I got in last night (actually a week or two ago now that I’m ready to post) feeling like I wanted to watch a classic, something showing the art of a great film-maker learning to stretch his talent – and his budget – as far as possible.

Every now and then the stream of sewage that is broadcast television spews out something worthwhile, like a dirty dank coal-mine yielding a 20-carat diamond. On this occasion ITV4 blessed me with exactly the gem I was hoping for.

It’s pretty much Spielberg’s debut feature.  And, without wishing to understate the film-makers’ craft, the logistics of shooting the movie must have been pretty damn simple.  They would have run something along the lines of…

1) Get hold of a car. A cheap, red, American car.

2) Stick an everyman behind the wheel. A cheap, red-faced, American everyman.  (In case anybody has registered that he represents the travelling salesman within all of us, call him David Mann.)

3) Stick a camera behind the everyman (and in front of him, and either side of him).

4) Get hold of a rig. A cheap, rusty, really beat-up rig.

5) Film the rig marauding the car at high speed, snaking along hundreds of kilometres of long empty roads through the heartless heartland of America.

6) Drive the car and the rig into a ravine, filming it from about thirty different positions.

Of course, there’s more to it than that. Every now and then Mann stops, and gets out of the car, and – through his total inability to engage with the inhabitants of the dried-up backwaters he’s washed up in – says very little.  We see how isolated and insecure he has become, expressed through this conspicuous lack of dialogue.

On the rare occasions that Mann speaks, he does so in fits and spurts. He scoffs at the gas station attendant’s transparent attempt to sell him a new radiator hose, or stumbles through the process of ordering a glass of water and a cheese sandwich. At the peak of his performance, he confronts a fellow diner with a string of incoherent demands and misguided accusations, all of which turn out to be totally unwarranted.

The real narrative momentum of DUEL is delivered through Mann’s interior monologue, as he explores each avenue of action open to him, and discovers each to be a dead-end. The film becomes a backdrop against which each of us is left to wonder how we would respond in the face of such a brutally malevolent force, one that will not relent, one that cannot be reasoned with.

Immediately after DUEL ITV4 screened an hour-long interview with Spielberg in which he discussed his work on several of his better-known films. With regard to DUEL, he revealed that he had undertaken the project on the strength of his first great realisation in film-making – that, armed with a good script, and his own assorted faculties, he could make a watchable movie.

So what is it that makes it such a good script?

Well, there’s the fact that it cuts brilliantly to an essential vulnerability at the heart of the human condition. That it holds us at the precipice, and forces us to gaze downward into the depths of our own potential powerlessness and ineffectuality. There is that.

Of course, there’s also the fact that it’s written to be so overtly realisable. Given one capable actor, two beat-up vehicles, three or four scenes with any significant dialogue, and a decent stint in an audio suite recording voiceover, Spielberg crafts a debut feature worthy of Hitchcock. And, by Spielberg’s own admission, if DUEL owes anything to Hitchcock, it was there in the script before he even picked it up.

I think I came home wanting more than to just watch a movie.  I wanted to learn something.  What did DUEL teach me?  That a good script doesn’t just deliver on elevated ideas and stylised insight into the human condition.  It’s set in a single location, or a wide open space – somewhere cheap to film.  It emphasizes a few central performances, and a concentration of focus and narrative tension.  Think the rich and concentrated mix of talent stranded in the remoteness of space, in Ridley Scott’s ALIEN.  Think the patchwork of talent isolated in the polar wilderness, in John Carpenter’s THE THING.

Look at the common ingredients, in pure story-telling terms, as they start to emerge:

1. We find ourselves at an environmental extremity, some lonely and isolated colonial outpost characterised by it’s actual and ideological displacement from the ‘civilised’ world.
2. We discover a tormenting force, at first hidden from view, whose motives and modus operandi become gradually clearer as the story unfolds.
3. We turn to our central protagonist – the character with whom our greatest sympathies lie. Though abrasive in manner, perhaps even mildly sociopathic, he or she is also essentially rational and reasonable, and ready to come to life in the face of adversity.
4. Our protagonists prevail, but never triumph.  These movies gain a great deal from showing an awareness of the difference between one and the other.

I don’t know about anybody else, but these make some pretty compelling building blocks for a debut feature.  They lend themselves to sprawling westerns, long range sci-fi, and the kind of smothering horror movies and psychological thrillers I grew up on.

They put the onus on the writing, confining events within the claustrophobic context of a wide open space, juxtaposing the intricacies of human nature against the an otherwise prosaic and inanimate backdrop.

This is the script I’m currently trying to write, and the idea behind the idea behind Weatherman.

All I need is the damn time to do it.

2am. I awoke suddenly and utterly a few moments ago, after just two hours sleep, neatly exiting a startlingly vivid dream into which one of my most notorious ex-girlfriends had just assuredly introduced herself. Still, nice to know the old ejector seat is still in good working order.

