I had lunch with a writer friend today, and it turns out he’s increasingly seeing himself as a filmmaker rather than a screenwriter. He’s just completed a short course in direction, and he views his future career as one in which he will be the producer and perhaps director of his own scripts. It’s an absolutely valid route for some people, and I absolutely understand why he’s taken that decision - but is it for me?

A few years ago I filmed a pilot for a regional short film scheme, so I would have the bones of a showreel to present to the panel. It was something I learned a lot from. The piece was around 80 seconds long, an extract from the ten minute film I planned to make, and thinking it through from story to script to visual style to performances and sound was a fascinating experience.

Some aspects of making that sequence came to me more naturally than others. I was pretty good at getting the general look and feel of what I wanted in terms of still images, but found working with a camera that works in realtime and 3d space a stretch that I couldn’t cope with well at the time. Fortunately I was working with a seasoned cameraman who had directed several of his own pieces, and he was able to outline what choices I had available so I could make whichever one seemed suitable. I managed, but it was my least comfortable part of the process, and my lack of fluency with this part of what we did showed through in the finished piece.

Working with actors was a much more natural experience for me, not surprising since I’ve done it plenty of times before in a theatrical context. It helped that I’d got two talented and patient performers who I knew, and took my novice status into account. So, I was pretty happy with the performances we got.

Editing was the phase where I felt most at home. That surprised me, but I really took to it. This was my second time in an edit suite where I got to make the decisions, and I had learned valuable lessons from my first experience. Most importantly, for my approach at least, was the practice of editing in line with the soundtrack I’d chosen: the story was about the relationship between a father and daughter who connect through astronomy, and the audio backdrop came from NASA recordings of sunspots or other cosmic activities. Anyway, with the audio in place I found a rhythm to work to that suited the piece just fine, and overall it’s probably the audio and editing of that short sequence that I’m most proud of.

So, overall I found it a stressful but enjoyable experience that I liked a whole lot more when we took the raw material into the edit suite to shape it into something that, for the first time, I turned from a concept into a film, however short. And while I did enjoy that, I’m not convinced that I want to get that involved again with the mechanics of filmmaking.

More than anything, I’m someone who can come up with ideas and develop them into fully realised stories. I’ve spent many years learning how to do that, and I love doing it. Taking the next step to directing is not something I feel comfortable doing, if only because I’m not sure that I could realise my expectations in that regard. And yes, I recognise that as a self-fulfilling prophecy, but a bit of realism is no bad thing: if it’s taken me years to become happy with my ability to write a script, how long would it take for me to feel comfortable as a filmmaker? Why not instead pair up with people who are skilled in that regard and like my stories? I’m fortunate in that I know people who do have that opinion of my work, and it’d be churlish not to make the most of that situation.

That said, ‘filmmaker’ embraces the production as well as direction side of taking a concept from script to screen, and I can envisage myself getting involved in that aspect of the process for various reasons, since - to use an Old Labour analogy - it’s basically about taking control of the means of production, distribution and exchange, rather than assuming they’ll be passed on by wealthy benefactors. Maybe that aspect of what I do won’t happen for a while but, as the saying goes, watch this space…

I returned home late last night, curry-plump, to find a message from my mother on the answerphone. She sounded a bit anxious, and that made sense as her story unfolded. She’d been drinking coffee with a friend at a Nando’s, when police came in and ordered everyone outside. If I tell you that this happened in Exeter, you might understand why. Mum had chosen to have her coffee next door to the venue where a mentally unstable convert to Islam had done his best to blow the town centre up with a home made bomb. Oops.

This news happened on the same day that filmmaker Terence Davies lambasted fellow British creators for following American models of film and not being true to regional British experience. This as part of the launch campaign for his latest film, yet another elegaic exploration of the Liverpool of his childhood. Not to appear too crass, but I wonder exactly how much money this film will make? I have seen some of Davies’s work and found it sensitive and moving, but common sense tells you there is a limited audience for films that feature 90 second shots of the shadows of rain playing artfully on the living room rug.

So, if we’re to make films representative of the British experience, what are we to make of my mother’s story, which comes seemingly straight from an American thriller? It was even structured like a mainstream movie, with normality (coffee with a friend) shaken by an inciting incident a few minutes in (the police telling everyone to leave), before mum and everyone else were moved first to one point, then to another (two chunks of the second act) before returning home shocked but safe (third act).

