Just a few weeks ago, I was in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territories of Australia. One of the reasons for being there was to check out some of the Aboriginal art that can be found on rocks in the area. There’s something both stark and lyrical about these images, as seen in this one depicting spirit people hunting. And part of what I liked was that the painting tradition has always been one in which artists are happy to work over the creations of their ancestors, as you can see in this image that was reworked in the 1960s.

There’s a non-preciousness about that attitude, of wiping the slate clean when you start, that appeals to me a lot. But it goes hand in hand with a respect for what has gone before. Stylistic changes are introduced, for instance X-ray style depictions of the internal organs of animals, but the narrative concerns are essentially the same. Art — and Aboriginal art is very much allied to storytelling — depicts the stories of the tribe. And those are fairly constant over time: relationships, hunting, noteworthy accomplishments. Layers of these images can be found on rock surfaces where Aboriginal people have gathered, dating back centuries and longer.

As with Aboriginal art, so with screenwriting. One project I’ve always been fond of, a science fiction epic I mapped out in a feverish week when I was tired of writing low budget naturalistic short films, is arguably redundant now that Avatar has stolen its thunder. At any rate, were my idea to be brought to the screen, people would inevitably compare it with Cameron’s epic. And I got there first…but that doesn’t matter. He got an actual film made, whereas all I have is a few pages of notes. Hey ho. So now I can develop my story in new ways that differentiate it from his (it’s not that similar, but…), or decide to devote my attention to something else.

Something else I liked in Australia was a boho gypsy band I caught in an artsy place that sold crepes and beer to support the nightly live music they showcased. Bizerka are a wonderful live experience, with accordion and cello and violin and guitar and orange box drums clattering away to amazing effect. Their music draws on Greek, Romanian and Russian traditions, and an old Greek man danced with his vivacious companion with delight on his face and in his feet, swigging red wine as he did.

What made Bizerka beautiful was their abundant passion for what they did. They loved playing, and that joy exuded from every performer and every tune, and in the nonsensical tales that the accordionist told between the songs, about how they’d been arrested in Russia for three months, and only learned one lousy tune in the prison. All lies, but it fit the fabric of their style and made the evening all the more delightful.

It never once occurred to me to question whether the musicians were representatives of the cultures whose musics they played. Authenticity was apparent in every note: Bizerka are part of a living tradition, in the same way that I aspire to write thrillers that people speak of in the same breath as ones that Hitchcock made and Bogart and Pacino dazzled in, or dramas that draw from the same well as Orson Welles and Kurosawa and Paul Thomas Anderson.

I have many wishes for 2010, but if I have a wish for other writers and filmmakers it is this: never mind what your influences are, but respect them whatever they are. And find a way to imbue your own concerns and fascinations and experiences with the scripts you write and the films you make. Stay true to yourself, learn who to listen to and when to turn a deaf ear, and allow your inner compass to take you forward to the future, in the certain knowledge that the journey will be a precarious one at times. It’s that edge that lets you know you’re alive, and an audience can scent that in everything you do, and will seek it out time and again, from you or whoever else provides that vital quality. The best way not to let them down is to not let yourself down.

Reports I’m getting from people better placed than myself to know are that development money for new tv projects is hard to come by. Which might explain why, despite the favourable response to my drug worker drama The Sharp End, I haven’t had a bite as a result.

Not that I was expecting things to be so straightforward. More realistically, people who liked my writing on that pilot script might want to talk to me about writing projects of their own. Which tentatively started to happen at one point, with a drama series set in a world that had parallels to the one I was writing about, but came to nothing.

Still, I’m moving forward with The Sharp End anyway. Started to do a rewrite yesterday, based partly on wise feedback from Philip Palmer, some of which I haven’t acted on until now, with a view to sending it out to a dozen or more production companies in the New Year. Again, the expectation is more that it’ll serve as a door opener than anything.

There’s also the multimedia project I’m developing. And I had a breakthrough with that when I caught up with a friend who is a director of a Soho post-production business. One missing piece of the jigsaw was what motivation I could offer to a games company to go with our untested concept and not one they’d developed in-house. I now have a very sensible answer to that question, albeit one that requires the investment of a chunk of money neither I nor my partner in this venture have at our disposal. But that’s what we were expecting, and is why we’ve set up as co-directors of a limited company, so that we offer a chunk of same to the investors we’ll be speaking to.

