It's officially been three whole years since I posted the first chapter of "He stings like he means it (He's mean and he's mine)"
However, the unofficial date when it all started for me, was four days ago. On November 13th I received a DM from @laurelwen, regarding a series of posts I had made hinting at the possibility of a Like Minds story I had in the works. At the time all I had was this edit and the concept of a chapter that lacked proper context.
If they hadn't reached out to me, I don't think HSHM would've happened. I had a strong vision, but no clear goals, just a sense that I needed to do something. Before HSHM I had never successfully written a long, multi chaptered story. It was scary, I'm not a native speaker and it felt like no one would care about my little fic.
Turns out I was wrong
I want to thank everyone that was there when it all started, before I had the best beta reader in the world, to everyone that kept showing up even as my pace slowed down, and everyone still discovering this story today, and making me relive the joy of accomplishing it. But my biggest thank you goes to @laurelwen for showing me support from the start, for all the advice, the ramblings, the holding out hope that I would eventually get this done, even when I was so sure that it wouldn't happen. I know it was a journey for you too, and I'm so thankful I was able to do this by your side.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that this project changed my life, so to everyone that was even remotely touched by it, I'm glad that we could share this journey in any way.
Remember: I'm always open to talk about HSHM, what was written and what was not.
I leave you with the song that inspired the title: Honey by Halsey
Excerpt from Said the Shotgun to the Head by Saul Williams
Screenshots
Medieval: The Hollow Crown // The Black Death
Renaissance: A Waste of Shame // Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Regency: The Widow Clicquot // Les Miserables
Mid Victorian (1840s-60s): The Aeronauts // Effie Gray
Late Victorian (1870s): Tess of the D'Ubervilles // Far from the Madding Crowd
WWI: Journey's End // Birdsong
1930s: Being Julia // Glorious 39
1950s: My Week with Marilyn // On the Road
1960s/70s: Savage Grace // Pirate Radio
Current: The Day of the Jackal // Remainder
Creator's Notes:
I've long had a spreadsheet matching up the filmographies of Tom and Eddie by era, in the hopes of someday making an FMV or gifsets around the theme of them reincarnating over the centuries, always fated to return to each other in some way. While I have every single work from their filmographies saved, this is a HUGE and daunting task. Even just pulling screenshots from all these different videos took me all of my free time for the past week.
Some artistic license was taken and choices were made to accommodate both the format and the vibes (matching angles, lighting, and aesthetics is crazy difficult so you have to be flexible).
For instance, Effie Gray is set in the late 1840s and The Aeronauts in 1862--the closest match I could make for either movie.
Eddie in Les Mis is in the 1830s--not really Regency era at that point, though the fashion/hair still bears some Regency vibes. Widow Clicquot is around 1805, but they styled Tom in more of a 1790s style (which makes sense for people in the countryside who aren't keeping up the the latest fashions. See also: the choices in 2005 Pride and Prejudice.)
Tom appears in Vanity Fair in a much more standard Regency outfit but it's such a limited scene and the outfit is so so flamboyant that it didn't match well with Tom's Les Mis attire.
There is, in fact, a scene in Birdsong when Eddie holds a gun to someone else's face AND a scene in Journey's End when someone else holds a gun to Tom's face. It writes itself.
Like Minds Masterpost - Aesthetic/Creative
Like Minds Masterpost - Main
alex with his red(/blonde) hair and beaming presence. charismatic and charming. confident and cocky. smart, revered, looked up to, the supposed model student. but still, burning with his fiery passion, blazing gaze, and explosive rebellion. a refined actor, though stil impulsive.
nigel with his night dark hair, pale porcelain skin, cold touch. eyes of silver, with a stare ever so persistent. movements subtle, quiet, deliberate. voice deep like the abyss, yet still boyish and soft. a symbol for many things. a reason for insanity. beautiful, delicate, and most importantly, eternal.
Yes, you can find parts of this DVD extra on Youtube, in varying levels of quality. I have it for you here, from my undisclosed source, in downloadable form. I only have 6 segments, and unfortunately the intro isn't one of them.
