Rough idea for anxiety inducing short film

Planning to shoot a short film on Saturday 4th, and I spent a fair amount of time today hashing out ideas.

On recommendation from my mentor Louis Bhose, I watched this incredible master class from Paul Schrader (wrote Taxi Driver, Raging Bull). Haven’t finished it yet, but holy fuck, literally the first 20 minutes has blown my mind open.

These 2 simple concepts I got from the video has been so insightful and useful as a writing tool:

• PROBLEM – What’s your most pressing, personal problem right now?
  • Ramifications? Manifestations? Who else knows about it? etc
• METAPHOR – How can you write about and explore this problem indirectly?
  • By definition, a metaphor has to be different from the subject matter it’s describing for it to work
  • It’s like bringing wires close together to make a spark, too far away – no spark, too close – no spark, you gotta find just the right distance

Looking through this framework, it gave me an idea for a very, very personal story (too early in process to share right now), it had me super buzzed walking home, excitedly speaking into my phone, sounding like a crazy person.

Will probably do a post about this – summarising key takeaways from the video, as there’s so much good shit that deserves to have more attention on it, but for now here’s a link to watch:

The idea for the short

Right now, the idea is about two journalists who have just come back from interviewing a celebrity, finding that they’ve lost the SD card with their entire interview on it.

As I’m going into the shoot day without a fully fleshed out script, I don’t know how successful it will be as an anxiety inducing short film, but that’s how I conceptualised it. I imagined it as the most intense 2 or 3 minutes, essentially Uncut Gems vibes in short film form.

Will have to see once the films finished whether the protagonist is conducive to audience investment in such a short time frame, regardless it will be an interesting experiment.

Inspiration for the idea

I got the idea because through some acting exercises we are doing at the moment in my class at Identity School of Acting.

We’re doing an Uta Hagen exercise called ‘Moment to Moment’. In this exercise we have to search for an object that is really important to our character in the scene, but we’re unable to find it until the very end of the scene. The stakes have to be super high, and as a result it in generally brings on a heightened state of panic in the actor.

I wanted to experiment with this in a short film, and see if I can use this technique to create a story with one actor.

Also, I was talking with a friend briefly a couple weeks ago, they were feeling really fucking stressed out, and I really felt for them as they were just explaining everything. I realised afterwards that I felt stressed just listening to them, and in such a short period of time too, because I empathised with their situation.

So, I’m going to attempt (the key word here) to try and do something similar, to try make you care about the character, make you want them to succeed, but then make it really hard for them to win, so you’re stressed as fuck with them on their journey.