Somewhere, the tv future and multimedia one converge. In not many years time, households and individuals will utilise portals through which they access both that which is currently called television, along with games and the internet. Which is one reason why tv development money is scarce: noone is sure what the future holds, though some bigger players such as the BBC can shape it purely through the choices they make about access to their archives. But only to an extent: even though the Christmas Dr Who is available at the BBC website, a sizeable number of people prefer illegal downloads because they don’t like the BBC’s iPlayer interface.

At the moment, I know about this stuff at a distance, but not as a consumer. And that’s something that needs to change. With that in mind, I’m planning to get an iPhone, to engage with what’s happening in digital media as it progresses, and find out at first hand the highs and lows of test piloting the future. There’s just the small matter of my phone contract not being up for renewal until July, but having been a good Orange customer for some years, I’m hoping that a bit of persuasion will see me tricked out before then.

With the iPhone, this bizarre world of apps that I’m hearing about, and have seen thanks to a few friends who own one, and their chirruping presence at seemingly every coffee shop I visited in Melbourne two months back, will become a reality. And it’s a reality I need to embrace: the multimedia project I’m co-devising is designed for just such a world, and I’m going to feel a bit of a fake turning up to meetings without being able to demonstrate on my own handheld gizmo. That role falls to my partner at this point, and both of us need to get tooled-up.

Fingers crossed, at least one of those meetings with a potential investor in the multimedia project will happen in the next few weeks. It’s a distinct possibility anyway, and means more putting of noses to grindstones, and shoulders to the wall, but you know what? I don’t mind. I’m long enough in the tooth to have picked up that success in this business is not just about the quality of what you do creatively, but your ability to treat it as if it really can make some money for people. Otherwise, it’s a hobby, and for that I have swimming pools and CDs to keep me occupied.

If you were to do a house-to-house search in your neighbourhood, assuming you live in Britain, you’d discover that fully a quarter of homes have a copy of Mamma Mia! The Musical on DVD. The film’s staggering success is built on the equally humungous record it had in theatres worldwide, where it was brought to the stage by producer Judy Craymer, writer Catherine Johnson, and director Phyllida Lloyd.

Mamma Mia! was and is Judy Craymer’s brainchild. She’d worked for Tim Rice for some years, and had a gut feeling that a musical based on the songs of Abba would be a big hit. Fortunately, she got to meet Abba’s songwriters through their contributions to the Tim Rice show Chess, and with their backing went on to assemble the team that created the hit stage show. Not only that, she held onto the same team when Hollywood came knocking at her door wanting to do a screen version, not prepared to do a deal that didn’t include the people she’d brought to the table.

I know all this, incidentally, not through any particular interest in the works of Abba — though they surely do have a way with a tune — but because I watched a documentary on Mamma Mia! last night on Channel 5. What fascinated me was Judy Craymer’s tenacity in making the show, then the film, happen. It’s a given that the story is perfunctory, a means of holding together the Abba songs that are the real reason that an audience has gathered. And I say that hopefully without condescension — the writing in this instance had to be within carefully designed parameters. As such, I’d treat a commission along similar lines (perhaps based on the work of Half Man Half Biscuit) more like I do writing a corporate video script than a screenplay: a job of work rather than something more personal. But still to be done to the best of my ability, and with pride.

All of which raises the interesting question of the distinction between art and entertainment, if indeed such a distinction can be drawn. Music producer Pete Waterman was banging the drum for Mamma Mia! and noting that it’s a film you can see, enjoy hugely while singing along, and then pretty much forget. Well, until some friends or relatives pop over and need to be shown the DVD anyway.

And sure enough, there’s a place for disposable fun. Soap opera is an ephemeral form, providing an emotional connection that’s put aside until next episode. But without soap, would we have had shows like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under? Similarly, pulp magazines were used as padding for packing crates coming over from America, but where would comics writer Ed Brubaker be without their influence on his own sophisticated works, Criminal, Incognito, and Sleeper?

Pop culture’s base metals sometimes prove to be gold, at least in retrospect, and are often used as the inspiration for more ambitious creations. Without pianists playing honkytonk in New Orleans brothels, there’d be no Miles Davis or John Coltrane. No Flash Gordon serial to reach for the stars, and maybe Kubrick wouldn’t have given us 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Which makes me wonder what of today’s apparent junk will prove to be inspiration for mature work in the future. Can something inspirational evolve from Japanese collectable card games? Will composers with serious intentions create ringtones? Can Twitter give rise to a 21st century take on the haiku?