BTS Part 1 - Casting
BTS Part 2 - Pre-Production
BTS Part 4 - Yorkshire 1
BTS Part 5 - Yorkshire 2
BTS Part 6 - Music
I have things to say about Alex overtly trying to seperate himself from the Catholic ideas taught to him and then both demonizing and deifying Nigel in his retelling of what happened.
From the PietĂ parallels at the start of the movie (where Nigel is lying in Alex' arms) to the ethereal lighting that Nigel is depicted in especially towards the end of the movie, Alex' memory of Nigel seems to be infused with religious idealistic imagery. Meanwhile, Alex talks about him like he was a demon or the devil himself messing with his head and tempting him to sin - a dark force that he was powerless against.
I do believe Alex meant it when he said he felt like his thoughts were no longer his own. Of course, there's always the possibility that he was just lying to Sally in order to sell a narrative. But, psychologically, it fits.
No matter how hard he resents his father, how much he rejects the ideas forced upon him, he can't just erase his religious upbringing. The core ideas are still there, ingrained in his subconscious. So, if we're assuming that Alex caught feelings for Nigel (because duh), it would make sense for him to feel an insane amount of guilt and disgust at them. Look at his dad. That's the most homophobic man I've ever seen. Alex was surely taught early on that any kind of sexual desire is sinful and men being attracted to other men is even worse.
And, because it would feel easier to assume the desire comes from an outside force rather than from within, Alex did the Sir Chloe and projected his own feelings onto Nigel. Assumed he was some sort of mind-controlling monster that came to tempt him. "I felt that my thoughts were no longer my own" is literally the definition of externalization.
But, through the course of Alex' story, there's a visible shift.
At the start, Nigel is often shown in dim, cool lighting. Towards the end, that lighting becomes warmer and brighter. For most of the movie, Nigel wears black. At Nigel's house and later in the scene where he dies + the PietĂ scene in the beginning, he's wearing white.
The way the PietĂ scene is framed is especially deliberate. It's foreshadowing the way that Alex actually views Nigel while pretending to be the victim. It's literally the first of Alex's memories about Nigel that we see, and in it, he remembers him as something akin to Jesus.
It's clear that Alex' view of Nigel slowly changes from seeing him as a force of evil to seeing him as a prophet or even a god. It should be said here that those two views can coexist and Alex switches back and forth between them subconsciously throughout the movie.
But, no matter which way he sees Nigel, it's always heavily influenced by Catholic ideology.
When Alex is hit by the Big Gay for the first time and blames Nigel for it, he can't help associating Nigel with something demonic. When he starts to be intruiged by Nigel's ideas and eventually believes in them fully, he can't help associating Nigel with Jesus. Because that kind of thinking and imagery is familiar to him, wether he likes it or not.
Alex never managed to rid himself of Catholic beliefs, he simply projected them onto something else.
Ok I'm done. I'll go rewatch the movie now and quietly whisper 'gay gay homosexual gay' to myself while doing so
Per the Behind the Scenes video from the Like Minds DVD, the scene where Josh is buried was filmed at Haworth Cemetery in the village of Haworth in West Yorkshire. The town's primary claim to fame is its connection to the Brontë sisters, who lived at the Haworth Parsonage while their father was the parson. They wrote most of their novels here, including Wuthering Heights.
This cemetery was created after the original Haworth graveyard was deemed too full (there are reportedly around 40,000 people buried there, obviously by reusing graves). It's located on a hillside, overlooking the Yorkshire moors.
The choice to film the movie partly in Yorkshire is particularly appropriate given the region's connection to Gothic literature both in terms of history and due to the nature of the landscape itself.
The scene itself was filmed near the center of the cemetery marked by a cluster of trees, and near the middle of the slope. As we can see on the drone image below, the bottom of the slope is marked by a line of trees, and a paved access road bisects the slope. Given the distances of the tree line and the cars parked in the shot, that places the scene at approximately the red X in the overhead view. The arrow indicates approximate direction of the camera in this shot.
There's an open area that would have allowed them to dig a faux grave without disturbing any of the actual graves, and there are plenty of headstones to fill the foreground of the long shot. It's difficult to tell exactly where the grave is placed because of the way camera depth of field can distort distance perception between the characters and the background.
Alex and Dr. Forbes are standing with their backs to the central cluster of trees. Nigel and John Colbie are standing on the opposite side of the grave, with the tree border in the distance behind them. Raj seems to be standing on the downslope, at the "head" of the grave (probably thinking about the bullet he dodged).
