Phone Box Gun, my new short film, will be a minimalist heist movie, which I intend to shoot in black and white. It's about a young man, Vincent, who needs cash in order to visit his long lost sister in Mexico, and so, under the influence of his blustering best friend, Bob, decides to stick-up a jewellery store. Visually, and in terms of rhythm, the film owes a little to the film noir of Aki Kaurismaki, especially his London based film, I Hired A Contract Killer. I always try also to give the dialogue a certain rhythm and structure, which owes less to Kaurismaki and more to American auteur, Hal Hartley. When I started writing screenplays in my late teens (for fun), I instinctively wrote dialogue that was highly formalized, deliberate, but was told that this was wrong, that dialogue in films had to be “naturalistic”. It was years later I discovered the films of Hal Hartley, and for anyone unfamiliar with his work, Hartley crafts his dialogue until it is a “beautiful object”, and is infact one of the most distinctive features of his cinema, and a joy for the viewer. And so upon discovering his films, I decided that I would continue to write crafted dialogue. While what I'm doing is not going quite as far as Hartley, what I hope to do is structure the dialogue such that it compels the actor to say his next line, it thrusts him forward – here's an extract from Phone Box Gun to show what I mean:
BOB
So, you're short of money.
VINCENT
Nah man, it's not that bad.
BOB
You're short of money.
VINCENT
It's not that bad.
BOB
How much do you need?
VINCENT
I'm saying, it's not that bad.
BOB
How much do you need?
VINCENT
I've said, it's not that bad.
BOB
Tell me.
While this is not a particularly high stakes, heightened dramatic scene, it's clear that both characters want something different – if played properly, ie; each actor working off his scene partner (as oppose to merely trotting out the lines as he rehearsed them, ignoring what his partner is doing in the scene), then the result will be a snappy intensity, bringing the actors alive. In addition, the actor needs to bring a concretely doable action into the scene, in order to live truthfully under the imaginary circumstances of the scene. And crucially, what the actor is doing in the scene, is not the same as what the character is doing. I'll explain.
In a quick analysis of the scene above, we might conclude that what Bob is literally doing is; “trying to find out how much money Vincent needs” (you may find a different analysis, there is no perfect analysis). However, the actor playing Bob will never be able to convince himself that he actually is Bob and that the other actor actually is Vincent, and that the money actually exists, and that the scene is anything other than a fiction. So, the actor needs to get away from the fiction, and give himself something in the scene which he can actually accomplish, something he can actually do. If I was playing Bob in the scene above, I might give myself the action; “to get a straight answer” - this concretely doable, I can begin doing it immediately, and it is in line with the intentions of the script, and it's interesting to me. Armed with that action, I then take the attention off myself in the scene, and put it onto the other actor, responding to him in relation to my action. This enables the actor to perform fully and truthfully. But note that the action I have given myself has got nothing to do with the money, or Vincent.
Overall, the acting in Phone Box Gun will be fairly minimal, not bravura, but pared back, simple, perhaps alluding to classical noir. The world of Phone Box Gun is shabby and tired, the characters are low-grade, and they have a purposelessness, it is as though they are treading water and marking time, they act merely to avoid stillness. Perhaps then, this minimal quality, marks a deadness within the characters, they are not real people, they exist as images of figures occupying a certain space during a certain moment - as in a memory or a dream.