These are valid questions, and interesting ones to ask when some commentators are decrying the emptiness of modern culture. Personally, I’ve always viewed such critiques as bunkum, but rather than do that as a reflex action, consider what could be done if the time and resources that went into creating spam and negativity went into saying or doing something new. And if new is too much of a challenge, one that’s just as great is to say something old in an unexpected way.

How many stories are there? Well, one answer is there are thousands upon thousands, since there’s no shortage of films washing up at cinema screens the world over. But look a bit closer and you’ll start to notice disturbing similarities…

Virtually all American films are predicated on a model that works pretty much as follows: hero/ine achieves their outcome against improbable odds, experiencing a transformation of character in the process. Which is all well and good, as far as it goes. And, to be fair, it does have its utility: if you’re going to be spending ninety or more minutes in the company of an imaginary character you’re encouraged by various dramatic means to identify with, best that the experience is an enjoyable one.

Problem is, firstly that said model omits any number of fascinating and compelling stories in which people fail to get what they want, a life experience which may be frustrating but is an inherent part of the human condition. Second, that the model described is increasingly applied to television, another medium which you’d hope is a broader canvas for storytellers to spin their tales.

Especially in public service broadcasting, which has a wide remit, isn’t there room for a broader spectrum of stories than ones in which people achieve their goals through persevering against the odds? What’s happened in the last decade is that people involved in commissioning tv programmes have been sent on Robert McKee courses and the like, all of which trot out the same old message about three act redemptive structures.

Now, I have high regard for McKee as it happens, but there’s a difference between writers using the likes of his Story to guide their work and script editors and producers using it as a stick to keep errant writers in line. And according to someone who knows a lot more people in the industry than I do, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Similar abuses are made of the Hero’s Journey. It’s an interesting and valid template for story arcs, and one that’s well worth becoming familiar with. But it’s a very selective account of how mythical stories function. It neglects that considerable number of stories in which heroes fail to get what they’re after, and are killed or suffer divine punishment in the process. Now, if all this Hero’s Journey stuff is as significant and archetypal as all that, surely that would suggest that humans have an inherent need to hear stories of defeat as well as victory?

I approached someone I respect recently to ask for their thoughts on a script I’m writing. They turned me down because the story mixes genres, and didn’t believe this would be commercially viable. Which is a fair point, but a defeatist one. We’re living in a world where Charlie Kaufman writes uncharacterisable scripts to great acclaim. Where the likes of Warp X are explicitly interested in genre fusion for the potential it creates for new stories. And tv is breaking new ground with shows like Lost and Misfits.

All of those examples point to a future in which new forms of story will be welcomed. And we’re at a fascinating time for that to come about. The convergence of computer and television in one box, and the use of digital technology to stream films as well as games and tv shows and whatever the hell is playing on YouTube, could well present a tipping point not just in a technological sense, but in terms of the types of stories that audiences want to watch.

Let’s hope so. The alternative is that technology marches on and Avatar becomes the benchmark not just for sophisticated graphics, but for complacent storytelling. And that’s not the future I signed up for.

Let’s get it out of the way: Avatar is undoubtedly the most spectacular science fiction epic you’ll have seen. It sets a new benchmark in gee-whiz effects based lunacy, and will remain the touchstone for this kind of thing for some while.

All very well, but what’s it about? There are two answers to that question. One is to say that it’s to do with the interaction of humans with an alien race on the planet of Pandora, aliens who unfortunately for them live on top of a massively desirable mineral that Earth can’t get enough of, and the consequences of that conflict.

More interestingly, Avatar is basically what would happen if you took a probe into James Cameron’s brain and put what you found in a petri dish to create a very particular culture. Only, for petri dish read ‘gazillions worth of software and hardware’. But the point remains: what we’re seeing here is much of what makes James Cameron tick.

Rewind 35 years, more maybe. A young Jimmy Cameron sits reading the Whole Earth Catalog and listening to that Yes album with floating islands on the cover, tv on but sound turned down, images of Vietnam playing onscreen. He’s been smoking weed, and the resulting high has taken him to a kaleidoscopic vision of a story that mixes Roger Dean’s airbrushed psychedelia with eco-fable and a dose of anti-war activism. Damn, thinks Jimmy, coming back to Earth as the joint drops a hot rock on his cheesecloth shirt, I’d give anything to see a film with all that crazy shit kicking off.