Zooming in, we can see the obelisk shaped headstone highlighted in the screenshot above. The photo below also shows the same headstone, from the opposite (bottom) corner of the area.
The stunning backdrop of the desolate moors is used as the perfect accompaniment to Alex's emotional state in this scene.
[Like Minds Masterpost]
[Filming Locations: Secret Rendezvous]
[Filming Locations: The Old Astra]
And what if Gregory J. Read just got inspired by (fell in love with) young Tom Sturridge in "Being Julia" and started just making scenarios, you know, imagining thing in his head.
Of course he wouldn't have told anyone what it really meant. Who the real Maraclea is. Just a thought.
Analysing the rejection of faith in Like Minds (2006)
Take this essay with a grain of salt! These are the ramblings of a girl who is way too sleep deprived for her own good, (and who has watched the movie 18 times in the past week) but this movie really got me thinking about their delusions of grandeur â that feeling that thereâs always something extraordinary out there for us. The movie mirrors the kind of hope that religion offers, even if weâve rejected the notion of God.
Disclaimer: I know enough about religion, but Iâm not claiming to fully understand all aspects of it :) This is just a brief analysis and I could be entirely wrong. These are my interpretations of it all...
Itâs interesting to view the story from both sides of the narrative.
Following along with Nigelâs whole âmythological reckoningâ and âdestinedâ argument as being actually true is one way of seeing it. But itâs also just as interesting to view it as his personal justification â a reason for why he always felt so out of place and not ânormalâ throughout his life. He needed reasoning for his behaviours, sexual orientation, and inability to socialise. So when he starts obsessing over the order and sees it as his âtrue purposeâ to be the pike, an implement for killing, then finally meets alex and experiences homosexual attraction for the first time⊠he frames Alex as his "knave" or âjack,â the missing piece of the puzzle that explained why he was so extraordinarily fucked up.
Alex is a very unreliable narrator throughout the story, and I think both of them genuinely believe that they were made for some purpose because of how out of place they were all their lives until they met each other. But I also think Alex was unable to see that it may have just been a coping mechanism or psychological illusion that Nigel twisted to have moral reasoning for his actions. and you can see the parallel in Alexâs behaviour too â he justifies his bad choices under false reasoning. Both of these characters are very easily susceptible to the idea of a mythological practice being what has âmade themâ who they are. partly because of their issues, and partly because theyâre still teenagers. Thereâs still that thin line connecting them back to childhood, the hope that you have a âpurposeâ in life, that the hardships youâve faced arenât your fault but a âpredestinedâ act. Because itâs so hard to make sense of a world that feels cruel and unfair â why would a god have created it in such a way?
and when youâre young, especially, it feels unbearable to accept that maybe there isnât a reason. if youâve been isolated or mistreated your whole life, itâs almost comforting to imagine your suffering was written into some bigger plan, rather than admitting it was meaningless. thatâs what makes them latch so tightly onto the myth: it offers structure. it says âyou were always meant to be this wayâ (cough cough their homosexuality) instead of âyouâre broken and nothing explains it.â itâs easier to be a tragic figure in a story than a kid in a random, uncaring world.
thatâs also why the myth becomes so intoxicating for them â it takes all their shame, their loneliness, their inability to fit in, and transforms it into destiny. theyâre no longer just two messed-up boys fumbling through adolescence; theyâre chosen. and even if that destiny is dark (murder, violence, obsession), itâs still something greater than the nothingness theyâre terrified of facing.
Nigel finds religion in Alex, in the idea that he gives him purpose and gives his murderous intent a driving force behind it all.Â
soooo it leaves a lot of questions. Do you perceive it as the characters being destined to commit atrocities because of some old myth? or were they just two boys who loved one another but were so fucked up they fed into delusions to justify their moral ambiguity?
And thats why i think this movie sticks with you. It's about that desperate need for meaning. Nigel and Alex want their suffering to be part of something larger, and in finding each other, they turn their pain into a distorted kind of faith.
