Whistler Readers and Writers Festival Blog

Our Brain

By Rebecca Wood Barrett

Rebecca Wood Barrett 2011 003In the winter of 2004 I asked my friend Lisa Fernandez if she’d like to make a film with me for the World Ski and Snowboard Festival’s 72 Hr. Filmmaker Showdown. Collaboration is not a natural state for creative types. Typically it’s an escape from other people telling us what to do. Creative adventures are the one time we get to forge into the unknown and embark on the path of our own making. Having said that, filmmaking might be one of the most difficult creative journeys to set out on by oneself. You need a camera person—unless you hit the Record button yourself and plan zero camera moves. And, if you write characters that walk and talk—anything other than rocks, for example—you will also need actors. Lisa had a camera. I had an editing system. More importantly, we had been through the Ryerson film program together and shared a professional and artistic shorthand, not to mention we have a simpatico sense of humour.

Since then, we’ve made nine films together. Four have qualified for the WSSF 72 Hr. Showdown Finals, one for Cornucopia’s Vino’s finals. Three are People’s Choice Winners. Our approach to writing scripts has changed little. We secure Time. We cook up tasty Snacks. We procure Libations. Some script ‘meetings’ have relied more heavily on vodka, others wine or boxes of chocolate. We make the process fun, and delicious. After all writing is hard work. It makes your brain hurt. We might as well enjoy the pain.

Lisa likes to say we are two halves of one brain. When we write it’s slow going initially, because it takes time to percolate good ideas. Bad ideas are easy to come by. They’re often cliché. Unfunny. Boring. Or inaccessible.

There was the time I had the idea of a talking penis. I don’t know what I was thinking. Was it a feminist statement of some kind? A bizarre stab at humour? At any rate, Lisa kindly shot and edited a test with a talking head superimposed on an actual penis. When we watched the clip we both said “Nah ah.” A creative partner not only helps you mine the good stuff, they help you bury the toxic stuff, too.

The thorniest part of our collaboration is coming up with the seed idea. Although we’re reasonably alike in our tastes, we also know how incredibly time-consuming and enervating it is to produce a film; we both have to be completely invested in the idea before we can even begin to flesh out an outline. So we pitch ideas back and forth, sometimes for weeks. When we discover an idea that sparks the creative fever in both of us, that’s when we start to sketch-in the scenes. After that, we work through the dialogue. Then we rewrite. Six drafts. More. Polishing every word, every shot description, until we’re content. At that point, we’re a third of the way. We still have to shoot and edit the beast.

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