And so it came to pass that Jimmy Cameron grew up to become the celebrated filmmaker James Cameron. Along the way he made two sequels that redefined their franchises, Alien and Terminator, before creating the humungous hit that was Titanic. And now he’s written and directed Avatar: can it really be bigger than what he’s done before?

Avatar is enormous, in every possible way. And, most of the time, it justifies the ridiculous attention to detail that went into making it. A bravura opening scene showcases the technology that Cameron’s people have come up with, as space marines emerge from stasis in zero gravity. They swoop down to the surface of Pandora, where humans have established a mining facility: it’s here, in a relatively subtle bit of visual storytelling, that we realise we’re not welcome on the planet when arrows are seen protruding from a vehicle’s bulbous tyres.

The protagonist — played by Sam Worthington — is a marine in a wheelchair, disregarded by his colleagues but immensely valuable to the science team since he shares the genotype of his deceased twin brother, trained up to pilot a human clone of one of the resident aliens via a high-tech interface. Some of the scientists resent the soldier in their midst, but without that background Sam wouldn’t have the survival skills to get by on the deadly planet.

Sam does more than survive — he thrives, taken under the wing of a clan chief’s daughter, who mentors him to become one of her people, and ultimately becomes his lover. That story arc is played out against another one, as humans on Pandora increase the aggression of their campaign against the natives, and destroy the massive sacred tree they live in.

Human aggression and arrogance backfires: unable to comprehend that the natives have a sophisticated culture biologically linked to the planet’s ecosystem, the military are ill-prepared for the way that Pandora fights back. And because this is what we want to see, the aliens succeed in turning the tide and defeat the humans, in a titanic battle amid the very same floating islands that young Jimmy tripped out to back when he was listening to Yes.

This is mythic, bombastic stuff, and it’s very good at realising that vision on a technical and story level. It would be churlish to dismiss the prowess with which Avatar delivers its particular goods, and I have no desire to: if you relish cinema that’s as grandiose as Wagner working with Jim Steinman, you’ll find plenty to enjoy here. If not, do yourself a favour and stay away: some of us want to wave our cigarette lighters in the air.

There’s something cosy, complacent, about Christmas telly. And, truth be told, that’s an assessment that holds about A Child’s Christmases in Wales. It was a moderately entertaining tale about a family’s festive gatherings in the 1980s raised above the standard of a script that just about succeeded in living up to its lack of ambition by strong performances.

Writer Mark Watson should be grateful to the performers who breathed life into his fundamentally obvious and unchallenging script. Ruth Jones, playing the mother of the family, is used to this kind of work, doing a similar job of inflating material beyond its scope in Gavin & Stacey, which I find irksome and anodyne. Likewise with the other actors, all of whom did an excellent job.

An analogy can be made with The Travelling Wilburys — a group of legendary players collaborating on a frankly middle of the road offering. The cumulative effect is to ask ‘why bother?’, but in the same way that it’s sort of interesting to hear Roy Orbison and Bob Dylan on the same recording, there’s technical interest to be had in the results of a very particular challenge: how to fill an hour of screen time using the limited resources available on a BBC4 budget.

The answer? A story which is limited in space, but travels liberally through time. Three Christmases are depicted, using the same location and mostly the same actors, the exception being the two lads in the extended family, who as they grow through their teens are portrayed by different actors each Yule.

Frankly, it was a rather humble offering elevated beyond its roots. But, with the best part of a bottle of sherry inside you, and if you’re more partial to Gavin & Stacey than I am, maybe it’ll work for you. See for yourself.

Rather more successful was a repeat that I’d missed first time round last year. The Wainscoting was the first of three chillers scripted by Mark Gattis under the title Crooked House. Since the days of Dickens there’s been a tradition of spooky stories at Christmas, and that’s exactly what Gattis delivers. Traditional scares in (18th century) period dress, again realised by BBC4 on a low budget.

There’s a modern day framing device featuring a householder showing a spooky door-knocker to a local museum, and then we’re back in Ye Olden Days with a tale that’s simplicity itself. A well-to-do chap buys a house and is troubled by the interior decor. Specifically the wooden wainscoting on one wall…

First it’s a matter of unearthly noises. Then blood-like stains spread over the area. Even decorated over, the stains reappear to chilling effect. And the house owner discovers that the wainscoting was made of a gallows that has hung countless people.