Thank you for reading if you have! I am currently working on an analysis on their big confrontation in the rain and how it ties back to a euphemism for their sexuality SO. I will link that here when ive published it :)
Yes, you can find parts of this DVD extra on Youtube, in varying levels of quality. I have it for you here, from my undisclosed source, in downloadable form. I only have 6 segments, and unfortunately the intro isn't one of them.
Okay, but can I just say that seeing the bare shell of Nigel's room feels like a violation somehow? Like digging up a body and staring at the skeleton that's left.
BTS Part 1 - Casting
BTS Part 3 - Australia
BTS Part 4 - Yorkshire 1
BTS Part 5 - Yorkshire 2
BTS Part 6 - Music
The setting: we begin in a dimly lit bedroom somewhere in the middle of Yorkshire, at almost 1am. The collection of posters and stuffed animals feel a little far removed from the subject we're preparing to talk about, but a large piece of artwork depicting Nigel Colbie, as drawn by a dear friend of mine serves as a gentle reminder of the grit of the film I'm about to grill this poor man about.
I answer the phone to the friendliest Australian accent I have ever heard in my life.
Gregory J. Read, an Australian filmmaker known for an array of documentaries and projects, and of course our topic of the night - Like Minds, his 2006 feature film about the murder of Nigel Colbie. He's apologetic about the time it has taken for this call to come to fruition, but I don't mind - I have far too many questions for him, and almost 20 years after the film's initial release, it feels like the right time to ask them.
For clarification, questions/interviewer statements are bold/italicised.
GREG: I'm sure it's quite late for you.
It's currently 00:40 in the morning, but I have nowhere to be, so it's no problem.
GREG: Yeah, sorry about that. It's just been very busy, as you know, for the last six or eight months. It's been busier than normal.
Have you been up to a lot of new stuff recently, then? Anything in particular that you've got coming out, or that you're proud of?
GREG: I'm working on a bunch of projects right now, but I do a lot of things these days. I've been very fortunate in my career that I've been able to move across all parts of the film industry from development to all areas of production including post. I'm not someone that just does one thing. I tend to do multiple, I always have.
When I started on Like Minds, it was my hobby project. At the time I was working on documentaries, television commercials, and music videos. For me, as a documentary film maker, it was a concept that I wanted to develop. So I wrote the original treatment as a documentary. Primarily it was an investigation into Gestalt psychology and how people who are incapable of being a monster by themselves can come together to be one. In a way a psychological Frankenstein story. What is it about these sorts of relationships?
However my documentary sales company took one look at my treatment and said "This is not a documentary." Well you can imagine my disappointment with him saying that. Then after what felt like an eternity, he said, âyou must write this as a feature film.â It was a moment of âwow what a compliment,â to one of absolute trepidation. Trouble was I had never written a drama script before and I had no idea if I could. So I took a short night time writing course and got the basics. I also got my hands on some great scripts. Kubrick, Hitchcock, David Lean films. These wonderful filmmakers had scripts that were so well constructed, every word had to fight to be on the page. I love the way their stories explored character. I found the character driven plots incredibly well thought out, especially in Hitchcock films, like Strangers on a Train.
Beautiful film.
GREG: Yeah, beautiful. That's why I make a little homage to it in the Like Minds when Alex goes to the cinema. And it also relates to the last shot of my film, two strangers on a trainâŠ.
So I thought, well, okay, why can't I write a drama that explores character but also stays true to my original documentary idea. So I set about to write something that explored Gestalt psychology but tell it in an interesting/engaging way.
So every morning, before a busy work day I would write 3-5 pages. I had a lot of support from my wife, she would read each scene as I wrote them to give me feedback on where she thought the story was heading, this helped me weave the story threads and make it less predictable and stay on track. It was wonderful to watch the script evolve this way. But this took time. I was still running my companies and I had staff. I couldn't just say to my staff, "Well I'm going to go make movies now, so you can all go home," I didn't want to do that. So I thought, "Well alright, I'll write this over time and see how it goes, and we'll go from there."
After finishing the first draft I sent it back to my documentary sales company. Then there was silence. Not a word. It was like torture, not knowing what someone thinks of your work. After a few days I heard my sales guy had flown to New Zealand, where he met up with some producers who were working on Lord of the Rings, and he had shown the script to one of the producers, Mark Ordesky.
