CHRISTMAS LIGHTS: A BREAKDOWN
Christmas Lights began as an idea that popped into my head many months ago. What happens if an immortal man gets found on earth? What would be the process the government would undergo to deal with him? My thought processes jumped straight away to space. Their last resort, in my opinion, after all the research was carried out, would be to send him as far into space as possible and hope he can discover new things that other humans would die of old age before they got to.
I felt the best way to tackle the restrictions of the 8 minutes (pages) and 10 lines of dialogue rules was to keep the immortal character (Adam) by himself and to play out his final contact with humanity in an almost real time basis. I find it both darkly hilarious and sad that a person, who has forever to live, can still have their entire life change in 8 minutes.
Keeping him alone and under pressure was the key to keeping the 8 page story going really. I think it was the best possible choice because it minimised my dialogue and added plenty of action. I worked out a way to replace dialogue and recorded sounds with text on screens, stickers and newspapers. This saved me a tonne of lines, and makes audience involvement a little more prominent I think. It’s up to them to take part, even if it’s just reading and interpreting a few newspaper headlines.
Christmas, the woman, the records and the newspaper wall were all ideas that struck me as looking good cinematically while also being a representation of his close desire to keep up human experiences. Most people would stop worrying about Christmas when there are no presents under the tree. Not Adam. I also liked the idea that he was given entertainment to do, but the entertainment is so behind because of when he left, he’s cycling through a pile of records that is now more than 100 years old because nobody could give him a stack of DVDs or tv shows to watch.
Keeping the action purely cinematic was one of the most difficult things about writing Christmas Lights. Trying to write a screenplay that was still substantial, but had no dialogue was a really odd experience that I’ve never actually tried before. At first it made me angry, I thought it was impossible. But in the end I’d say that I managed to latch on to how I could make the action flow and be interesting for large sections at a time. That’s not to say it was perfect, because it was so hard to try and keep the action from becoming ‘novelistic’. Fighting the urge to make Adam’s thoughts and feelings fill the action became the biggest strain. I think I managed to remove most of it, but there are some lines in there that I just couldn’t work out how to make subtle and implicit in the action and so had to spell it out.
The opening wasn’t quite as good as it could have been in hindsight. Instead of records being played, maybe audio recordings would have been better. Like the Christmas Tree and Lights I thought that the record player could be a close reminder of home and how this guy is still really attached to humanity. Instead I’ve come to think that maybe it would be better to have audio recordings of conversations with friends/family/other people to establish just how important the satellite dish is to Adam. The pillow lady, could be enough though, it shows an interest in human interaction and a longing I think, but the recordings could potentially work far better.
Dominique said the ending worked well, which was a massive relief. I tried to make his life and experience unusual and hard to determine throughout the script. The 60s décor thing and the newspaper wall were the sort of major clues. The 60s thing in particular I think, helped make Adam more ‘out of his time’. Ultimately I want audiences to sympathise with the moral wrongness of forcing somebody to act against their will (that’s the ‘inspiration’ I chose morally wrong. I hope the script raises questions of how far we’ll push science, and how far it’s worth pushing science. How far is too far really? Is it not this guy’s duty to help us find more about our experience? I also really like the idea that tis already happened, during the cold war (hence the 60s décor). I feel like this makes the most sense because this is essentially a time when humanity was at its most dangerous and most competitive. Cold War America would definitely send a man into space forever (Modern America probably would too though).