Both Crooked House and A Child’s Christmases in Wales were conservative in scope, but Crooked House had an ambition and level of attainment that exceeded the smug cosiness of the comedy piece. It’s that vision which will drive me to seek out the other two parts of Gattis’s series, while I have no desire to re-experience the Mark Watson piece.

Does tv for Christmas have to be so safe? Given the need for family friendly viewing, the answer is a qualified yes. And at least these two programmes demonstrate that there’s a place for new work, rather than seasonal specials for tired favourites. Christmas might be a time for families to view together, but let’s hope this year’s crop of shows includes some that rise to the challenge of being entertaining and imaginative for all ages. Which is probably another way of saying that I hope Dr Who gets it right this year…

Glee is a very clever piece of work indeed. It manages to function as a comedy, a high school drama, a musical and more at the same time. More than that, it does so while fusing ironic humour with straight ahead song and dance routines. Quite a juggling act, and one that I hope will be sustained in the series proper when it debuts on E4 in the New Year.

The show’s DNA almost certainly owes something to the success of High School Musical, about which I know nothing but the success of which is glaringly obvious given I encounter no end of merchandise when I visit supermarkets and record stores. Mix that with a twist of Fame, and a dash of Mean Girls, and you’ll have a good idea of what to expect.

The story is pretty straightforward — what lifts it is the style with which the whole is accomplished. Seemingly every part is cast perfectly, character emerging within moments through whatever genetics has done to shape someone’s face and body, and costume that accentuates implicit character. Thus we encounter the disciplined media-savvy sports coach, the financially-driven principal, the sassy black siren and others. Fast edits ensure the whole moves with great pace, leading the viewer in pursuit of new nuggets of story.

A glee club is a high school musical society, and after the teacher leading the one at William McKinley High is suspended to become a drug dealer peddling the medical marijuana he’s prescribed for stress, a new teacher takes over. Will was part of the club back in his own McKinley days in the early 90s, and wants to enthuse the kids with the passion he felt for music and dance.

All very well, but wife Terri has very different plans for Will. She’s got a bigger passion for Balinese mahogany toilet brush holders than their slender joint income can cope with, and wants him to take a sensible grown-up job with one of the retailers she is obsessed with. And that’s the way it looks things will turn out initially, until a colleague reconnects Will with his passion for the glee club.

That’s Will’s story anyway. But to some extent that’s an excuse to get us to watch the antics of the teens. They’re initially dominated by Rachel, the singularly showbiz focused daughter of two gay men who won her first dance competition at the age of three months. She wants the glee club to succeed, and it looks like there’s no credible male partner to work with her — until Will blackmails Finn, one of the football team who’s also a fine singer, into joining the gang.

It’s quality stuff, with a sharp script that delivers humour along with interesting beats. And it moves fast, bang bang bang. Along the way, it also demonstrates a cavalier but intelligent way with writing devices: one scene is narrated by Will before Finn in turn takes up the monologue baton. Unusual and effective.

There’s something very American about the whole thing. American high schools really do have glee clubs, which have a Broadway pizzazz about them that was lacking in the productions I remember from my school days. I don’t recall Busby Berkeley dance routines and rearranged versions of Bee Gees songs in the version of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist we did at any rate.

The series was created by three men who were active in their own schools’ glee clubs: Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan. They’ve been astute in devising something that hits so many buttons. The song and dance elements can’t help but echo the likes of X Factor and Pop Idol, and the songs are well chosen, mixing show tunes and cheesy rock ballads to good effect. The music industry approves: some artists are letting Glee use their songs at discount rates, and one episode will feature Madonna tunes throughout, Madge having let them access her back catalogue for nothing.

This isn’t a show for everyone, but its catchment is pretty wide. And you’ll have a good idea by now whether it’s a show for you. I thoroughly enjoyed the pilot, and will do my best to catch the series when it kicks off in January.

It’s not often you come across a mainstream film that offers much meat to pick over on a scriptwriting level. Thrillers in particular seem to be honed with engineering precision, ensuring that thrills and spills are delivered in escalating fashion with meticulous timing. And characters do what characters do in such genre flicks: they’re taciturn but tenacious in their pursuit of justice, baddies are sinister to order, and if anyone swaps their white hat for a black one there’ll be some seeding before the transition takes place.

