When we first went into quarantine, our Hal team was incredibly grateful that we had already shot the movie. For me personally, I was also relieved that I would have more time to write - with all of the directing, producing, and rewriting I’d been doing, it had been 14 months since I had written a first draft of a play or screenplay. I felt incredibly backed up, and had already been planning to structure my life for the rest of 2020 in the way that would allow me to get the most writing done.
Now, 4.5 months into the quarantine, we’re a lot farther in the editing process for Hal, and I have not run out of steam. I have written first drafts of two brand-new screenplays and one new play, and done major rewrites on a screenplay I wrote in January 2017 that I thought I would never work seriously on. I’ve loved focusing so intensely on my writing, and it feels great to be coming up with new ideas and moving older ideas leaps forward. (I think I’m done churning out first drafts for a while, though - now my focus will be on revising and getting these screenplays into excellent shape.)
Being in post for Hal, and especially in the rough cut stage, has definitely changed the way I write screenplays. I’m writing much more as a director now - which for me means taking Hitchcock’s advice to use a screenplay to “fill the screen.” When we were in pre-production for Hal, I thought of the screenplay as a tool to plan production. Through the conversations with designers, I realized it can also carry more of the visual landscape, and give a production designer and cinematographer something to work with.
Now, as we sculpt performances in specific beats and reaction shots, I am finding how the screenplay can do more to convey the emotional journey of each scene. In the rough cut, I’m giving notes like, “In this cut she’s playing the conflict with so-and-so, but I need to see the fear of such-and-such.” The actions don’t need to sketch out an actor’s entire process of course, but they can provide seeds of inspirations both for the actors and the editor who will ultimately be sculpting their performance.
I’m also getting a lot better at figuring out what can be done with a look, and how to describe that look so that the beat still reads well in the screenplay without dialogue. In the beginning of Hal, there’s a scene where Amy’s mother is driving her to the halfway house. They’re both unhappy, and the scene needs to set up why her mother has chosen this option, why Amy thinks it’s a bad idea, and the fact that they have had a tense relationship for a long time that has only gotten worse since the death of Amy’s father. It’s a pretty dialogue-heavy scene, but we found that their conflict wasn’t being conveyed best by the dialogue; it was being conveyed best by these long silences. We were able to cut a few lines to create space in the scene where one of them jabs at the other, and then the pair just have to sit in that rather than continuing the conversation.
I feel proud of the screenplay for Hal, but it was supplemented by an incredible amount of conversations with my creative team. I’m sure that will always be the case, but I feel now that I am learning how to pour the cinematic vision into the screenplay itself, and that feels extraordinarily valuable.
