White Lies

Lately my creativity has been a bit off. There are a few reasons for this – it’s a been a uniquely busy year and in some cases I bit off more than I could chew. But also I’ve found the vast majority of new films and TV shows so uninspiring, shining a harsh light on just how much I rely on exciting new stuff to energise my own process.
 
A few months back I went to Mt Buller for a few days by myself, largely to clear my head and refocus after the insanity that was planning and writing Andromache in the Dark in two months. While there I really tried to hone in on what it was that had slipped away from me, and in doing so I ended up tracing some of this disillusionment back to my fading interest in screenwriting.
 
This, I believe, was due to the many frustrations on The Hunted movie and the struggles on Gremoryland, neither of which I am currently involved with (although good things are happening on The Hunted front that I can hopefully talk about very soon). These twin disappointments left me gun shy about pursuing any film work and so I opted to focus on the books, which gave me plenty to be getting on with. But while up on the mountain, I tried to work out whether I had enough renewed focus to try and write a film again.
 
There has been one movie this year that I found fresh and exciting and fun and thought provoking in all the ways I love, and that was Challengers. It’s the first time in years I’ve felt like I’ve seen something really new, something that isn’t aspiring for popular disposability or arthouse significance but rather is just a good fucking movie. While on that trip I read the Challengers screenplay and began to wonder if I could write something with that same energy. If that was the kind of spark I needed to reinvigorate this long dormant corner of my writing life.
 
In doing so, I thought back to an idea I had years ago, during the writing process for The True Colour of a Little White Lie. True Colour is about a teenage love triangle at a ski resort. It’s maybe the most overlooked of my books and maybe also my favourite. But while writing it I began to entertain the idea of a quasi sequel/companion story that gave protagonist Nelson and his (first) love interest Juliet their own Before Sunset, a chance encounter well into adulthood where they reflect on where the years since their last meeting have left them and on the lingering pain and lessons from their teenage entanglement. I pictured it as a two-hander play, a long conversation in a ski-lodge bar that maybe one day I could produce as a small theatre show.
 
But revisiting that idea through the prism of Challengers made me consider it differently. What if, I thought, the swooning Before Sunset stuff was just the first act? What if their fifteen-years-late reconnection ended with the discovery that they have both been lying quite egregiously about their lives? What if this discovery reopened old wounds and threw them into a charged game of one-upmanship that would force them to confront all the ways in which they haven’t changed and all the things they still need to work through?
 
Returning from the mountain, I was too busy to think about it much further. But the idea continued to percolate. Then, in Sydney a couple of weeks back, I ended up with a few spare hours in which I walked around Circular Quay and idly let the story unfold in my head.
 
By the next day I had an outline.
 
It wasn’t perfect. The third act was pretty loose and the central themes of the story were alluding me. But most importantly of all, I felt it. I felt the weird mix of hurt and fury and yearning that would draw Nelson and Juliet into increasingly bad choices that would start off farcical and funny until the point where peoplestart getting hurt.
 
The tone was a challenge. It wasn’t quite a comedy, not quite a romance or a drama either. But it was a story I wanted to tell and what was more, the first major thing I’d worked on since 2019 that didn’t have a contractual obligation looming over it.
 
I told myself not to write it. I was woefully behind on edits for both High Rise and Andromache in the Dark. I told myself I could start writing when both were done, maybe in November.
 
I finished it yesterday.
 
Is it any good? Parts, maybe. I think the first half absolutely crackles. The second more or less works, but it needs development and fleshing out to reach the place I think it could and should. But it was just so much fun. Nelson and Juliet’s spiky banter spilled on to the page, as natural and barbed and electric as it was in True Colour, only now shot through with a sadness and desperation that their fourteen year old selves couldn’t have because, well, they were fourteen. Writing now the characters felt as alive as ever, like they’d just been waiting in my head to re-emerge, older and jaded but not a whole lot wiser.
 
Does it have a future? I don’t know. I suspect any version of it that goes out into the world will likely have to be edited to be about totally new characters, to avoid the tangled rights situation that has tripped up attempts to sell Maggie’s various misadventures to different parties. Furthermore, I’m not sure it’s high concept enough to really seize the imagination of producers, although it’s enough like Beef that there’s at least another recent successful comparison.
 
But even if it doesn’t go any further, even if I leave it here, writing it was exactly what I needed. I got to spend some time with old friends in a new context with the freedom of knowing there was no pressure on if or when I ever finished it. If all it ends up being is a warmup exercise to a more commercially appealing script then that’s okay.
 
It’s called White Lies. I hope you get to see it one day. But if you don’t, you can at least credit it with a renewed excitement for whatever I write next. 

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