Acts of terrorism have no respect for parochial aesthetics. And neither should filmmakers. We live in an interconnected world, where a web of influences play on one another in a fashion that no individual can comprehend. So instead, we simplify, and live within our own edited version of the world at large. In Terence’s case, it seems he’s still stuck in 1950s Liverpool.

Thankfully, other British filmmakers have found ways of capturing something to say about the world we live in now: Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things is a masterful examination of the effects of migration in Britain’s capital city. Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland explores modern family relationships against a complex metropolitan backdrop. Shane Meadows has brought the underside of the East Midlands to the screen on several occasions, from his shorts such as the wonderful Where’s The Money Ronnie to his last feature This Is England. So, let’s not pretend that contemporary British filmmakers aren’t interested in the country they’re from. Even films that have an effectively American model of storytelling, such as Paul Andrew Williams’s brilliant thriller London to Brighton, still bring a distinctly British turn to the proceedings.

Yes, there is another side to British filmmaking, present in the James Bond films, in anything featuring Hugh Grant, and in costumed dramas, but those films are an equally valid part of the country’s cinematic culture - and unlike Terence Davies’s oeuvre are likely to be the ones that make the money that enable producers to take risks on edgier propositions. Let’s not forget, Davies’s work owes its existence to the arts equivalent of another grand British institution - the welfare state. And long may that be the case…but please don’t suggest that your preferred style of filmmaking is the best in a world as complex, as fascinating, as rich in story, as we all inhabit in the 21st century.

Another day, another fascinating thriller with a lot going on. This time it’s Sexy Beast, which I saw tonight for the first time since recognising its homoerotic aspects, and this time came across as a rich dark study of male power and sexuality.

Ray Winstone is Gal, a criminal who’s retired to Spain. Thinks he’s retired, that is. Don Logan, played by Ben Kingsley, has other ideas. Yes, we’re in a ‘one last job’ story, but superbly scripted by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, one which gets inside the minds of some beautifully and convincingly twisted characters.

It all kicks off with Ray Winstone sunning himself outside his hacienda when a boulder comes crashing down the hill and into his pool. It foreshadows Ben Kingsley’s entrance: he’s a psychotic gangster determined to get Ray to take part in a job in London. Only, there’s more to it than that. Before Kingsley sets eyes on Winstone he sees Winstone’s pool boy, the pool itself being symbolic of the love that exists between Gal and his partner Dee (it features a tiled heart design at the bottom). And as the pool’s guardian, the teenager later tries to defend Gal from Don, as well as being the subject of Don’s envy. All subtly painted, but undeniably there.

Don is a gloriously deranged creation, equal parts vile and violent, and wonderfully conflicted about his feelings for Gal. At the very least he resents that Gal has left his mates in the lurch and has no contact with them any more. And there’s plenty more to it, as there is more generally within the underworld that Gal thought he’d left behind. Some of the characters, including Ian McShane, the Mr Big behind the robbery that Don wants Gal to be part of, are bisexual. And when the heist itself takes place, the screen is awash with near-naked men swimming underwater to get the booty they crave.

Sexy Beast is head and shoulders above the empty posturing of the other Brit gangster films that were so prevalent for a while, an incisive and elegant dissection of the intersection of criminality and masculinity. And lest that sound too pompous, it’s also wonderfully directed (by Jonathan Glazer), superbly acted, very funny, and well scored. More than anything, it shows the capacity of genre material to work as a way of exploring big ideas - especially ones that were implicit in older, more naive, takes on storytelling in the same genre.

I’m thinking of thrillers at the moment. Not regulation thrillers where the action purrs like the engine of a high performance car to an inevitable conclusion, but the sort where you’re not quite sure what’s going on at times, and maybe the writer or director have an agenda beyond the base requirements of the genre. Insomnia and Memento would be good examples, and the one I’ve just watched is Inside Man.

