Writing a fight scene

One of the hardest things I find to write is an action scene.

There's a theory that when there's lot of action you should take your time over it, writing more rather than less. And I think this is useful. Most readers will have noted how, when the climax of a story is coming, the author gives more and more detail, expanding the big moment, even though it may in real terms all be over in a couple of seconds.

I'm in the middle of the draft of my fourth children's fantasy. It doesn't have a name at this point, so it's just book four. It picks up some leading characters from the other three books and throws them together in a new story, but one that hopefully connects back to the earlier books.

I've got a note to myself that in the climax of one chapter, where a villain is (probably temporarily) dealt with, that I need to fill this out more. Everything is over for the villain in a couple of sentences.

But today I've been trying to write a small fight scene, where the three main characters overcome three people on the opposite team, as it were. They can do it, but getting it all down on paper has required considerable writing and rewriting - even though this is still only the first real draft of the book. I don't want to skimp at this point because it's likely that what happens here will affect later scenes.

Who does what to who at which point, and who gets in first, and how do the baddies retaliate, and so on, all have to be taken into account. If I'm not careful the baddies could easily end up winning the scene!

Grimhilda intends to shoot Toby,
but his father stands in the way.
Photo by Ian Thomson

When my co-writer and I were working on the play of Grimhilda!, which came before the book version, we spent hours on making sure that on stage everything in the fight scene at the end would work. We made sure there would be time for a character to move from here to there before someone else did something to them...and so on. And then the director came along and ignored all our stage directions! I know that's not unusual, but when things work in the script, it's possibly wise to at least try those things out before changing them!

When I'm writing a book I'm not only the scriptwriter, but the director as well. This has its advantages, but it means you've got to careful to keep things tight as well as clear. You can't give one of your characters the upper hand by extending out how long they have to win when the rest of the characters have much less time. (Though you do see this done in the movies all the time.)

While your readers may be so excited at the fight itself they'll allow you as the author to get away with certain inconsistencies, I think it's valuable to know that if they fight was staged for real, it would work. Just one of those little disciplines we writers have to live with!

Passing by and Time

James Nesbitt is a fine actor who doesn't always get parts that give him enough to get his teeth into.  Furthermore, he's an actor who can show vulnerability without it seeming in the least bit hammy.  We caught up with a TV movie the other night called Passer By (a somewhat unusual 'spelling' of this common phrase - usually it's hyphenated if it's not treated as a single word).  Nesbitt plays a man who seems to have it altogether, but when one night coming home on a suburban train he's forced to make a decision as to whether to help a girl who's likely to be sexually assaulted if he leaves the train, he still decides to get off at his normal stop, suggesting she pull the emergency cord if there's further trouble.  Once off the train, he comes to the place where he can make an emergency call himself, but still fails to speak into it.  The consequences for the next year of his life, and for his family, are traumatic, as he's more and more pushed into having to face his cowardice and his unwillingness to get involved.

It's a play that hits home to all of us: how far are we willing to go to help a stranger in distress, someone who means nothing to us in terms of relationship, and whose only connection with us is their common humanity?  Nesbitt's character is given grace in more ways than one, as it turns out: from his wife (who's a good deal wiser than him, but who hasn't personally had to face the crisis), from his 14-year-old son, who's having trouble himself with bullies at school, and from the police.  The young woman who's attacked, of course, has to live with the ongoing trauma, and decides to repress it to a great extent, and comes to despise Nisbett's character.  The story could have ended far more tragically than it does; however without any great tweaking of the characters, it manages to offer a satisfactory and hopeful ending,   Nesbitt's wife in the film is played by Siobhan Finneran, who's perhaps now more famous as the sharp-tongued personal maid, Sarah O'Brien, in Downton Abbey.  Here she shows a much softer side, though it's combined with considerable strength.  Nesbitt's troubled son is superbly played by Ben Smith, who was 15 at the time, and already had considerable experience in television (he'd first appeared when he was four.)  His part certainly needed an experienced actor, since it combines violence and vulnerability in fairly equal measure.

On a different note, we watched In Time, last night.   This is set in some future time, though it doesn't appear to be too far away.  At this point everyone is genetically engineered to stop aging at 25, and then given only one more year to live.  By swapping and buying 'time' they can achieve longer life spans (the first female 25-year-old we meet is actually 50), and of course, those with enough capital in 'time' are effectively aeons old.  There's a difficulty with having all that time available: this form of immortality can become increasingly tedious, but it's also dangerous, as those with greater amounts of time are at greater risk from those who want to steal their 'time' from them.  Time can be transferred from one person to another, like a kind of debit/credit system, or can be bought from places that charge increasingly large amounts of interest.  It doesn't pay to think too much about how this system works; during the course of the film it makes sense enough for the viewer to go along with it.

