I’m staying in Anglesey at the moment, and that presents entirely different scenery to what I’m used to in Nottingham.  Mountains straddle the landscape, visible pretty much wherever you are.  Forests reach down to the sea.  And there’s a fraction of the amount of traffic I’m used to seeing.  All of this makes me think in terms of location.  It’s a key aspect of screenwriting with the potential to have a big effect on the audience.

Look at the cosy Sunday night shows that bring big television audiences in.  Monarch of the Glen, Last of the Summer Wine, Heartbeat: all shows with a strong sense of time and place…even the ones that are set in the here and now feel like they belong to a bygone age.  Set your characters against a horizon, and they and their horizons can’t help seem bigger.  Look at No Country For Old Men: the raw story could have been the basis of a middling thriller.  But in the hands of the Coen Brothers, and as adapted from a book by Cormac McCarthy, it becomes a story about life and death itself when experienced through characters living in the space Texas presents.

Contrast that with the world presented in Se7en.  A corrupt city where the protagonist is trying to  get out and build himself a place in the sticks.  A monolith of a place where rain lashes inhabitants like a scourge for their sins.

These things are worth thinking about.  let’s take the subject of yesterday’s blog, a mutated episode of The Fixer, and move it to Anglesey.  Immediately, the story has a different feel.  And a key decision has to be made: what world did Jude the killer come from before being settled in a safe house in North Wales?  Odds are, his crimes happened in a city, at which point we’ve got a world of visual contrasts and metaphors available to play with.  And the fact that Jude kills again even in this safe haven points to the fact that he can’t even be redeemed by being put in somewhere that could be portrayed as a rural idyll compared to the urban chaos he’s used to.

With your eyes open, details just fall into your lap…yesterday, one of our tasks was to pick up a couple of dead thrushes that met their ends hitting a window, and pass them on to a local artist to paint.  That detail, which could only come from a world where people are conscious of nature, and part of a community where they know how to help one another out, and what someone else could make use of, could form an interesting part of the story we’re developing.  Particularly since it points to Anglesey being a place where people view death as part of the natural cycle…so how will they respond to a cold-blooded killer like Jude?

Note, I’m not pointing to any answers here.  Just playing with the possibilities that location presents, and what happens when you shift from some of your presets and explore alternatives instead.  Already, by reversing some of the aspects of a story triggered by The Fixer’s second episode, and shifting its location to rural Wales, a whole new story is starting to emerge.