When I write, I normally have a strong sense of the places and locations that I'm writing about. The sense or feel of a place and time often prefigures character. There is a thick-headed old adage that you hear people lobbing about like neo-conservative gospel that you should only write about what you know (What right, it seems to suggest, do we have to search out the unknown, or to identify deeply with someone other than ourselves?) I have to confess I rarely write about characters I know. Maybe the characters think and feel in ways that echo what I might have thought or felt, or people I know may have thought or felt; but how insanely dull would the months of writing be if you weren't trying at the same time to discover those things about characters, about people, that you don't know?
In any case, when I write my half baked scripts, the characters might remain unknown to me, but what I do normally 'know' are the places where the stories are set. So, the project I'm currently undertaking is a strange one for me. I've adapted the short story 'Small Mercies' for the portmanteau adaptation of 'The Turning' written by Tim Winton, to be produced by Robert Connolly. A whole pack of filmmakers, actors turned directors and cross disciplinary artists are tackling the seventeen intertwined stories from the book. True to Winton's deep attachment to the ocean and the West Australian coast, most of the stories take place along the fringes of the continent, in small run down fishing towns. I'm thousands of kilometres from these locations, so we're trying to find a sense of his story in other locations closer to home.
So, these past days, I've been haunting the South Gippsland coast, looking for and photographing places and spaces that feel like the unmade film in my head. It's strange when you get a shock of recognition in a place you've never seen… and slowly, slowly, those small sparks are accumulating and the script is finding it's place in the real world.
Strangely, due to time restraints, we'll shoot the film in just a little over a month, but delay our post production until some time after we've shot the feature 'Galore'. So, I won't know for many, many months whether these imaginary spaces tie themselves together in the real world in a way that creates a unified sense of this fictional town. Here's hoping.
"We look out upon the sea / The coast is always changing / We'll take the train out to the sea / My heart is always changing / It won't be long before you've gone / I can't imagine leaving"
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