The 12th day

                                        

A girl laughed at a joke. An idealist fumed at some injustice. Some one started singing.
She isn’t there. Not yet. He felt all alone. Abandoned in the crowd.
He stood in the room. Watching all the people. Conversations. Idiosyncrasies. Provocations.
He knew what united all of them… Loneliness. They were all trying to pretend that these meetings somehow can substitute for life.
She used to say-‘The moment we lose faith in happy endings, we will stop coming here.’
Did she lose faith? He wondered. She hadn’t turned up for the last twelve days.
A friend winked at him. He ignored it. Someone was waving a big flag as if his life depended on it. Some one was writing a phone number on the wall in big red strokes. But nothing held his interest any more. Not even the new faces with pretty names.
The friend nudged him twice. He sat still. Finally the friend went away, fuming.
He felt old. The world was becoming too repetitive. Even the heart breaks are being compared with the severity of the older ones now. And the worst part is that he didn’t even know where she lived. ‘Not yet’- she used to say whenever he talked about it.
He got up and logged off from the chat room.
He thought-May be she would come tomorrow. May be tomorrow she would sit beside him with a mischievous smile. And would say- ‘Now tell me. Is thirteen lucky or unlucky?’

Photo by funkyfork

Redrafting the thriller script

 

                                                                          

We have started rewriting the thriller. Major problem we are facing during the rewrite is how to change things that do not work without affecting elements that work. This is a tricky situation because we got some rave reviews for the first draft. So now the thing is that we don’t want to blindly go on reshuffling it when in the first place itself we have something good in our hands. It is not always necessary that the script on which you toil the most will be your best script. Sometimes it just happens and then you are scared that you will lose it if you go on shuffling with it.
We had done a lot of head banging during developing the treatment. I think that is reflecting in the first draft. We never got stuck during the first draft due to the excessive detailing. Many characters developed during the first draft. Another major thing that happened while writing the first draft was that we found a new ending half way into the story. And that ending has stuck because every one who read it found it novel.

Avatar

  Yeah, I know. I am not the first person to say that Avatar is going to revolutionise the way we watch movies. It is the future of cinema. I mean visually. But at the same time, the direction to which it points is a little scary for me. Somehow it appears that form is going to dominate the content in this format.

Look at Avatar. Let aside all the parallels and metaphors of colonisation and imperialism. What remains is a very basic story line. May be it was intentional from the side of James Cameron. If you have to penetrate into all the nooks and corners of the world with your cinema, you will have to remain elemental in your story. That is a lesson he might have learned with Titanic. Now the problem is that is that there is no point in telling the story of ‘Forrest Gump’ or ‘American beauty’ with 3D. With all the expensive expertise it is going to be tough to collect the revenue globally. So until a time when 3D becomes cheap like 2D, it is going to be all about explosions and arrows rushing past you. I have no problem with that. You can push the envelope in an action film too in terms of ideas and plotting. ‘Dark Knight’ did do that. Look at District 9. It had original content because it never tried to be a ‘big’ movie.

What really is going to be troublesome is the global outlook. When you try to cater to all at the same time, you will have to remove everything that may not work with any subgroup and satisfy yourself with the bare essentials in terms of story.