Spike Lee is a director I’ve admired without loving for some time, and Inside Man does nothing to consummate our relationship. It starts simply enough with a bank heist masterminded by Clive Owen and investigated by Denzel Washington, and adds layers of complexity as it goes. First, there’s the requisite tricksiness of the heist itself, which leads the crooks to take the bank staff and customers hostage and dress them in identical outfits. That’s interesting, but even more so is the motivation of the bad guys; just what is it they’re up to?

The fact that the cast also includes Jodie Foster tells you that the answers the audience are after probably go above and beyond the bare necessities of a thriller; that is, to thrill the audience. And Spike Lee being the director means that there’s sure to be a larger game afoot, and so it proves. We discover that the bank itself was started with Nazi booty looted from Jews, something that its founder Christopher Plummer would not like made public.

So, there’s the expected stuff around the mechanics of a heist, augmented with some neat business around the crooks bugging the cops, faking the death of a hostage, and so forth. All good fun that keeps you on the edge of your seat. And as the story develops, there is a sense of a bigger game being played. New York’s cultural melting pot is part of the fabric of the story. Racist attitudes to Denzel Washington’s character from a white cop, and to a Sikh hostage whose turban is forcibly removed and is disparagingly called an Arab, form part of a credible social world that Bruce Willis never has to navigate in the Die Hard films.

That element of politics and ethnicity becomes more important as the Nazi aspect of the story is made clear. It’s done with a fairly light touch, and Lee’s own status as an African American director comes into play. How many times have you seen two black cops work together? In almost any other situation, a black cop would be partnered with a white cop, but here Denzel’s character is paired with Chiwetel Ejiofor: it’s no accident.

Inside Man is not brilliant - I sense that the actors are sometimes bringing more to the characters than can be found in the script - but as an intelligent heist movie edging out of the mainstream it’s to be applauded. A brave failure is always more interesting than a mediocre success, and to call it a failure is to exaggerate its weaker points anyway.

Iron Man is the latest superhero film from the Marvel Comics stable. The thing with Iron Man is that he’s a self-made hero, whose powers derive from his genius engineering skill, which itself has also given him access to power in the form of immense wealth.

Tony Stark, the man who wears the Iron Man suit, is a billionaire industrialist who enjoys Bill Gates style riches from his arms business, and a reputation for booze and women that…well, it helps explain why he’s played by Robert Downey Jr. Frankly he’s a jerk, albeit an amusing one, and Downey plays him wonderfully, giving him a hint of badda-bing as well as a streak of geek.

It’s a clever balance, but there’s a fundamental problem here because Tony Stark is already a grown and successful man at the start of the story. Compare with Peter Parker, Spiderman, a teenager who acquires powers in the context of an emotionally richer life than Stark’s. Stark’s life is light on genuine intimacy, while Parker’s superhero origins are meshed with his failure to save his uncle from being killed.

Tony Stark is a grown-up hero with a grown-up problem: how to turn his arms business into one that can help the world rather than contribute to its conflicts. All very well, except bringing this grown-up theme to life requires some pretty simplistic storytelling. Which is fine: you don’t expect multi-dimensional stories in a summer tentpole movie, even if it is about the consequences of a change of heart by a tycoon in the midst of the military-industrial complex.

But hey, bring on the bad guys. Every hero is defined by the quality of his nemesis, and in Iron Man Robert Downey Jr is set against his right-hand man, Obadiah Stane, played more than capably by Jeff Bridges, who is up to no good in Stark Industries. Stane is in cahoots with the Al Qaeda-likes who are the film’s initial villains, and creates an even bigger and more fearsome set of armour for them, which he first uses against his employer.

It’s all well put together in terms of plot and pace, and different strands are threaded together adeptly. Gwyneth Paltrow as PA Pepper Potts is the woman who very literally touches Tony Stark’s damaged heart, in a scene that’s all about the tenderness between them - and also sets the seeds for a crucial bit of action that leads to the bad guy’s comeuppance later. For all that craft and skill, there’s something cold at times about the way it feels, particularly notable in what has to be the most egregious example of product placement I’ve yet seen, when Stark comes home from captivity in Afghanistan and, before anything else, demands a cheeseburger.

