Interview (Part 3): Rachael Prior — Big Talk Productions

One of the delights about spending time on Twitter is having met and gotten to know Rachael Prior. Whip smart and passionate about movies and storytelling, Rachael is the Head of Film at Big Talk Pictures, a U.K.-based film company overseeing movies such as Attack the Block, Cuban Fury, and the excellent romantic comedy Man Up (2015), written by Tess Morris, directed by Ben Palmer, and starring Lake Bell and Simon Pegg. Previously Rachael worked in development at Working Title where she was involved numerous movies including Edgar Wright’s ‘Blood & Ice-Cream Trilogy’ — Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End.

Recently I had a wide-ranging hour-long transatlantic conversation with Rachael. Today in Part 3, Rachael drills down into the process of working with Tess Morris as they went at the process of rewriting the script Man Up:

Scott: There’s a conventional wisdom, at least in Hollywood, that romantic comedies are on the wane. The timing of this script [Man Up] coming to you on the heels of Bridesmaids, maybe that helped grease the wheels there a little bit in terms of its receptivity on your part?

Rachael: Yeah. Perhaps it gave us more confidence that there would be an audience for the movie. Timing‑wise, it certainly didn’t hurt. Though because we’re a company that wants to make innovative and authored comedy, those are the scripts we’re always on the lookout for.

I’d like to think that we would have gone for it anyway. I’m sure we would have done, but it definitely didn’t hurt in terms of selling it up the chain and into StudioCanal who we had our first‑look deal with at the time.

Scott: The script comes in. It’s in pretty polished shape. Can you remember what particular areas you were focusing on with Tess in the rewrite stage of it in terms of elevating material?

Rachael: To give Tess credit, the script, when it arrived, in terms of stuff that you might normally work on when you get a first draft in, where you can see you’ve got serious story work to do, strains that need developing, elements that are lacking, or underpowered, just wasn’t the case with Tess’s script when it first came in.

You’ve seen the movie, you’ve read the script, it’s sort of a simple premise. It takes place over 24 hours. The script was always, in essence, what you see it in the final movie. It always started with Nancy at an engagement party demonstrating where her head was at. She always went on this awkward, unwanted set up date. She always met Jack under the clock, they always parted in that painful way at Waterloo Station, he always came for her at her parents. I suppose, because it came as a more polished script, it didn’t have that more muscular development process that other scripts go through. That said, we did work quite hard on it!

One of the things we focused on, was how we open out a script which is essentially a walk and talk movie… how you make the more talky moments feel cinematic. For example, from the moment Nancy and Jack meet at the station, then walk along the South Bank, and those various bits and pieces that happened along that location was… I think I’m right in saying, initially just two different scenes, so it was a little static. We worked on breaking all of that up and cutting down the dialogue to the bare minimum. Harder than it sounds. Tess had a lot of great lines that we were loathe to get rid of.

In the earlier draft of the script there was quite a lot more of Nancy’s family present, and more family members. One of the things that we realized early on was the need to pull back on those scenes quite a bit in order to keep the emotional focus on Jack and Nancy. We asked ourselves: how interested is our audience going to be in her family? We concluded that they would be interesting to our audience as long as they were helping them understand more about our central character, by providing context and reflecting the central themes of the movie.

I think it’s quite challenging, when you make a romantic comedy (and Tess and I talked about this at great length), to take real‑life notions about what it’s like to be single and then make them play in a movie authentically, and in an entertaining way. Nancy’s issue is that doesn’t want to put herself out there anymore. She’s 50 times bitten and 1,000 times shy. She’s bored of it and exhausted by it. These are emotions that in real life can be quite subtle and elliptical.

Of course, in movies, they can’t afford to be any of those things. You have to find a way to really nail them for an audience in quite a precise and economic way, especially if you’re going to take character to the point where they do something as, sort of, mental as what Nancy does, when she steals someone else’s blind date.

In a movie, you hope an audience are going to suspend a certain amount of disbelief and go with you on that for the sake of being entertained, but to help it along you have to create a start point for a character where you believe that they’re capable of it. You have to find a way to articulate what, in life, is a very layered, murky, and often quite contradictory feeling that exists in a person when they are, like Nancy, single, pissed off about it, and pissed off with the whole process of finding someone to love and hang out with.

We worked a lot on the opening, [laughs] a lot, on that hotel bedroom scene, figuring out what we had to articulate about the character. You don’t have a lot of time to do it, and it’s your opening scene so it better be funny too or it’s like someone just died when audiences are watching in the theater. The audience wants you to get on with the story but you’re just like “Hang on, we need you to know this about our character first!” It’s a difficult balance to get right. Openings, yeah, almost as often reshot as endings.

Scenes from Man Up

Scott: If you don’t buy her character saying, “Yes, I’m your date,” you’ve got no movie. You’ve got to set up her character, so that, you understand why she would do that.

Rachael: Yeah, as soon as people stopped saying, “It’s not credible,” which to be fair, not everyone was saying (but some people had an issue with that point), we knew we’d got the opening right.

Another area of the script that we worked on, which was the bane of our life for a while, was the scene with Jessica on the train. We had to communicate, via comedy with a stranger, the romantic of the argument of the movie. You have a few key scenes in the first act to really convey to your audience who Nancy is, why they should like her, why she’s a lead character worth your emotional investment. That scene on the train, it went so many different ways, but it’s actually one of my favorite scenes in the movie now.

One thing I think is interesting to talk around with regard to that is the calibration work with did with Nancy. You hear this note quite a lot when you are a writer: make your character more likeable. It’s a note that can drive writers crazy, and I do understand that. I think it’s because it’s probably not quite the right word, when people say, “Likeable,” I don’t think they always mean exactly that. I think what they’re often talking about, when they say, “Likeable,” is tone.

We did a lot of work on Nancy’s character just making sure that, tonally, that magic thread that an audience develops between a central character and themselves when they are on board with a movie, stays intact. When people say, “likeable,” they really mean watch out for places where you’ve got lines or thoughts or sentiments that have threatened to sort of snap that thread or connection.

Interestingly there’s a line quite early on in the script where Nancy apologizes to her date that her hands are wet, she says “It’s not wee, it’s Mojito.” In one of the really early drafts, she used to say “It’s not piss, it’s Mojito.”

It’s the exact same joke and in real life, “piss” would be very funny. It’s what Tess or I would say. But we talked about the difference between real life and movie dialogue. We wanted the joke because it was a lovely way to show Nancy being a little gauche and giving away the fact that she’s overly nervous and awkward and not remotely a cool customer when it comes to a first date. So Tess changed the word an it changed the tone and Nancy became more “likeable” in that crucial early scene. By the end of the movie, I think Nancy could make a piss joke and we’d probably love her for it, but first impressions require slightly more delicate handling.

It’s a small thing, but it’s a good example of where we were calibrating tone, which other people were referring to as “likeability,” but as I said, I think it’s a word that sort of obfuscates what people are really talking about.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Rachael discusses how she handles the “gap” by translating producing notes into something which can benefit a writer reworking their script.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

To download a PDF version of the script for Man Up, go here.

Twitter: @ORachaelO.

For the Big Talk Pictures website, go here.

For my June 2015 interview with Man Up screenwriter Tess Morris, go here.