The film stars Justin Timberlake (as a young man from the wrong side of the tracks - the 'ghetto') and Amanda Seyfried as the daughter of one of the most wealthy men in the country (she lives in 'New Greenwich').  Through various circumstances they meet, and wind up on the run - from the Timekeepers.  These are a kind of police unit that aims to keep some sort of balance in the society, ensuring the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor (the latter often only having the means to accumulate one extra day, or less, at a time). 

The story behind the film has been done innumerable times before, but the twist in having 'time' as something that can be bought and sold adds an interesting and novel approach.  The cast of mostly mid-twenties actors is excellent, though I'm not sure that Justin Timberlake is quite your action hero.  He pulls it off, and adds some warmth and humanity to a character who could have been nothing but macho. Seyfried is a nice match for him, and the two become a kind of Robin Hood duo in due course.  At the end of the movie we see them continuing on their goal of robbing the rich to give to the poor; given the world they live in, it may be the only way the film can end, but it seemed just a little less than satisfactory.

The world they inhabit also seems a little constricted: there are lots of empty streets, and in the ghetto everything visible has been reduced to blandness: there are no shops, apart from pawn shops, so it's hard to work out how anyone manages to eat or clothe themselves. There's no entertainment, apart from one or two streetwalkers.  Even the Mission gives away only 'time' - no food or clothing or shelter.  When people do appear in the streets, it's as if they have nothing else to do all day.  Even in New Greenwich there's a shortage of bodies.  Perhaps this is intentional, part of the kind of world that we're experiencing.  It certainly feels a little odd.

The film is sharply directed (and written) by New Zealander Andrew Niccol, who leans towards stories in which the world isn't the way we normally experience it (The Truman Show, Gattaca).  A small-scale action movie, perhaps, but worth watching.

Tomorrow is the 15th: Blog Action Day

Tomorrow,New Zealand time, is the 15th October, which is Blog Action Day. Here's a sneak preview of what the subject matter of this year's Blog Action Day will be:

Blog Action Day 2010: Water from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

Trafficking, Water, Wallis

Blog Action Day is coming up in Oct - there's a link for more information right down the right column of this blog. Not sure why it decided to hide itself way down there, but now you know, and have no excuse for not finding it!

I was hoping that they'd choose Human Trafficking as their big issue for the action day, but they've chosen Water, which, in terms of the need for clean water in many countries is certainly an issue, and the lack of which results in deaths.

However, I've been getting tweets (tweets galore, in fact) relating to Human Trafficking and consequently that's an issue that's more on my mind. A friend on Facebook alerted me to a site called The A21 Campaign, this morning, so I've been checking it out. In line with its name it has 21 things you can do to help make people more aware of human trafficking. Click here for the list.

I went and heard Jim Wallis speak on Tuesday - he'd been brought to the city by the Professor of Public Theology at the Otago University. He's a fairly low key/laid-back speaker, has a good sense of humour, tells lots of stories, and (quixotically) is married to the woman who was consultant to the series The Vicar of Dibley. She's an Anglican priest, British born.

His theme is injustice, injustice, injustice. You may have heard of Sojourners, the organisation that he heads, but he does far more than that. He has the ear of people in high places - including Barak Obama, and is a Christian who is able to speak into society in a way that many Christians cannot - through lack of opportunity. You might put him in the prophetic mode, except that he wasn't wearing anything outlandish in the way of garb, now was he eating locusts or intending to cook his evening meal over dung; nor had he buried his underwear in the ground and disinterred it a year later (only to find, as would be expected, that it had deteriorated considerably); now has he been fed by ravens at any known point.

Nevertheless, prophet to the nation(s) is pretty much what he is. Thank God for him.

Wallis had plenty of injustice issues to comment on, and there's only so much you can say in a couple of hours, so he didn't speak much about human trafficking, as it happened. It did come up at one point, when he pointed out that there were more slaves now than there had been in Wilberforce's time - millions more. Wilberforce successfully fought for the abolition of slaves but the battle needs to be fought all over again in our day. Check out the A21 site if you're devoid of ideas as to how you might be involved.

Pros and Cons

Having had another 12 hours or so to think about the latest Harry Potter movie, I thought I'd write a few more notes, mostly for my own benefit.
These will just come as I think of them....sorry it's not a bit more ordered.

