Chad Taylor

Writing REALITi (contains spoilers)



My first produced feature-length screenplay REALITi will be showing at the 2014 New Zealand International Film Festival this month. Directed by Jonathan King and starring Nathan Meister, Michelle Langstone and Graham McTavish, REALITi premieres in Wellington and screens later in Auckland. You can book for the Wellington screenings here and the Auckland screenings here. This is a blog about writing the screenplay and its relationship to my other work. If you want to avoid spoiling the movie, stop reading now.

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Making REALITi has been a long road. Around 2005/6 after he had made the horror-comedy Black Sheep, Jonathan asked me if I had any movie ideas "lying round." I did. In 2004 I had written a short film called The Alibi Girl for the 48 Hour Film Festival. Directed by Clinton PhillipsThe Alibi Girl is about two women trafficking a street drug that alters the perception of time. You can see it below – again, if you want to avoid partly spoiling REALITi, don't.


 

The Alibi Girl was an idea I had been thinking about taking further. So the screenplay for REALITi started with that idea of two people dealing in a street drug that turned out to be something else. The effects of the drug were time-shifting and illusory, which causes the characters to wonder if the world they're in is really the world they're in. I've approached the subject before in my novels Heaven and Electric, and in stories like 'Somewhere In The 21st Century'. But this time the idea felt more like a movie.

The second idea for the screenplay came from an experience I had in Los Angeles in 2004. The hotel where I was staying had the newspaper delivered to the room every morning, and every morning the stories always seemed to be the same: a few national headlines, Beverly Hills real estate, and military action in Iraq. After a week of reading, Iraq seemed both closer to Los Angeles and further away. Here was everyone sitting in the sun while over there people were being killed. When I got back home TV was running the same war footage with a different voice over. It didn't seem real.

Using the short movie as the set-up for the second longer story I wrote a treatment and then a feature-length screenplay. I wrote it very quickly. It was never going to be a conventional story. There was an obvious way of approaching the script which you see all the time -- a mystery leading into a chase sequence, lots of shooting and everything wrapped up happily at the end. I wasn't interested in doing that. I wanted to do something that rattled you more and relied on the old-fashioned language of film. I kept referring to REALITi as a sci-fi drama or a sci-fi movie with no special effects. Its reference points were 1960s TV series like The Avengers and The Prisoner; movies like Last Year at Marienbad and Alphaville. The idea was for it be something that was mysterious and cool.

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In this blog I've referred to REALITi as both a sci-fi noir and a SF movie with no special effects. It's a drama about normal people confronting a surreal possibility. In that respect it shares something with my 1994 novel, Heaven, which also plays with the idea of changing realities. Heaven was made into a movie by Miramax in 1998, directed by Scott Reynolds:


Like Heaven, REALITi plays with the idea of repeating, if slightly altered, personalities and events. It's about a media executive who begins to wonder what's real – an idea which also popped up in my 1994 science fiction story 'Somewhere in the 21st Century' (from The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself.)

The idea of reality-altering drugs figured in Electric, in which chemicals cause different cities around the world to occupy the same space. Chemicals influences are everywhere in REALITi. Four of the character names – Holly, Mandrake, Meg (nutmeg), Jessamine (jasmine) – are taken from plants with toxic qualities. There is also some nominative determinism in the lead character of Vic Long: he's not quite a victor.

Some people have asked if the plot all adds up. It does. But you'll have to watch it more than once.