None of the above is a complaint by the way — I enjoy a well-tooled Hollywood thriller if it delivers the goods it promises. What, then, to make of Law Abiding Citizen? On the surface a piece of mainstream hokum, it presents a scriptwriting issue of considerable interest that you’d not expect from a straight genre movie, one that’s at the heart of the story.

We open on the grisly killing of a woman and her daughter in front of the eyes of Clyde Shelton, the man of the family, who is tied up and helpless to act. Then cut to the legal consequences of this, when slick prosecutor Nick Rice negotiates a deal meaning that while one of the culprits will be executed, the other will be out of prison in just a few years. All of this serves to position Nick as the antagonist in the relationship, and Clyde as the hero.

Jump ten years, and it’s not long before the positions are reversed. Clyde puts his considerable inventiveness and resources into bringing down not only the bad guys, but the legal team involved in the prosecution, and in fact the whole social edifice it rests on. Dude has issues. Grievance issues. And he can’t let go. Not even after sawing up one of the bad guys — an act he commits to put himself in prison, where he masterminds his Joker-style plan to hold a city to ransom with his increasingly bloody acts of vengeance.

All of which is nonsense of a high order, but nevertheless thoroughly enjoyable hokum if you’re in a mood to see stuff get all blowed up. It has the same kind of crazed appeal as the plan to install Rage Against The Machine’s obscenity-peppered polemic Killing in the Name Of as the Christmas number one to show The Man — in the form of Simon Cowell — what da kids really want. And Kurt Wimmer’s script has some fun with the ridiculousness of it all, little moments of humour softening the mayhem like slippers on a serial killer.

So, how to ensure that we turn against Clyde and sympathise with Nick? Part of the solution is in casting. Nick Rice is played by Jamie Foxx, a smooth dude for sure. And Clyde is played by Gerard Butler, in a conspicuously uncharismatic way. Make Clyde too likeable, even in his crazed plan for vengeance, and the scales would tip too far and the audience would get where he’s coming from when attempting to off the city’s leaders with napalm. And that won’t do: anarchy cannot reign, at least not for long and without consequence.

Conversely, Nick becomes more sympathetic as those around him are blown to smithereens. Particularly when he loses a promising young female colleague, we’re inclined to think that perhaps Clyde’s one man terror campaign is maybe a bit out of sorts. Which is a shame: there were hints of a more Fight Club style film in Law Abiding Citizen at times, but desire for sanity and the reassuring ker-ching of the box office cash till put paid to such commercially suicidal thoughts. Pity.

When stuff happens is very important in drama. I’m talking here not of the precise moments when red herrings are discovered, allegiances betrayed, love declared and so forth, but the time in the calendar when events take place. This after a week in which I’ve seen The Merry Gentleman, which as its title suggests is set in part over Christmas, and the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 which similarly unfolds on Christmas Eve. For that matter so does Die Hard.

What is it about Christmas that makes it a good time to set a film? Well, that all depends how you want to use the holiday. In The Merry Gentleman it’s a convenient time for two lonely people to get to know one another in the absence of any other social contact. In The Taking of Pelham 123 the date is critical because it means that activity at the edge-of-town police station is at a minimum, and the blizzard that hits the city pretty much cuts it off, which suits the antagonists just fine.

Thanksgiving is popular with filmmakers too, Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters a classic example. The American holiday is all about family coming back together, wherever they are geographically and personally. As such, it’s a brilliant opportunity to have a bunch of relatives sitting round a dinner table with a variety of agendas going on between them. Sibling rivalry, parental expectations, whether you’ve brought a partner and what gender they are, children and their behaviour…all fantastic stuff to create tension and humour.

The periodic exchange of gifts and news is a chance to compare your own stock in life to that of those you’ve grown up with. If you’re successful, that doesn’t make it more or less likely that you welcome the success of your brothers and sisters: the Kennedys were a fiercely competitive clan, and who knows what the atmosphere is like when the turkey is carved and Dickie and David Attenborough pass their plates for a slice? I’m reminded of the tale of Anthony Burgess who, getting his literary cock out with another man of letters (I forget who), ultimately and pathetically tried to trump his peer by declaring that he was primarily a composer, not a novelist, on the basis that he’d written a few orchestral pieces and had them performed.