Mark was travelling to Sydney so he met up with me. I got to meet Orlando Bloom and a few other people who were in Sydney at the time, which was very, very exciting. However as it turned out Orlando was very busy on the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Black Hawk Down was about to happen so he wasnât available. But just as well, as I wouldnât have ended up finding Eddie [Redmayne]. But it gave me a glimpse into the rollercoaster ride of film making. One day youâre making a film, the next you are back to square one. This was quite a welcome to the âSnakes and Laddersâ of feature film making.
A few years passed. I did some more drafts but there was no meaningful traction. During this time I expanded my experience into working on Australian feature films as a co-producer and executive producer, to gain experience. I also worked on low budget films as 1st Assistant Director and Production Manager. Even though I had been to film school, this was âat the coal faceâ experience, which was invaluable.
It was now six years since the first draft, however over the years, having worked on a range of films, I had met some great film makers and producers, one being the producer Jonathan Shteinman. Jonathan felt the best chance we had to make the film was to raise the finance as a co-production with the UK. So we teamed up with Piers Tempest at Tempo Productions in the UK. Screen Australia came on board and we were able to get Toni Collette interested. I travelled to London and started casting.
Lucy Bevan, an amazing casting director, suggested watching some plays which had some great young actors in them. One being a play at Covent Garden called Hecuba, a Greek tragedy. Eddie played Polydorus, the murdered son of Hecuba. The first time I saw him was as he rose up out of a pond in the middle of the stage soaking wet. His performance was mesmerizing. I knew straight away heâd be perfect for Alex. I met Eddie after the play and invited him to a casting session with us. At that point, I already had Tom [Sturridge] on my radar. So I brought them in together, and the chemistry between the two was just palpable. I made a video, then sent some images to Toni Collette to get her reaction, and she looked at them and said "wow, these guys are great." So I knew I had the chemistry.
Eddie Redmayne in âHecubaâ - Donmar Warhouse, 2004. (courtesy of @laurelwen and @addictedtoeddie)
They are absolutely fantastic. I mean, that's something that gets mentioned a lot in fan discussions about Like Minds - the chemistry between the two of them. As you know, I've told you about the community online and it's always sort of growing, and we'll occasionally get someone new who wants to know what the deal is, really. Like, are they in love? Do they just want to kill one another? Which is thrilling for us to be able to tell them it's up for their interpretation, how they were written. There's so many ways to interpret it, which is a testament not just to your writing but to the fantastic chemistry between the actors.
GREG: Thank you. That was absolutely, the intention because I believe there's many ways you can see things, many ways to unpack it, based on your own learned experience and what you know. I wrote the script so that it could be interpreted in different ways. But there is one clear way that it should be examined, if you want to be really black and white about it - it does follow the rules of Gestalt psychology. So it's not ambiguous, but itâs not a closed book either, which is a very strange way to put it, but I was deliberate about it. It's a psychological puzzle, the actual film is a puzzle box. So you're right, when you said you were trying to unpack it, trying to understand it as it seems to have a lot of layers - yes. Yes, it does. There's lots of little hidden things throughout it, little Easter eggs, so to speak.
I thought, if people looked into the history the boys talk about in the film, they may get something extra out of the story as well. It may inspire people to read books on these subjects and start to understand some of the concepts I included. There's so much material in contemporary historical books as well as books written back in the 1800âs that is referred to in the story.
Definitely a lot to read, then!
GREG: I know! Some is in Nigelâs Bible. There's all sorts of history, but ultimately that was just me having fun because I knew when I started refining the research that went into this, there was so much more than I could put into the screenplay.
Of course.
GREG: So I had thousands of pages of documentation, and I handpicked things to look at. Maybe in hindsight I could have been a little bit clearer about certain things, but I don't know - I don't think you need to be hand fed. I didn't want to lead people one way or the other. I felt that it was important that they come away with their own interpretation. What does the ending mean? What actually happened?
đŹ 0  đ 0  â€ïž 0 · 20 Years On - Part 2 ·Â
But anyway, if I can answer any of your questions.
Well, I do have a few. Some of them are from
Yes, you can find parts of this DVD extra on Youtube, in varying levels of quality. I have it for you here, from my undisclosed source, in downloadable form. I only have 6 segments, and unfortunately the intro isn't one of them.
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