So, I finally popped my Beatles cherry this morning, and bought their Love album. Call it an impulse purchase, call it a desire to hear outside my head some of the songs that play within it, call it about time too. Whatever: I wanted to listen to something old, and new, at the same time. And it’s brilliant: fresh and fabulous all over again, which is kind of what I’m looking to do when I approach the low-budget thriller I’ll be writing soon. Only, how do you reinvent the wheel when that circular one works so well already?

Genre-splicing is where it’s at in the world of low and micro budget film making. It makes sense: you want to capture an audience’s attention, and one very good way to do that in the absence of high-paid stars is by presenting them with something they haven’t seen before. Or, more accurately, something that has elements of the familiar, with a twist of originality. And one way to do that is to fuse genres.

Before looking at how genres can be fused, let’s look at genres in their base form however. In essence, a genre is a species of story recognised by distinguishing characteristics. These are so particular that they’re easily spotted in a 90 second trailer. A romantic comedy will feature two people who for some reason can’t act on their initial attraction, and may even deny it, before circumstances lead to the fruition of their relationship. A thriller will feature pursuit in some form, and something bigger than an individual’s life is quite possibly at stake when the chase is on.

Somewhere inside, we know the rules of a whole bunch of genres. And filmmakers are increasingly scrambling them in the pursuit for some small degree of novelty to attract audiences who are more than au fait with how things go. Hence the rise of Charlie Kaufman, writer of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Hence a film like The Cooler, which to follow the logic of both its genre parents – thriller and romance – goes through all manner of twists and turns to create an ending that’s dark and happy at the same time. Hence the approach of low budget studio Slingshot, whose Arvind David has explicitly said he’s interested in films that combine genres in new ways.

All very well, but how to go about this essentially Frankensteinian business? I know someone who swears by the taste sensation that is a peanut butter, fried egg, and brown sauce sandwich, but I’d fear for his chances if he invested his life savings in a café that has only those on the menu. And bear in mind I’m not looking for art-house obscurity with my script: I would absolutely love a sizeable audience to come and see the film if and when it transpires, and for people to hire me to write more scripts in the future.

At the moment, the solution seems to be in the realm of bringing elements of the family drama to the story, and infuse it with the kind of messy relationships that I seem to be drawn to in a lot of my writing. OK, not a startlingly original tack there, and the role model in this respect is The Grifters, and I’m hoping I can bring something original to the table.

And if the thriller-with-a-twist doesn’t work, I’ll head in another direction: I’ve been thinking for a while that there hasn’t been a romcom addressing modern relationships, and specifically the world of polyamory. And it’s got a built-in appeal after all: why settle for one partner over another when you can have both? Hey, I’m not necessarily an advocate for it as a lifestyle, but there’s got to be an audience for a film that at least explores the subject outside the realms of pornography. Besides, the poly people I’ve met include some fascinating and funny characters, and have a vocabulary about their way of doing things I’ve yet to see on screen.

Hmm, somehow we’ve got to a consideration of the joys of three-way loving having started out with The Beatles. I really am a child of the sixties I guess, though I was only a toddler when it happened.