required deconstruction and I was thorough.
What were the reasons my favorites stayed knocking around in my head after I’d left the theater? The greats seemed meticulously considered from the inside out, as emotional individuals with entire spectrums of life experience, in spite of whether or not their lives would ever be observed by an audience. This changed everything.
I nixed starting with my principal, Osmond. Instead, my therapist was thrilled when I pointed my microscope at myself. For a couple weeks I tracked my biggest flaws, attributes, instincts, fears, emotions, motivations, reactions, the soup that shaped my existence as a human being. Even the most banal and trivial instances – the ones that would make audiences ask for refunds – are very real moments and constitute the majority of our lives. Just think of all the hands that twisted our doorknob before it was haunted.
My breakthrough fired me up and again I sat to confront my laptop. After a few months of brainstorming, Proust and Jung questionnaires, application of my research and living with Osmond, I did the same for my other three principals. It sucked. Every time I sat, the itchy scalp and overwhelming ringing were immediate. As Dorothy Parker said, “I hate writing, I love having written.”
But, the results – genuine, flawed, perplexing individuals capable of real decisions gathered from full lives. Now my characters could forge their movie’s path, guiding me. Their decisions were better than any I could ever write for them.
Point a microscope at yourself and publicize some of your flaws in a comment or in a twitter message, @craigachampion.
Craig Abell-Champion: An unusual kid who grew up on a sheep farm in Oregon. When I reached legal adulthood I was gone and never looked back. I earned a BFA in photography and spent several years shooting pictures around the world. A cinema lover, I moved to Los Angeles in 1998. Directing TV commercials was my film school. Today, I have left the realm of thirty seconds for a longer narrative road. A first time writer/director, my project Recess is in the packaging phase seeking financing.