It’s a whole lot of fun in a whizzbang way, but there’s something about Iron Man that’s not as compelling as Batman or Spiderman: they’re defined by primal emotional situations that we can all empathise with (the death of parents or a guardian leading the heroes to find their purpose in life). Tony Stark, by contrast, is a successful businessman whose biggest problem is that he can’t make an emotional connection with women. But so what? As a playboy, he gets to have flings with stunning models and actresses he picks up at casinos and film premieres. A lot of men - and this is a film aimed more at a male audience - would kill for a problem like that. Anyway, there’s still plenty of room to make a sequel or two, and hints that it could offer glimpses into other facets of the Marvel universe as yet unrealised on screen.

How do you bring new life to a theme or genre that’s tired? One answer is to bring new influences in, the tack that the makers of the Daniel Craig version of Casino Royale took when they wheeled out the James Bond franchise for its latest iteration. The speed and action of the film that resulted clearly owed something to the massive success of The Bourne Identity and its sequels, films which successfully redefined what a spy franchise can do in the post-Berlin Wall and post-Twin Towers era.

Horror films have been faced with a similar dilemma. There’s a danger that werewolves and vampires and other monster staples can feel hackneyed, so what else can be brought to the table? One route is to explicitly explore the horrors that people are capable of inflicting on one another, which was handled with pathos and credibility in Wolf Creek but unfortunately also led to a host of crappy torture porn films such as Hostel and Saw.

But what if you’re still attracted to the old style monsters? Ginger Snaps demonstrated that intelligent ideas about female adolescence could be brought to a werewolf film, in a story that in its own way did for the werewolf what comics writer Alan Moore did for a whole host of horrors in his socially aware run on Swamp Thing.

And now, writer Brandon Seifert and artist Lukas Ketner have reinvigorated the horror comic anew with their title WitchDoctor. In essence, it’s House in a horror setting; the rare conditions explored by the magical medical specialist are vampirism and other forms of monstrosity, framed in a quasi-scientific way that’s a lot of fun to read. The creators have put their demo episode up at www.witchdoctorcomic.com in the hope of attracting publishers, and I wish them luck: it’s a sparky and well-executed concept that’s got the potential to inhabit its own very particular niche with style.

As for how to go about reinvigorating your own concept with the energy of fresher ideas, first look at your core story and decide whether it really does merit the time you’re going to spend on it. If it does, and it’s a new take you’re interested in, check out possible role models by exploring their style and structure: what can you borrow from, say, the new take on Dr Who that will help you to write your proposed security guard drama serial? If it’s family-friendliness, then how exactly does Dr Who manage to attract an audience of whole families, and what of that approach can you emulate in your own script?

This method isn’t, hopefully, about copying: if you learn well from a role model you can incorporate elements of their own success into yours in a way that transcends ripping off. And if not, then so be it; just bear in mind Tom Lehrer’s words: ‘Plagiarise/Let noone else’s work evade your eyes’.

A friend asked me my opinion of the band The Divine Comedy the other day, and I expressed my belief that there’s more going on in the clever words department than recognisable feelings. Plus, there seems to be a lot of ornamentation in the arrangements, perhaps more than strictly necessary. And all of this came to mind having just seen In Bruges, for one reason and another.

Like The Divine Comedy, who seem to be defined by the presence of Neil Hannon, In Bruges was pretty much put together by one Irish smartypants, in this case writer-director Martin McDonagh. And much the same overview applies: while the film was certainly enjoyable, and well crafted, it felt maybe a bit too crafted to actually convince.

Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are a pair of hitmen who’ve been sent to Bruges to cool their boots after a job in which a young boy was accidentally shot, as well as the intended target. The two are, of course, a mismatched pair, Gleeson enjoying the medieval town’s culture and history, while Farrell is more about beer and women.

Initially at least, things are quite stagy, though Bruges being Bruges it’s hard not to come across some visually interesting surroundings along the way. Things heat up when our heroes chance on a film being made in the city, and Farrell takes the opportunity to introduce himself to a woman working on it. They arrange a date, and both play the honesty card — a bit too neat and symmetrical for my liking, which applies to much of the film overall. Anyway, she is dealing drugs to the film crew, and there are sparks between them.

