The Making Of A Monster_Making The Film by Matt Shaw

Author:Matt Shaw [Shaw, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Back To The Script

I learned (thankfully before we shot the film) that a script read-through is vital when you're making a film. I don’t mean it as a case of just reading the script out loud when you have finished it, I mean - actually getting your cast to read it through whilst you sit back and listen. You can hear unnatural sounding sentences, words that the actors stumble over and clunky dialogue which would pull the audience from the film. Had I gone ahead and made a short film, that weekend, as opposed to working more on the feature - I would have got to set and potentially cringed my way through the shoot. I say “potentially” because I was working in so many directions that I might have missed the clunky dialogue and - had I done that… Disaster. What’s more, there were other issues with the screenplay too and - so - potential spoilers ahead…

Set the dialogue to one side (and it really was a case of changing the odd word here and there) and focus on the story. By the end of ACT 3, the “hero” of the piece is trapped in a dining room. She escapes and, instead of running to the front door, she runs up the stairs. Worse than that, she runs up another flight of stairs. They always do that in horror films. Or rather, they always do it in shit horror films. I mean, why don’t they just run out of the front door? Why run upstairs? From there it turns more ridiculous as she is chased up there by not one but two people. Then she has a bit of a run around in one of the rooms before running back down the stairs and back to the front door near to the dining room… It was ridiculous.

Sadly Mik couldn’t be at the read-through due to distance. Remember, he is up North and I am down South. He doesn’t drive and the train is a stupid price (hundreds of pounds!). So I did what I had to do. I sat down and tore the script apart again. I moved where “The Birthday Party” happens to the Monster’s room. It made sense from a narrative point of view… The house is “normal” looking and all the horrors that occur there are actually done in the one room, up in the attic where they keep their son. Now when the “hero” has to run away, she just runs down two flights of stairs, being chased… The dialogue could stay the same, all that had to change was where the dialogue was spoken. It was a simple fix but one which improved the pace of the film ten-fold and ensured we lost that horrible cliché of the victim running up flights of stairs as opposed to heading for the nearest door.

I phoned Mik and ran him through what I had changed and - thankfully - he was fine with it too.

‘It makes sense,’ he said.

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