Friday, May 6, 2011

Ideas

So for the past four months I've been trying to get together a treatment or something for a movie about my hometown.  Well, not about it, but highlights it.  Like the Coen Brothers - their films really utilizes the setting.  So Fargo isn't about Fargo (in fact, like 5 minutes of the movie is in Fargo), but it kind of is.  Well, about North Dakota and a tiny bit about Minnesota.  Their wide, establishing outdoor shots in each of their films are amazing.  So I want to do a movie where I can do epic, beautiful shots like that while incorporating the culture of my hometown without it being a documentary or some awkward character study.

At first it was going to be autobiographical, but it was too long for all I wanted to capture.  Then I was going to split it in two parts, but I never really returned to it, because ehh, just wasn't feeling it.  A few weeks ago, I had another idea of how to incorporate my idea, but it was still lacking whatever thing my other ideas lacked.

But as I was driving today, it hit me - the perfect opening scene, and it just unraveled from there.  And now I'm sure I got it.  The problem was, I was making it too much about myself - making it too sentimental to me.  And I want to capture my city, not my necessarily my life.  This story is undoubtedly so inspired by my actual life, but it's not autobiographical, and it's not "High Point: The Movie."  I'll call it "High Point" in the sense that the Coen Brother's called their movie "Fargo."  It's not about High Point, but rather about characters who live there.  But still at the end of the movie, I want people to come out understanding where I grew up - hate it a little, love it a lot, and just appreciate this random place in the middle of North Carolina.

Practically the whole movie came to me in the thirty minutes I sat in Panera waiting for someone (and of course I didn't have a notebook on me), so I got myself a good skeleton.  Gotta brush somethings up, but I might be writing this soon.  It's about time I started on another screenplay.

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