Interview (Part 5): 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 5, Rachael discusses what she’s looking for in a “writer’s voice” and why that it is critical for writers to develop one:

Scott: You mentioned it earlier, and I think it’s an apt description, that you perceive your job in some ways to be a facilitator?

Rachael: Yeah.

Scott: What about, in August 2015 you did a Twitter rant on what you called, “Writer’s voice”? When talking about voice, you zeroed in on character work and dialogue. I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit more about that. What is it about character work and dialogue which contributes so much to a writer’s voice?

Rachael: It’s such a fascinating area to talk about, because when you’re assessing scripts, either to commission, or just to give a set of notes on, so much of that creative process… what’s going on in your brain and how you’re responding to it is at a subconscious level that’s not easily articulated.

I’m sure you know what I mean by that. You’re having a gut, emotional reaction to how something is making you feel. You’re either being pulled in, or you’re being turned off when you’re reading dialogue and character. I’m obsessed with good character and dialogue above all else, because it’s the part of the craft that is least able to be taught.

How you structure a story, how you pace the peaks and troughs, is not easy, and the best writers do have an innate ability to just reach for those beats at the right moment, but it’s still the part of the process that I can most help a writer with. All stories are essentially borrowed or reconstituted. But character and dialogue are, I think, where writers truly innovate, and are at the heart of an audience’s emotional connection to material. Films live or die on that. It doesn’t matter whether they’re a $100 million studio movie, or a half million dollar indie.

I’m not controversial on Twitter, but I once said “I think I can tell if you’re a good writer, just by the way you Tweet.” And the reactions to it were quite interesting. I mean, of course Twitter is just social downtime, but I don’t know a writer worth their salt that doesn’t care about the way they get their fleeting thought, joke, jibe, or observation down in 140 characters. Twitter is very demonstrative of a person’s command of language, and it’s a tremendous place to work on voice and discipline your writing.

The way that one constructs a sentence can either be dull, boring and perfunctory, or it can show that you have a love of language and an ability to play with sparks, and stimulate an intellectual or emotional reaction in the reader. A good writer needs to be able to do that. I think that means they just need command of language. The writers I most like working with are those who are truly adept at that, and find joy in it.

Finding your voice as a writer is about being brutally honest with yourself and unfiltered. I’ve watched some writers develop from being kids the same age as me when I was an assistant in the industry, to being at the top of their game. It’s been amazing to watch their style, voice and confidence unfold.

A common thing you see, even in talented newer writers, are attempts to emulate what they have consumed to date as “movie” writing. You can feel all their influences, you can hear echoes of their heroes in the way they write and construct their characters. The result feels familiar and inauthentic.

I think when writers truly break through is when they realize that their own idiosyncrasies, their wild, curious, or embarrassing thoughts and feelings, are the absolute lifeblood of what makes good character. If you can just open that up and get that down in an unfiltered way on the page, that’s when you’re breathing true life into your characters.

The more you’re trying to think, “Oh right, this woman is a businesswoman, and she’s uptight, and she’s all this,” and you start to think about other characters you’ve seen in movies, you end up replicating. That’s when you get you get dull and uninspiring character work. Real people are full of contradictions and imperfections. We all know this, but our movie writing brains forget it sometimes.

I think it’s about a weird kind of bravery that comes with confidence and experience. I don’t want to say age, because that is obviously nonsense in many respects. There are plenty of young writers that have realized this and are switched on to it. It’s simply about originating rather than emulating.

Scott: I actually highlighted a tweet where you said, “Most of all,” this is talking about narrative writer’s voice. You said, “Most of all, do not filter yourself. Write gloriously about how repressed, angry, alive, haunted, ecstatic you feel.”

Rachael: Yeah, that about encapsulates it.

Scott: You’ve been very consistent throughout this conversation, talking about the emotional center, the emotional core, how the characters feel. I’m gathering that that’s a really important consideration for you in terms of story, the emotional core of a story.

Rachael: Absolutely. Also, because I think all narrative possibilities stem from that. The integrity of a character… when I say emotional, that doesn’t necessarily mean, feels-y, warm, fuzzy emotion… it can be brutal, hard or nasty. It can be any number of things, but it needs to be truthful, and it needs to be imbued, absolutely.

I find that when I’m reading scripts, that if I don’t… if a writer hasn’t within the first ten pages got hold of me with one of their characters and made me believe in them… then I’m just not interested. And an audience is not going to be interested. It’s the first thing I look for… So I will meet with writers whose scripts I’ve read where, even if the material is not quite right for us, they have shown good command of character.

Scott: I’d like to raise some questions I typically ask of writers of the craft, and get your take on them. For example, how important do you think story concept is to the overall strength or viability of a screenplay? Specifically a spec script.

Rachael: I think it’s interesting, because the movie-making climate is shifting all the time. What could be a good answer today may not have been a good answer two years ago, or might not be two years from now. It’s all about climate, and getting produced. Getting production money is a very different game to getting development money, and I’m more focused than ever on pitches and ideas that I believe can get production money. Development money is thinner on the ground, so taking a punt on things feels harder and riskier. It’s a shame, but it’s a reality.

Just to be very cut and dried about it, concepts sell themselves more easily from an outline, treatment, or a pitch. Less concept driven ideas generally require you to write the spec in order to demonstrate why it’s compelling without some zingy logline or concept at the heart of it.

In my experience, if you’ve got a low concept movie that is driven mostly by character, then you’re going to need to have written a really stellar script that convinces people it’s a movie narrative and doesn’t belong in some other medium.

Tomorrow in Part 6, Rachael offers advice encouraging writers to write from a place of passion for their stories.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Part 4, here.

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

Twitter: @ORachaelO.

For the Big Talk Pictures website, go here.