Pros: superb technical proficiency. Just one example: the camera shot starts in the train with a group of characters, pulls back outside the train, sweeps along as the train moves past, and catches up with another group of characters further down the train. Of course, it would have been much easier to have done it as two separate shots, but there's a kind of exuberance about this approach.

Cons: No Dursleys. This film begins with the deatheaters do nasty things to London.
Cons: No Voldemort - at least not in his current guise. He turns up (via two very good young actors) as Tom Riddle, in two memory sequences. This film can in no way stand on its own: there are too many characters you're just expected to know, and too many things you're expected to remember from earlier episodes. And characters who don't appear that you're expected to know about as well. Okay, it's all a matter of how much screen-time we've got, but...

Cons: lots of loose ends. London being under attack is shown initially and then forgotten about. And how does it relate to Hogswart and what's going on there? And why is the countryside outside the train so bare?
Why do the deatheaters attack the Wand shop, and who are they dragging out and what do they do with them?
The Horcrux business arrives quite late in the proceedings, and then, after all the effort to get one of them (with Dumbledore nearly dying in the process) it turns out to be a fake. Okay, this is in the book, but it's treated in a very off-hand way here.

Pros: the usual superb mise-en-scene, wonderful sets and design, but....everything is so gray. Harry says right at the end something along the lines of 'I never appreciated how beautiful this place was.' But he's looking at a very gray version of it. It's been a lot more beautiful in the other movies. Admittedly the grays are beautiful in themselves - the early shot of the London office people looking out at the storm is full of wonderfully toned-down colourings. So that's sort of a con and pro in one.

More loose ends: the Weasleys house goes up in flames - we hear no more about this, and no one seems particularly worried. Hagrid's house goes up in flames: is he inside? I'm not sure if we find out in this movie, as I can't remember him being in that late scene where everyone is raising their wands in the air in tribute to Dumbledore.

Con: everyone who knows the books will know that Dumbedore dies at the end of this episode. But curiously there's a lot more emotional feeling in the death of Cedric Diggory in The Goblet of Fire than there is here in the death of Dumbledore. Certainly there's a wonderful piece of elegaic writing in the music score at this point, but somehow it doesn't affect you emotionally. Odd.
When I read in the book about Dumbledore's death, it was shock - this couldn't happen! And you waited in vain in the last book for him to appear safe and sound. So it's a bit of a puzzle that it's nowhere near so affecting here. Perhaps it's because most viewers will know what happens to Dumbledore, and it's difficult for the filmmakers to overcome that. It would be interesting to know what people who hadn't read the book thought about this point (assuming they weren't totally confused by the movie anyway!)
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I said yesterday the film seemed slow. Thinking back again, there are still some very exciting sections: the search in the cave for the horcrux, for example, or the attack on the Weasley's house. And the Quidditch match is superbly done. Think back to the way Quidditch was done in the first movie to compare how much more technically superior this section is. But there's no explanation as to why Ron should be playing Quidditch after all these years, when he's never shown the slightest interest in doing so before, and why Harry isn't playing. (I'm sure there's a good reason in the book, but for some reason the filmmakers have chosen not to tell us.)

Pro: Luna Lovegood. Evanna Lynch has made this character utterly her own. Whatever you thought Luna should look like has been thoroughly overtaken by this actress' interpretation. It's a delight. (Emma Watson, as Hermione, on the other hand, is still 'wrong' in my mind. My impression of Hermione, from the books, was always that she wasn't particularly attractive; it was her intelligence that marked her out. In fact, my original picture of her was of someone not especially slim. Watson's beauty in the film versions makes it hard to understand why she's so interested in Ron, who's not only lazy and unintelligent, but a bit of a slob. And in this film he barely gives her a moment's notice.)

Con: the stuff about the necklace that's supposed to curse Dumbledore and ends up cursing the messenger instead. That's all handled a bit oddly in the movie; it makes Rowling's consistently clever plotting seem clunky. (Maybe it was a bit of that famous Nintendo jewellery I'm always on about...?)

Obviously it's time to go back and read the book and figure out some of these peculiar loose ends and untidy plottings that are in the movie. Thank goodness for the books, which leave far more room for our imaginations than the movies, for all these superb visual reconstructions, do.

