Getting the right title makes all the difference. No Country For Old Men tells you that this is going to be about more than a killer with an unusual modus operandi: no, this is a film that has a worldview. There Will Be Blood is a stark title that prefigures not just the blood within a film about the early days of the oil industry, but all the blood that has been spilled since in the pursuit for oil. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind refers to a classification of the type of UFO sighting that the film is about, and conjures up an air of mystery even before the poster is seen.

And then there are other titles, that don’t say or do a whole lot, even though they’re sometimes attached to good films. Michael Clayton could be a VAT inspector or a vet: lucky for all of us he turned out to be played by George Clooney in an excellent thriller. Trainspotting was a brave choice of title for the film it was attached to, and worked because when you did encounter it, it was on an iconic poster that clearly didn’t refer to Intercity 125s.

I’ve come up with some good and some less good titles for projects over the years. Recently I was developing a story that I really wanted to call Pad Thai for reasons that make all kind of sense, and because I like the sound. Only, naming your film after a foreign dish, when that film is low budget and probably won’t get much marketing if it gets made, is probably an unwise move. The alternative I came up with is workable, but not nearly as memorable.

Perhaps the canniest title I’ve come up with is for my series about drug workers, The Sharp End. That references the edgy world in which the drug workers operate, while also alluding to injections, and some people will also pick up a reference to ‘sharps’. Spot on, I think. And the pilot script is titled Blue Tuesday, which is half a skit on the song Blue Monday, and also a real term used by some drug workers (Tuesday is when heavy ecstasy-users will feel at their worst after a weekend of partying).

For some reason, writers of television shows often reference song titles in the episodes they’re writing. But what I find really annoying is the pernicious habit of sitcoms being named after hackneyed phrases. Hence In Sickness And In Health, Pushing Up The Daisies, Man About The House: if they can’t come up with a title that shows any signs of originality, it doesn’t bode well for the actual show.

If you’ve got the name right, then you’ve done an important part of branding your film or tv show. Some people get sniffy about the intrusion of a word like branding into the world of screenwriting, but I’m using it for its accuracy. Good writing of any kind has a lot in common with branding: it’s about getting across a core message succinctly, and that’s a skillset that applies both to advertising and scriptwriting. Plus, I like winding people up, so if you feel that way, maybe you shouldn’t have such obvious handles for me to pull.

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