Kitty Fitzgerald is the author of Pigtopia (2005, Faber and Faber), Small Acts of Treachery (2002, Brandon), Snapdragons (1999, Brandon) and Marge (1985, Sheba), 4 plays for Radio 4 and 8 theatre plays. She was also shortlisted for the 2013 William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Story Award. Ink Pantry elf Deborah Edgeley caught up with Kitty about her screen-writing experience.
You won the most original screenplay for Dream On (Amber Films) at Le Baule Film Festival, France. Can you please tell us a bit about it, why you think it was original, where you got your idea from and what inspired you?
We always worked in teams at Amber Films; I’d been working with a group of women on a council house estate for 5 years, running a weekly writing group and I was convinced from what I’d learned that a fictional film based around the lives of these women would be good.
So three of us women in the collective began research work, film work, filmed interviews and eventually persuaded the collective that it should be a our next film.
We brought in professional actors to work with the women – several of whom played themselves in the film – talked about scenes and did some devising. In the end I took all the material away and came up with a full script. The three us then spent a week talking it through and I wrote shooting script. It changed a bit in the filming e.g. my script was ninety minutes and the finished product was over two hours.
It was thought original because it told the story from three different viewpoints and we also use direct to camera comments from the three women. Also the subjects covered: Bulimia, Child Sexual Abuse, Alcoholism, Glue-sniffing, Violence against Women and Clairvoyance were then rarely seen on the big screen.
You were a partner in Amber Films and produced heritage scripts for museums and other venues. This also sounds really interesting. Could you please tell us a bit more about it?
The heritage scripts weren’t for Amber, they were for other companies such as Atacama Films. I really enjoyed it. It involved researching particular periods in history and coming up with an entertaining storyline for the script; Border Revivers, Craft Workers on the Titanic, Children in the mines and so on. Sometime I was given an historic object and had to build a story around that. The films were then used in museums and other heritage venues and as educational resources
Do you think in images when you are planning a screenplay, or do you write the story first and then adapt it for the screen?
I always think in ‘scenes’ so the process is very visual from the start. I do the same with theatre scripts.
Which films would you recommend as inspiration for first time screenwriters with regard to crafting a film?
Recommending films is really tough. I like so many and all for different reasons. But in terms of script, I love Casablanca. I’ve just seen it again on a large screen (at Whitley Bay Film Festival) and its wonderfully crisp and ironic.
With regard to structure, how do you manage to piece the scenes together? Is this the hardest part of screen-writing for you?
I think getting the structure right is the fun part. I find first drafts very painful but once I’ve got that, I write the bones of each scene on postcards and play at shuffling them into different sequences. Sometimes it throws up great surprises. The difficult thing is working with producers or directors whose only real interest is in making money not making good films. They will cut corners that shouldn’t be cut and dwell on things that should be minimised. The last one I worked with said: Don’t make any scene linger than 2 minutes, that’s the level of audience general concentration. Naturally I disagreed with him. That’s why I like the new interest that has developed in Nordic film making; they have no fear of dwelling…in the right places.
What elements of screen-writing do you enjoy the most and why?
I enjoy the development of a new idea/character/setting or the revisiting of old themes; thinking about it, playing with it, walking around with it in my mind until it feels ready to hatch. As I said above, doing the first draft of a script is tough but then I get the playfulness of the editing and redrafting stages.
http://www.kittyfitzgerald.com/