It’s all done with tongue partly in cheek, which is part of the problem: funny though the lines are, the balance between that comedy and the attempt to deal with deeper themes doesn’t work. Which is a shame, because McDonagh really does try hard, too hard in fact…exactly my problem with Neil Hannon. They also share a thing for classical allusion that doesn’t necessarily assist what they’re trying to say: In Bruges features some slightly clunky business concerning one of the characters wondering about his fate after killing the young boy, realised through an old painting that is in turn the source of some of the imagery in the film-within-a-film.

McDonagh does not wear his learning lightly, and though he tries to balance it with some amusing potty mouth dialogue, I’m not sure that an equilibrium is reached. And that’s a pity, because much of the film is thoroughly enjoyable, and I sense if McDonagh could put his literary and other role models to one side and instead learn more from the quality end of the American thriller market, he could make something really special. Instead, I sense that In Bruges exemplifies in its protagonists its creator’s own conflict: does he want to enjoy the culture on offer and show off his learning about it, or kick back with the lads and pull the women? Either way, like many a good Irish artist, he’s guilty and conflicted about the choice he makes.

Pick a film, any film.  If the notion that there are only seven stories (or however many) in the world is correct, we should be able to reverse engineer its specifics and find its template. 

The film I’ve chosen is Guy X.  The story goes something like this:

An American soldier is transported to a military base in Greenland, where he is mistaken for the press office they’re expecting.  The fact that it’s the wrong guy entirely matters not a jot: military intelligence being what it is, our hero is declared press officer whether he likes it or not.

Problem being, there is pretty much zero news to report from the Greenland base.  There are swarms of midges, troops enacting rituals hundreds of miles away from any context where they might have meaning, and that’s pretty much it.  Except for this one cute woman who’s also on the base, and attracts our hero’s attention.  Only, she’s caught up in the world of the commander of this crazy outfit, and rank counts for a lot in set-ups like this.

Taking to his press officer role if only to give himself something to do, our hero starts to get suspicious about what’s going on at the base, and discovers a hidden hospital ward, full of seriously injured soldiers who were hurt at an earlier point of the commander’s inglorious career.  He has exploited the inane system he works in to do what he can to hide his mistake.

But hey, it all works out fine in the end.  Our hero blows the whistle on the commander’s sick exploits, and the story ends with the hero and his new chums flying away from Greenland under newly assumed identities, knowing that the clumsy system they’re part of will never discover what’s going on.

So, there are a few things going on here.  And if you want to reduce the film to its vital elements, you can use its blueprint to create a fairy story.  Like this:

A humble peasant is mistaken for a librarian by the king’s courtiers, and gets to live in the crazy world of the court.  Everything revolves around the assumption that the king is a good and wise man.  But the peasant, smitten by the king’s daughter, discovers the terrible truth about the monarch.  The king is overthrown (overthrone???)  and the peasant and princess head away on horseback using forged papers to start a new life of their own.

Simple, huh?  (And I hope it urges you to see Guy X, which I am very fond of, and was criminally ignored when it was briefly in the cinemas about three years back.)  Now let’s see if we can make things simpler still.  Hmm.  Do that, and the core story starts to look like The Emperor’s New Clothes, in contemporary American military drag, part of a film lineage including M*A*S*H, Dr Strangelove, and Three Kings. 

Maybe we haven’t gone back as far as deducing which of seven ur-stories is Guy X’s ancestor, but this reductionism thing can be taken too far.  What’s useful is looking at the structure and themes of a story, finding precedents for it in film and myth, and seeing how they can usefully shape the way you want to write your own screenplay.

I was working with a filmmaker once, acting as a scriptdoctor on his new short. To make a point about his own project, I made a comparison with another short I knew he’d seen. Oops. He didn’t consider the one I brought up to be of relevance because it didn’t approach its subject matter, drug trafficking, with the socio-economic reality that this director felt it deserved. Hmm. Meanwhile, he never once stopped to consider the equivalent level of social reality in his psychological drama, which seemed to inhabit a dreamworld.

Interesting, the things we consider relevant when we compare films to reality. I’ve just looked at a short film script about burglars that’s quite playful. I pointed out in my notes to the filmmaker that he essentially has a choice to make. In one corner, the socially realistic burglary film, in which most burglaries are committed by drug addicts looking to sell your DVD player so they can get a fix. Alternatively, create a world of your own, where crime has its own context: Bugsy Malone and Ocean’s Eleven are two very different examples. Either route can produce a good film: make your choice and stick to it.