Quantum of Solace

First, the title appears to mean very little, although a site called the James Bond Dossier gives a fairly good indication that it actually does mean something. Apparently 'quantum' can mean an amount, in which case, 'a small amount of comfort' might a reasonable translation.
The movie is high energy, lots of explosions, little sensible dialogue, lots more explosions, the inevitable inability of villains to kill someone even with a machine gun, car chases, rooftop chases, plenty of people getting killed for no apparent reason, explosions, and finally, lots and lots of explosions. Out of which Bond, his lady friend, and the villain all manage to escape. As you'd expect.
Beyond that, the film washes over the brain, seldom engaging it in any way at all. It's full of stuff but what that stuff is, is anybody's guess. Most things that happen in the movie have very little to do with anything, especially the action sequences, which come at regular intervals, just in case anyone with even half a brain wants to do some thinking for a while.
The action sequences are cut in such a way that most of the time you have no idea what's going on, which is a pity, because they look as though originally they were staged very cleverly. And there are all sorts of unexplained things. Both Bond and M appear to get shot very early in the piece, but make no comment about the fact that they're both still alive in the next sequence.
I suspect the film is full of Hitchockian McGuffins, which the scriptwriters thought nobody would want explained so they threw them all in. To detail them all would be a waste of time; suffice to say: this Bond film is all-out energy, rather like Mumma Mia, but when you walk out of the film you rather wonder what you've spent a couple of hours doing.

Indiana Jones returns!

We went to the movies today to see the latest Indiana Jones escapade: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I had to look the rest of the title up as that part of the film made no impact on me at all!
The reviews I’d read were a bit mixed, but Roger Ebert seemed as pleased as punch about the movie just because it was so much fun that I thought it would be worth catching it at the cinema rather than waiting for the DVD to come out. If nothing else, the sound in cinemas is far more effective than what comes out of our TV – although when we’re watching West Wing (we’ve just gone through the entire sixth season), the phones ringing in the background often seem to be pitched somewhere away from the TV and occasionally make us want to go and answer them.
Anyway, the film is a hoot. It doesn’t take itself in the least bit seriously, plays off against Harrison Ford’s age on more than one occasion, fills itself with in-jokes, references itself back to the other movies - and offers the most extreme villains (and, as usual, disposes of them in particularly nasty ways – they just never learn, do they?).
The car chases and fights on car chases are so absurdly over-the-top you’d have to be a misery guts to carp at them (one or two reviewers have managed to play misery guts), and the spectacular destruction of practically everything in sight has a certain kind of odd satisfaction. It’s a bit like going to the refuse dump (or tip, as we used to call it; it’s now something absurd like the transit station), and throwing piles of glass off the back of your vehicle, or large pieces of borer-ridden furniture, or great heavy chunks of metal, all of which you can smash with completely-permitted freedom.
The Indy story is pretty regular: it starts off with lots of nasty Russians taking over the atomic bomb site in Nevada (Indy manages to set the bomb off, though how he does it is anyone’s guess), shifts to Indy once again in his proper employment as Professor in some elitist college (which narrowly avoids getting thoroughly wrecked), and then sets him off on a madcap trail around half the world, creating havoc everywhere with his newly-found companion, Mutt Williams, a much younger bloke with a surprising ability in sword-play and a penchant for doing his hair rather too often.
There are a couple of real plot surprises (the film doesn’t really have time for much plot with all its other antics), and a curious ensemble of characters, Shia LeBeouf as Mutt, John Hurt as a cracked archaeologist, Karen Allen (dug up, as it were, from the first movie in the series) as Indy’s old flame, and Ray Winstone as a goody/baddie/goody/baddie who doesn’t quite know which side he’s on from one scene to the next. Cate Blanchett has enormous fun as the villain (she’s more interesting than similar bad females in the Bond series, which is saying something). She has a sidekick with a constitution like an ox, and a seemingly endless supply of minor villains, none of whom survive – as far as we can tell.
And since we spend some of the time in South America, we have nasty South American natives – slightly more pleasant than the islanders in Jackson’s King Kong – as well as FBI agents and KGB agents and probably various others whom I’ve forgotten about already.
Being only two years younger than Harrison Ford, I find it hard to imagine how he coped with the rigours of filming this piece; sure there are doubles and stunt men in droves, but there are a couple of scenes where it’s obviously him, and you think: that must have puffed him out, or left him very sore.

Independence Day again

Last night, while trying to get over a dose of hay fever such as I haven’t had in many moons, I watched Independence Day. I hadn’t seen it since it was on at the movies, and though I’d forgotten some of it, most of it had stuck in my visual memory. Which isn’t somewhat unusual. While some films are eminently forgettable, Independence Day, it turns out, wasn’t.

