Taking Franco to France

Edward Windus recounts the experience of taking a script to the 32nd éQuinoxe screenwriters’ workshop

The recent cull of screenwriting programmes has brought down many of the key players on the European development scene, including Arista, North by Northwest and Moonstone. But perhaps not unsurprisingly, given France’s particular love for cinema, over the last years a Gallic one, run by the very well-connected Noëlle Deschamps, has not only survived but thrived.

In 2007 éQuinoxe celebrated its 30th workshop in 15 years, attended by such luminaries as Bond writers Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Spiderman producer Laura Ziskin. In 2008 it doubled in size to include sections for beginners and the more experienced. More importantly, with 40% of projects going into production, including Jacques Audiard’s impressive Read My Lips and Oscar-winning The Counterfeiters, it boasts a solid industry record.

For a European screenwriter a chance to have a three-hour session with the likes of David Peoples, Ron Bass, Simon Beaufoy or Paul Haggis is a sort of Holy Grail and this is the third successive year I have applied, this time with my most offbeat project, Franco: The Movie. It’s a comedy set in 1960s Spain about a censor who is forced to direct General Franco’s biopic and runs into David Lean shooting Lawrence Of Arabia and Sergio Leone helming Fistful Of Dollars and accidentally influences the creation of those two classics, falls in love and alters Iberian history into the bargain.

In October there’s a ping on my computer and I discover I have been selected as one of the eight elite in the advanced section. Another bonus is it is totally free: flights and accommodation in a five-star hotel in Evian, on the French side of Lake Geneva, are generously met by the organisation.

Established, like Moonstone, on the model of the Sundance screenwriters’ labs, the structure of the week-long programme is simplicity itself: each writer gets a one-to-one morning or afternoon session with around half-dozen of the advisors. I’ve worked with a maximum of three story editors on a screenplay, which I found fried my head, so six (or more) diverse points of view is going to be tough; this is why the programme requests second draft scripts. Luckily there’s a lot of champagne, good food, a sauna, Jacuzzi and steam room - in a complex that has hosted Bush, Blair and Zidane - to act as punctuation to the sessions.

With all eight of the screenwriters male and five of them French, this is clearly a programme that prioritises the quality of the projects over demographic spread. Over dinner I hear one of the female advisors defending part of this decision, explaining all the women’s scripts were weak father-daughter relationship stories. My fellow participants are mostly very experienced, two with several features behind them, and the atmosphere (bolstered by the news of Barack Obama’s election win) is extremely friendly – over the week three of them make the time to give me feedback on my screenplay.

My first session is with Joslyn Barnes (Toussaint, Bamako and co-founder with Danny Glover of Louverture Films) and she’s not only politically astute but extremely thorough, advising me to clarify and thin out my plot and cut a few characters; she also tells me to be wary of the ‘double irony’ in my story. I come away with a practical and positive rewrite strategy.

Don Macpherson (The Avengers), who seems to have worked with every big name in the business, starts by saying that farces and love stories are incompatible. I cite Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway as a touchstone and after two hours he slowly begins to change his mind and launches into acting out little comic scenes to fuse the script’s two central ideas. His session is peppered with illustrations from figures ranging from Paula Weinstein to John Woo such as, “You need very little plot” and “Find the things you want to keep in your script and ring-fence them,” which reminds me of Kubrick’s method of constructing a script around five or six ‘non-submersible’ sequences. As Macpherson explains: “Writing is not in the words but the choices you make before you start writing. Screenwriting is like poetry, it’s formal choices rather than freedom.” He also suggests I write the big scenes first and rewrite the script backwards scene by scene, deleting anything that doesn’t move the story to its conclusion. If my first meeting set out a reassuringly clear strategy for rewriting, this three-hour session, the longest of the week, encourages me to consider a much more radical overhaul.

That night the first of the evening champagne cocktail parties kicks off. Peppered with first-hand stories of Audiard, Coppola, Sautet, Malick, Scorsese and Spielberg they quickly become some of the high points of the programme.

Each morning starts with a meeting between advisors with the aim of moving towards some kind of general consensus. An inadvertent consequence of these powwows is a confusing leak; my next advisor, Marion Vernoux (Love, Etc.) stresses that although everyone else wants to cut my wry epilogue (news to me!) she likes it lot. She goes through my script page by page pointing out what works and what doesn’t, echoing many of Joslyn’s sentiments; in short, my story needs to be simplified. The afternoon is the turn of Tania Blumstein (former European creative consultant for Paramount Classics), who pleasantly surprises me by mentioning one of my key influences, Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not To Be, and suggests I tone down some the more over-the-top characterisations, arguing the script works best when it is more subtle. She encourages me to streamline the whole project too.

One advisor I am particularly looking forward to, is editor Yves Deschamps who worked with Orson Welles and recently cut the French hit Les Choristes. Within the first few minutes I realise he really understands the script’s dry European humour and after a two-hour session I am aching from laughing so much. He explains that when he works on a film he needs to get the whole movie visually ‘in his head’ and talks me through my script in images, with suggestions on swapping plot-points to smooth the visual flow; it’s a very exciting ‘pure cinema’ approach. He has some excellent ideas about developing a crazed dreadlocked gypsy character of mine and is very attentive to ruptures in tone, with a chilling story of failing to get two tonally-disparate strands to marry in the cutting room.

Afterwards one of France’s most respected screenwriters, Jacques Fieschi, calls my script “dense and contradictory” but I sort of take it as a compliment. He has first-hand knowledge of the Franco regime and corrects a few historical inaccuracies and, like Don, argues the screenplay should be much more grounded in reality and more disciplined. He also echoes criticism of certain character motivations and plot holes pointed out by Marion, Yves and Joslyn.

This leaves me with the most experienced advisor till last: Matthew Robbins (a long-term collaborator of Guillermo del Toro and Brad Bird). He is by far the harshest about my comedy, telling me I treat most of my cast “like insects” and he urges me to flesh out my central character into someone to root for. He also suggests some great material to beef up the part of a minor character Joslyn proposed to cut. I can sense in him the strong influence of audience-friendly Spielberg, who directed one of his scripts, The Sugarland Express. Matthew even shares an anecdote about meeting David Lean in the American mogul’s offices. The main advantage of this ‘Dirty Dozen’ structure is that you can try out the suggestions of your initial advisors on subsequent ones. For instance, Joslyn challenged my decision – taken for comic effect - to deny my protagonist any character change; she argued he needed to go through some sort of political awakening. However, when I repeated her suggestion to Matthew, he thought such an arc would only work if the love story were removed. In his opinion it was enough that my hero ‘gets the girl’ and survives; he doesn’t need to learn anything during the course of the narrative.

By the end of the week, the combination of criticism, new ideas and late-night drinking sessions has completely disorientated me. Yet typing up my 30 pages or so of notes back at home, a pattern quickly emerges. It is amazing how many of the advisors, sometimes as many as five, agree on certain key issues. Although actually experiencing the programme was a bewildering, if very pleasant experience, once the dust has settled I can see my script afresh with a clear rewrite plan.

I remember how, on checking into the hotel, one of my colleagues, Irish director David Gleeson, who has twice attended Moonstone, warned me, “This isn’t script-editing”. I didn’t understand what he meant at the time, but I do now. It will be the British film industry’s loss that, since the collapse of Moonstone, now only a couple of UK screenwriters at most can attend a programme of this calibre each year.

For further information see www.equinoxetbc.fr 

This article first appeared in the Guild's magazine, UK Writer (Spring 2009)