What I presume people mean by ‘realism’ is ‘presenting a similar worldview to my own (objectively correct) one’. Only, the term has been hijacked by people of a maudlin disposition, many of them academics and reviewers, who believe that some forms of reality are more real than others. Not for them the giddy delights of Amelie: no, life is best expressed in this worldview by the angsty Nordic cinema of Bergman, or in the socio-political paradigm of Ken Loach. Oh, the sacrifices such thinkers have made to whitter about film when their true calling was in social change or psychiatry.

The above is of course a generalisation. There are other commentators on film who care less about the tone of a movie than when it was made. I’m thinking here of those who still bemoan the collapse of seventies American cinema, which brought us Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, and Coppola among others. Only, the clue’s in the title: it’s not the seventies, so how about waking up to contemporary and even world cinema? Asia is producing some of the finest horror films you’ll see, and Korea in particular has become a hotbed for inventive thrillers.

For other people, how a film is made assumes significance above all other things. That’s clearly a concern for George Lucas, who didn’t even go near the second Star Wars trilogy until digital filmmaking had advanced to the point where it could tackle the effects he knew he’d need. And having done so, he went back and tinkered with the original trilogy to give the effects there an extra je ne sais quoi.

The Golden Age is whenever our favourite films were made. And that may well dovetail with other things going on in your life at that time anyway, outside the context of cinema. Which might explain Jonathan Ross’s enthusiasm for Stardust: hell, I’d be happy if my wife wrote an adaptation of a Neil Gaiman book with Robert de Niro in it, too.

Some years ago, at a friend’s house, I watched a home video double bill of Se7en and Shawshank Redemption. Both fine films in their very different ways. And what’s inescapably noticeable when you see them back to back like that is the endings, both of which present Morgan Freeman carrying a box with mysterious contents.

Take a step back, and it’s like there’s a third Morgan Freeman, offering the protagonists of both films a choice of which box to open, like a particularly daemonic Noel Edmonds. ‘Now which will it be: your wife’s head, or a stack of cash? Choose carefully.’

That particular sequence could work well in what passes for much of contemporary horror, combining as it does the banal torture antics of Saw, Hostel, etc, and a game show twist that could pass for Lottery satire.

The best horror films often have a strong element of social comment. Torture porn doesn’t begin to qualify unless you buy the argument that it comments on what Americans are getting up to at Guantanamo Bay and with rendition flights etc, which frankly I don’t buy. The films reflect what’s happening there, perhaps, but there’s no sense of analysis or irony or distaste: it’s a mere two-dimensional presentation of people being eviscerated, no nuance at all.

Perhaps you need to monsters and mutants for metaphors to really come alive. There’s no shortage of motifs to play with if you’re looking at vampires, which connect Freud’s biggies of sex and death in one toothy package, and provide rich material about blood, sex, and AIDS. And I don’t know how many times Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been retold now, but it can be (I’m overlooking the lousy Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig version) a potent way of exploring themes of social conformity, emotional sterility, and more.

But the big daddies of the metaphorical horror film have to be zombies. Under George Romero’s sure guidance, zombie films have become some of the finest satires of our times. They’re a wonderful means of criticising capitalism, proof positive that death is no obstacle to continued consumption. They’re a shambling version of what the Buddhists call hungry ghosts: creatures with immense appetites and stomachs the size of blimps, but with mere pinprick-sized mouths. That’s what they’re attempting to do when they push shopping trolleys round supermarkets in their early appearance. Later, in Land of the Dead, they take on another aspect: migrant workers beating at the walls of the gated communities of the privileged. I haven’t yet seen Diaries of the Dead but I’m betting there’s plenty of room for comment on the modern media with people attempting to make a zombie film while actual zombies attack them. Media eats itself as surely as a zombie snacking on your kneecap.

Given the opportunity, I’d love to do a zombie film that taps into tabloid fears about East European migration. The story would start off with urban rumours and scare stories, but people would soon adjust to the walking dead in their midst. After all, cheap labour is cheap labour, and the food issue could be dealt with by giving the zombies ASBO teens to devour, proving once again that in a good horror film, humans are the monsters.