Pity about the script

A newly launched New Zealand Writers Foundation aims to raise the quality of local screenwriting. KEITH HILL looks at what's wrong with our feature films.

In 1965 Alan Curnow wrote in the introduction to his selection of New Zealand poetry that the role of the poet should be to provide a public voice that reflects our nationhood.

In Borders bookstore, cinema magazines are situated directly beneath girlie magazines. These two facts seem to me to reflect the central dilemma of filmmaking: cinema is something we do in the dark, each of us is responding very privately to what we see on the big screen, yet we engage in this very private and subjective act in the midst of a large crowd unless, of course, we happen to be watching a New Zealand film.

Private versus public, personal versus collective, culture versus commerce - it's a balance every New Zealand film necessarily tries to address, and there are as many individual solutions as there are filmmakers. But one thing everyone does agree on is that our scripts suck.

In the past 20 years our actors, technicians and deal-makers have all improved radically, whereas our scripts have, at best, marked time. At worst, they have regressed.

In the analysis that follows a number of films are criticised. The intention is not to attack anyone in particular, especially as numerous factors affect a film's development and production. This is an attempt to deconstruct the writing, not the writer.

Dramatic feature films tell stories. Without a story there is very little for an audience to engage with, apart from some scenery, the odd character, nice cinematography and special effects.

From this we could conclude that our scripts suck because they don't tell interesting stories in an engaging manner. But we'd be wrong, or, at least, only partially right, because before the script is written, the writer needs a strong story concept. And recently most of our story concepts have sucked.

What does a story concept need? Try passion. Film director Ian Mune has suggested we need to get back to the 70s and 80s, when filmmakers made stories they were passionate about. If we, as filmmakers, don't feel we have a story that shakes our guts and absolutely has to be made, how can we expect an audience to get similarly excited by it and put their dollars over the counter?

The best commercial Hollywood filmmakers - Spielberg, Cameron, Scott Rudin, Zemekis, Betty Thomas - don't research the market, then make the films that research tells them will be successful.

They find stories that move them, assess whether others will feel the same, then commit emotionally to telling those stories in the most powerful cinematic way they know. Story concepts must have a gut component.

Try dramatic conflict. Our story concepts lack conflict. Let's look at some examples. Jubilee: the town buffoon has to organise a jubilee, the climax of which involves putting up a large tent in a field. Chicken: a rock'n'roller, well past his use-by date, tries to revive his non-existent career by faking his suicide, but no one is interested.

Savage Honeymoon: a married couple can't get the bonking together, so go on holiday but the family turns up, the husband isn't really interested anyway and - lack of interest all round. Hopeless: one character can't decide whether or not to get on an aircraft, and the rest can't decide whether to do anything at all.

The common problem with these stories? They are small stories about small people who don't risk anything, don't put their lives in jeopardy and never make an irrevocable decision that changes their lives so they failed in the cinema.

In comparison, Scarfies involves students finding a dope stash, selling it off, then having the owner turn up and wanting his money. Clear conflict. An irrevocable act from which no one can step back. Life-threatening consequences for all involved. The result is in the box office.

Try ambition. Peter Jackson started out making genre films, but he strove to make them significant to the genre - Braindead is one of the great zombie movies, Heavenly Creatures is a great real-life murder mystery. I came out of Desperate Remedies excited by the way it consciously sought to add to the history of melodramas. These, and a number of other films, add to our culture.

Try underlying myth. Stories need an underlying myth. By this I don't mean Jung-by-way-of-Joseph-Campbell. But stories do need to resonate on a deep level if they're going to grab an audience.

Example: Strictly Ballroom has two myths: the ugly duckling turns into a swan, and David v Goliath - the small guy who beats the system. Goodbye Pork Pie and Sleeping Dogs: individuals against the system. An Angel at My Table: ugly duckling becomes a swan.

We're a frontier country, so you'd also expect frontier myths to apply. Utu is a revisionist Western dealing with a bicultural conflict over issues of law and order; Vigil is based on the myth of civilisation versus the savage landscape, and The Piano, a revisionist costume drama, puts real female sensuality and yearning into the bodice-ripper. In comparison, recent films fail the mythological test.

Try genre. All films, including art films, have a genre which a knowing story-teller draws on and, hopefully, adds to significantly. Two attempts at comedy, Jubilee and Savage Honeymoon both tell the same story - about a married couple who have lost their passion for each other, the wife meets an old flame from the past, doesn't bonk him, and the couple gets back together again.

What genre is this? A sub-genre of screwball comedy known as the genre of remarriage. Classic remarriage stories are His Girl Friday and The Awful Truth - both starring Cary Grant. In the 40s and 50s audiences were older (before they shifted to television), so the couple was married to reflect its audience. In Australia's Dating the Enemy, the couple are younger and not married. This is because the audience is younger, society has changed, and relationships outside marriage are accepted.

So Jubilee and Savage Honeymoon missed as comedies because the scripts weren't aware of the history of their genre, its contemporary metamorphosis, and the need for the onscreen characters to reflect current audience attitudes.

Art films also have genres. The Piano is a costume drama. An Angel at My Table is a bio-pic. The Ugly is a serial-killer film - more loved by cineastes than the public, as they're bad date movies.

What about Heaven? Vaguely crime thriller but its intoxication with genre style over genre story-telling conventions means it remains of no fixed genre abode. Memory and Desire? It belongs to a new genre called the contemporary costume drama - examples are The Full Monty and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Costume dramas, contemporary or otherwise, are usually melodramas - they tell the story of an individual whose personal values clash with those of the world they live in. The most important aspect of this genre is that the audience is taken into the film's world and learns what is at stake for the central character in relation to the rules and values of that world.

But Memory and Desire is set between worlds - New Zealand and Japan - and the audience never learns fully about, or invests emotionally or intellectually in, either world, or in the woman's struggle against them.

Memory and Desire could have been a great melodramatic psychological study, as indicated by the fantastic bathroom scene where the husband is confronted, and freaked, by female desire. But he dies straight after and the story's psychological possibilities disappear with him.

What about Hopeless? Via Satellite? When Love Comes? The character-based story is not a genre. Neither are love stories - love is a relationship two characters have in the context of a specific genre. Of recent films, only Scarfies had a clear sense of its genre. And, again, it's the only story to which audiences responded.

* An edited version of an article first published in Write Up, the publication of the New Zealand Writers Guild. Keith Hill tutors in filmmaking at Waikato Polytech. His first novel, Blue Kisses, was published by HarperCollins in 1998. This Is Not a Love Story, his debut feature starring Sarah Smuts Kennedy, Stephen Lovatt, Peta Rutter and Beryl Te Wiata, is due for release later this year.