As soon as a character appeared, I remembered what happened to him or her. Pretty much. Which is intriguing, because ID is full of cliches, hackneyed moments, tripe, and gooey-eyed children. It’s part sci-fi, part boy’s own adventure. It has some romance, but not enough to get in the way of the action. It has some emotional moments: the big St Crispin’s Day type of speech the President makes late in the film is actually quite moving - probably because it’s based on a very good theatrical model.
It has some wonderful disaster stuff: the destruction of Los Angeles (or was it New York - where it was was hardly important), with cars flying through the air, and Will Smith’s girlfriend’s dog making it to safety at the last moment. It has a host of good actors who take hold of their roles and chew them to bits, the ones with the humorous lines even more so. Who can forget Will Smith kicking ass (literally) out in the desert? Or Judd Hirsch’s over-the-top Jewish father? Or his genius of a son, Jeff Goldblum, and his dry one-liners? Or Randy Quaid doing a full-out I-was-abducted-by-aliens maniac - with his lookalike scene from Dr Strangelove at the end. Or Harry Connick Jr (I think it was) doing a slightly out-of-the-ordinary buddy part with Will Smith, a slightly too friendly buddy, in fact. Okay, maybe you can forget them. I think they’re fun; they take the seriousness out of a film that might have been so full of its own importance, and keep it well and truly alive.
Yes, dead bodies abound: several of the major US cities are wiped off the map. Dozens of fighter pilots are blown up. Mad scientists meet their just deserts. The President’s wife has a schmaltzy death scene. But it’s all so unreal, because we know that in the end the earthlings will overcome these nasty locusts from outer space, and will put them in their place.
And anyway, the aliens are so ridiculous - as ridiculous and absurd as those funny men wandering around in sticky suits in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs. There’s no way they could be intelligent with all those octopus arms. That gives the game away from the beginning.
When you read the reviews from the time the film first came out, you find a host of people disliking it. Tired ideas, weak characterizations etc - even James Berardinelli can't find anything good in it. Well, well. Ten years or so on, and with 9/11 behind us, the film has one thing that is good: it undercuts those people who think the end of the world and the invasion of aliens and all the nasty stuff that's been going on is serious; it tells us that the way to combat an awful lot of it is with humour.

This is a rather wandering piece…

In the 1950s there used to be a recording artist called Ronnie Ronalde (the emphasis was on the second syllable). Ronnie’s gift to the world was the ability to whistle, (and yodel, I've just discovered) not just like your man in the street (never heard a woman whistling in the street); Ronnie could do all sorts of bird calls, and he had a considerable range and a great deal of flexibility. He was very popular on the 4ZB Request session which played every Sunday around lunchtime, so I guess he was pretty popular generally.
For some reason I was reminded of Ronnie this morning. Also in the 1950s cinemas used to show ‘shorts’ – short films on all sorts of topics which appeared before the Intermission. Some of these must have been years old when we saw them, and some of them were extremely cheaply made. One I recall with some sort of strange horror presented a band, which had a man who whistled with them. At one point the man whistled the tune for what seemed like a very long time. He was presented full on, with no variation, and no cutting away to anyone else in the band. A man whistling is not a pretty sight, even though the sound may be okay. For a start he can’t really smile, so the face presents a permanent pucker. This guy didn’t move either, so as a figure in a film he was what you would call, static. And it wasn’t actually that easy to tell that he was whistling. Anyone could have been doing it.
How times have changed. Filmmaking is often frantic. Some films know how to put dancing across – Shall We Dance, for instance – but others, such as Moulin Rouge, are a nightmare of cutting. In the big dance sequences in that film there was so much chop cutting that the dancers could have been dancing or standing still. It wouldn’t have made any difference: the editor was doing all the dancing.
Peter Jackson’s movies are made up of thousands of shots – for better or worse. As David Bordwell was commenting in a book I was reading a couple of days ago, The Way Hollywood Tells It, Jackson sometimes cuts in such a way that you often don’t see the actors’ acted reaction to what’s going on, only Jackson’s version of it - which, in fact, may have been filmed at a different time and place. In Brian Sibley’s book on Peter Jackson, we’re told that an emotional scene between Frodo and Sam was actually filmed in two places, a year apart. The shots showing Frodo speaking were shot a year in advance of the shots showing Sam speaking, though you wouldn’t know it on the screen.
Bordwell says the Hong Kong action films, for all their frenetic behaviour, do actually have scenes in which characters can be seen on screen together, which gives the actors a chance to react in their own way, rather than as the director cuts it.