A couple of days ago I posted the first sequence of the first draft of a screenplay I’ve been working on, called WEATHERMAN, with a view to answering a few questions, specifically in relation to Syd Field’s Basic Film Paradigm. I subsequently circulated the link to the following sprinkling of friends and acquaintances:

Dan Outram – writer and director of numerous short films and commercials
John Donnelly – writer and director of numerous stageplays
Kate Solomon – associate producer on UNITED 93
James Scudamore – author of The Amnesia Clinic
Dane McMaster – colleague, serial west coast technophile and screen guru
Emma Light – critic; therapist; confidante; wife

By the time I got up a few hours later I already had some good feedback. Dan was quick to set me straight on a fundamental tenet of screenwriting technique, asserting that “you shouldn’t write anything other than that which is seen or heard. Only that is allowed to tell the story. Otherwise the audience will not know it.” I’ve already taken that on board, and the updated version is available here.

Dane picked up on the question of whether short films need to conform to the paradigm: “Yes, in this matter at least, syd field is correct. a three act structure such as this should be adhered to as closely as possible. once you’ve mastered this you can destroy it and begin to build your own form of… well, form. Kubrick’s 2001, for example, does not follow this structure. Nor does Full Metal Jacket. But he’s one of the few directors who can stray from it and make it play. David Lynch actually adheres quite strictly to this formal structure… even if the elements that form his 3 parts are in a somewhat abstract form. David Mamet is another huge supporter of this form.”

Set-up, confrontation and resolution it is then I guess. I like the idea that it has to be mastered in order that it can be transgressed. It’s a fascinating point about Full Metal Jacket as well. Though I may have lacked the ‘education’ to put my finger on it, I always knew intuitively that there was something unusual about the form of that movie.

Dane also advised me to change the title. “Nicolas Cage got there first. Nobody needs to be reminded of that movie.” For the uninitiated (which, in the case of this movie, will be most of you) he’s talking about The Weather Man. He’s probably right, but I don’t need to start worrying about that quite yet. When I was a kid I’d spend days dreaming up great titles for my first novel, avoiding the trickier business of actually writing one. Speaking of which, in the words of the late Clarence Boddicker, “Sayonara Robocop.” [stabs Robocop in the chest with metal rod].

This has raised a number of questions in relation to WEATHERMAN.

Does the paradigm apply to short films? Does it scale from a 120-page screenplay down to one consisting of only 15-30 pages? Can the current draft be remodelled and transposed onto this paradigm? And, if so, is that what I should be doing? Is a short film adopting this paradigm even the right format for this idea? If not, what is?

In search of some answers I went for a drink recently with an old schoolfriend – Dan Outram – who has some experience working as a director of commercials and short films. I pitched him the concept as concisely as possible and he was quick to draw my attention to a number of issues, the foremost of which is that a screenwriter has to be constantly aware of what the audience doesn’t know. 15-30 pages (i.e. minutes) isn’t a long time to deliver a complete narrative, particularly one that is established in an unfamiliar social or cultural context.

Maybe that’s why I’ve decided to post the first few pages of the current draft here, for whomever finds it, and cares to read it – in the hope that any comments will help me gauge what you know; what you want to know; what you need to know. You don’t have to post them below – you can always email them to me. Anonymously, if you prefer

The root concept can be traced all the way back to a poem i wrote as part of a creative writing course while studying English Lit in Edinburgh, some time around 1999. I think I eventually called it ‘Alien’, forming part of a fairly slapdash body of work submitted to a suitably indifferent reception. I still have it on a disc somewhere, formatted for the Apple Mackintosh Classic I was using at the time (see below) – if I manage to resurrect it maybe I’ll try and get a copy up on here, for posterity alone.

‘Alien’ came back to mind about a year ago when I was out with Ems, wheeling Lola around Downs Park. I was trying to explain what Second Life was, how it worked, what mind-bending possibilities existed beyond it’s immediate limitations.

I started playing around with the script during a week in France earlier this year. We had a blanket week-long ban on blackberries, mobiles, laptops, but on the first day we went down to the local village and I bought a typewriter in a bric-a-brac market for 10 euros. It was pretty cranky, but it basically worked ok.

The great thing about writing on a typewriter is that you don’t tend to get bogged down the way you do when you word process. With a typewriter, you maintain a certain amount of forward momentum, rather than endlessly chewing over your work until the spirit and spontaneity of what made you sit down and start writing in the first place is no longer recognisable.

I came back from France with a first draft, if you could call it that. I stole the occasional moment to type it up a little, but for the most part it stood still. I picked it up again in Thailand, made some real progress thinning down the dialogue, and developed a stronger sense of how it might be structured. Of course, one step forward is so often ten steps back, and I came back from Thailand knowing that there was still a hell of a lot of work to do.

The reason I’m posting about it now is that Kelly O, a friend of mine from LA who does some work with Fox, met me for breakfast at the Broadway Deli in Santa Monica on Saturday, walked me up to Barnes & Noble, and found me a copy of Syd Field’s ‘SCREENPLAY: The Foundations of Screenwriting’. I started reading it on the flight back and it’s already clear to me what a cruel and necessary and illuminating process it will be finding out exactly how much I have to take on board.

There was one quote that hit me square in the face the first time I read it, right at the end of the introduction: “Talent’s is God’s gift; either you’ve got it or you don’t. But writing is a personal responsibility; either you do it or you don’t.” I like that. When I go too long without making the time to write, I feel like I’m neglecting a responsibility. I hope I go on feeling that way.