Charlie Productions : How To...Finish

We have made a lot of films but their numbers are nothing compared to those we haven't made. Like other endings, some were painful, some a blessed relief but all somehow passed the point of no return.

And how I wish I could put my finger on quite what that point was. How I wish I could see it, like a mathematical formula or sunset. I would love to write against the clock, pushing the project into that sunset, all the time knowing that I had just to wait until the light finally faded and I could call it a day, we could stand back shaking our heads sadly and declare for sure that this story is going no further. But no matter how many times we have tried to create that situation it is never like that.

Rather, writing a film is like having a party. At the start you are getting drunk and everything is exciting and everyone is happy. The point of no return comes somewhere during the evening when, unexpectedly, you find you have drunk too much and everything has slipped out of your control. You are making a fool out of yourself and everyone good has gone home. You never see it coming, it's never the same point, I mean, last night I did five pints and half a bottle of rum and I was still standing and talking fluently so why has that tequila gone straight to my legs... but wow, yeah, suddenly, none of this is working...

And the worst thing about the point of no return is that like being drunk rather than in darkness it is not the point at which you stop, merely the point at which everything becomes futile.

A good example of this is one of our earliest and thankfully most unmade films. We started out in our teens making a comic version of the Bible. This involved filming a lot in our local wood and so we soon decided that we too should make one of those films about kids in woods. To be honest the point of no return probably came shortly after we'd got over the excitement of filming a bit of us running through trees. That looked great but in truth neither of us wanted to actually make a low budget horror film at all so we should have buried the idea with the exuberance of the moment. A clearer sign should have been the appalling script in which we avoided horror cliche and instead I forced us to delve deep into sci-fi cliche. This left us with a horror film called "For The One" in which no one died and nothing happened except me standing in darkness talking to my mate Keith about made-up science. We were drunk at the party and no one was taking us home, but we didn't know it. We wrote more, argued lots, rehearsed our friends and can only have been saved by Lady Fortune from actually filming what would have now been a crushing embarrassment.

Likewise our second or third short film (depending how you care to count) is finished though it remains unfinished to this day. The shoot was calamitous and horribly expensive, though to our credit we somehow came through it having shot everything we thought we needed to. We cut the film in time for the Edinburgh Festival where our previous short, "Crowd Scene For Existentialists" was premiering. "Crowd Scene" is short and sweet, perhaps overly intellectual but funny and charming. "Cold" as it's successor was grimly titled, lumbering in at 25 minutes and was the full teenage deal of gloomy silences and pointless extended shots of people smoking. There is much to be learnt from making a wrong film like this but what we really should have listened to was the shorts distributor we met at Edinburgh. He'd enjoyed "Crowd Scene" and was happy to take a VHS of our rough-cut of "Cold", saying that he was pleased to meet people who weren't making overlong gloomy films about depressed teenagers...

We were young enough to be just about forgiven for taking the film that far, indeed the struggles of even cutting the thing to 25 minutes were very informative. But that reluctant handshake as we handed the man a film we knew he'd hate should have been the end of the matter. It had served its useful life for us, it had no value to the rest of the world and it never would. But we didn't stop until again Fate played a role in the form of an inept studio engineer who deleted the soundtrack that we felt sure would have rescued the material and given it meaning.

Of course not every unmade project grinds grimly to a close, some are snatched untimely from your grasp by the outside world. One of the earliest feature length screenplays I wrote was basically "The Banger Sisters", a film which received such a tepid response that I think it killed my idea dead in the water. Any pitch of the project must surely sooner or later come a cropper on those rocks as the exec pauses for moment then says "Oh, you mean it's like a british version of that film with, who was it, Sigourney Weaver and Meg Ryan?" I mean I still think my script is a great idea but just say "A British Banger Sisters" to yourself one more time and you'll see that it's impossible to feel anything but revulsion.

Likewise I wrote a rather pointlessly unpleasant Brighton based gangster movie in which I tried to hide the various failings by jumbling the narrative around until it made only the loosest of poetic sense. An experiment I finished some six weeks before "The Limey" was released in the UK and made the whole thing look not merely poor but ripped-off too. Rather charmingly I was thinking not so long ago that perhaps there was something of value still in that idea, a dark, seedy, sexually charged gangster story set on the coast, when to my eternal good fortune I was spared from expending any effort on the script by the arrival of "London To Brighton" a dark, seedy, sexually charged gangster story set on the coast...

Ideas are often described as babies and, like babies, they are hard to abandon. Consequently we must be grateful that the process of making a film, or rather, the process of getting a film made (a subtle but important difference) is so harsh that it kills many of our progeny for us. This feels horrible but is a good thing because it saves you working on something that was never going to happen.

Our version of "Days Of Thunder" but set in the world of Go-Karting saw six drafts and two or three years work before the cold fact that thirteen year-old boys on souped up lawn mowers were not going to be a drawer for petrol-head movie fans, or anybody else. Our film about a wedding videographer who turns to gonzo pornography in an attempt to get over his girlfriend leaving him saw two titles and four drafts before we had to accept that it was not merely art-house but worse it could only be seen as a "drama", the one genre tag guaranteed to kill your project dead in the water. A remake of "Heat" but based around the struggle between the head of London's road marking team and a man trying to paint the streets of London the corresponding colours of the Monopoly board was just too unfundably odd for it's cinematic scale. A version of a magic realist short story that at one time had interest from art-house Gods the Brothers Quay ended up too mainstream for them to consider and still far too odd for anyone else...

Now, in almost every case it is possible to claim that the industry made a mistake. After all, a micro-budget Go-Karting Action Movie may have looked like commercial suicide when we were pitching it, but we did have interest from (a then entirely unknown) Lewis Hamilton to take part so, had someone had the foresight to commission it, the subsequent spike in our DVD sales would have broken the graph on IMDB. However, you cannot live in the past. The cold wind of financial disinterest blew across those ideas and they were taken from us.

Not that everything that fails to find a home can be considered finished. Of course you can't keep flogging the same idea around and so once it is clear that now is not the time for such a story it is best to take it off the market. However many of these ideas, like King Arthur, are not dead but merely sleeping. "Free Speech" had two years in a drawer before Barrington gave it the kiss of life. "Hallo Panda" was dead to me three years as charming but unfilmable when Chris insisted that it not only had legs but was precisely the film we should offer to Film4 when they asked us to pitch for Cinema Extreme.

Truth is that, to return to the alcoholic metaphor, some of the best parties have been precisely those where we've been too drunk to give in and go to bed. It is true that often you do just end up stuck talking nonsense in the kitchen until you realise that the pretty girl has gone home without you but then comes the night when suddenly at six your thick skulled stupor is replaced by a brilliant new clarity and you all agree on the best thing in the world and then go and do it. And it those nights that you remember, which is why every new draft of a script is still wrapped in the hope, the certainty that it's definitely the last one...

So actually I don't think we know how to finish after all. Which is good, because I don't feel like stopping yet.

Charlie Productions believe passionately in doing things and always trying to stop in time for tea.
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