Screenwriting with Stanislavsky : Augmenting a Screenwriting Process Using Stanislavsky’s ‘System’

Abstract

It was July 1998. From memory, we were on the seventh take and David Megarrity, the lead actor and my co-writer, was getting irritated. We were three hours over schedule on a six- hour shoot, a feat of incompetence I didn’t think possible but, as the director, had somehow managed. Finally, after struggling with a long bump in, limited lighting options, costume disasters and prop malfunctions, we were on the last shot of the first scene. But something was wrong with it and I couldn’t move on. I wouldn’t move on. The film we were making was Fly Baby Fly (Mullins 1998a). David, another friend Kier Shorey, and I had written the idea only a few days earlier for a local Brisbane film competition the theme of which was ‘wings’. Fly Baby Fly told the story of Jeff, a reclusive man who was harvesting the wings of thousands of innocent house flies in order to build his own set of wings and fly (cue costume disaster). It was the second film David, Kier and I had made together. The first, Neptune’s Basket (Mullins 1998b), had won us the award for Best Original Screenplay at the 1998 Queensland New Filmmakers Awards. Our next film, Stop (Mullins 1999), would be accepted into official competition at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. But right now, we were still making our second film – our difficult ‘second album’ you might say. David was playing the lead role of Jeff, Kier was director of photography, and I was the director.