If Christmas and Thanksgiving are an opportunity to see yourself in the eyes of others, birthdays can be used to get characters to explore themselves in light of their expectations of what they’d like to have achieved by their current age. Again, wonderful opportunities for resentment, sourness, and other good dramatic stuff. Just don’t get your characters singing Happy Birthday — sisters Mildred and Patty Hill came up with the tune and words and established their ownership of it for decades before selling it on to a lawyer who continues to make oodles out of the ditty, which is why writers and directors come up with all sorts of cunning dodges to avoid using it.

Christenings can be an even greater opportunity to foment disharmony in families. Having a brother or sister drop a sprog is a classic cue for envy from siblings, a shift to new grandparental status for parents, and unsolicited child-rearing wisdom from pretty much everybody who has ever warmed a bottle.

Which leaves weddings and funerals. A chance for people to put their suits on and hang out with the extended family, the chief distinction being that the food is served at a table in weddings, and as a buffet in the case of funerals. Again, the opportunities for rivalries to surface, regrets to be inappropriately aired, family secrets to be weaponised, make these times of high dramatic and comedic potential.

When you’re planning your story, think about what significant dates it could include. Judiciously placing Valentine’s Day, a retirement party, or a wedding anniversary could give you delicious opportunities to put the heat on your characters, and there’s nothing like watching people sweat to give audiences the chance to empathise with what they’re going through.

I remember Michael Keaton for some compulsively watchable acting roles in the 80s. Beetlejuice and Batman with Tim Burton took him into heightened realities, Pacific Heights was a more grounded thriller — he was excellent in all. And then he seeemed to fall off the radar, leaving me wondering what had become of him. It’s taken until now to answer that question, with his directorial debut The Merry Gentleman.

Scripted by Ron Lazzeretti, the film recounts the relationship of a hitman (Keaton) with a young woman working in an office (Kelly Macdonald). In less accomplished hands, this could have been a gauche comedy. Instead, it’s a gently paced rumination on the nature of friendship. And, commercially speaking at least, that gentle pace may not help the film’s commercial potential. Which would be a great shame.

I’m not surprised that Keaton chose his cast well and gets good performances from them. What impresses rather more are some of the other aspects of the film, though without seeing the screenplay it’s hard to be sure whether to credit Lazzeretti or Keaton. The director at least deserves plaudits for his execution of ideas that may have been there on the page, at least.

One touch I loved was simplicity itself. A cop is attracted to Macdonald’s character and wants to find out more about her for personal reasons. In a very understated way, his colleague takes a step back and puts his notebook away as the personal questions continue.

Later, when Macdonald and Keaton have established their friendship, there’s a wonderful moment when they watch a burning Christmas tree. She didn’t want to see it languish in a skip, he picks up her mood, and somehow — we don’t get to hear the conversation, and don’t need to — arrive at the Viking funeral concept.

If you get the understated effectiveness of those two scenes, you’ll be in tune with Keaton’s intentions as director: this is a film of small ongoing pleasures, rather than cresting and falling between set pieces. Musically, the analogy can be made with chamber jazz groups, all about subtle interplay rather than flash.

All of which goes to tell you that, whatever Keaton’s ambitions, he’s not heading for the easier kudos awarded other directors who feature hitmen as their protagonists. This is slow burn stuff, and rightly so: it would have been easy for Macdonald being the focus of attention of Keaton, the cop, and an ex to seem contrived. Instead it feels natural, perhaps a consequence of her character’s innate reticence — the same quality that draws her to Keaton.

It’s not stretching things to say that everyone in the film is damaged. Not in a melodramatic hearts and flowers way, but all are bruised by life’s vagaries. And that’s what draws them together, too. I’m reminded of the scene in Magnolia in which a sequence of characters all sing along to One Is The Loneliest Number on the radio. The characters here feel that they could be in a Paul Thomas Anderson film, and if that’s who Keaton’s filmmaking brings to mind then he’s in good company: this is certainly a more accomplished feature than Anderson’s first, Hard Eight.

I went into the cinema expecting a wry American indie film of the sort I like a lot, and came away with more than that. The Merry Gentleman is, in its quiet way, a brilliantly crafted film in every respect, and one that I hope you find as much satisfaction from as I have. Subtly intelligent, delighting in shades of emotion and meaning, this is filmmaking of a high order.