Tuesday, 16 February 2010

The Interview... From Treatment To The Interview

Taking the step from Treatment to The Interview with such a small turn over time was difficult, as we have pretty much changed the idea. However, we have kept the themes of Schizophrenia and the use of dual perception, which we initially thought may come across well in a job interview, where the protagonist thinks he is being smart when he isn't.

When starting we established our brainstorming room as Gus', which is big and has a ping pong table in it, which is now our executive meeting room, and also has loads of other stuff which makes it a quite inspiring creative space. This helped as we all sat around and threw ideas and an American Football about (as it was the superbowl last week). We started to wonder about mental people that slipped through the system unnoticed, that you regularly see and is commonly referred to as 'a bag lady', as they don't think they are doing weird things. (Check Elspeths blog about schizophrenia symptoms)
Do they get reported to the police, because they do stuff that is out of the ordinary to members of the public? How do the police feel about dealing with these people?

After doing some internet research we found that the sectioning somebody isn't easy if they aren't a real danger; and obviously somebody can't be arrested for crimes they are yet to commit. So surely this would create an ongoing cycle that would continue forever until the mad person done something that was a serious criminal offense, which evidently results in a lot of police effort and paperwork, which must infuriate them. This also brings us back to our original idea, as criminals are interviewed. So from here Gus and I started to write and developed a premise and then a script about...

A police interview with a schizophrenic man, who thinks that he is in a job interview to become a police man, because he thinks that all of the petty crimes he had committed were for the greater good and stopping the fictional corrupt company who he calls 'Them'.

This script not only shows the way that the police may see schizophrenics, but also the issue of whether these criminals are criminals? As they are incorporating the themes aforementioned (Schizophrenia and dual perception). As we dramatically changed the script we have included Luke Philips' name in the script as the schizophrenic, used the name Vincent for one of the detectives and kept the bottle smashing scene in the supermarket! I think that this script works as on the surface it is a fun short, but has underlying serious issues; like MicMacs (2010) but less humorous and less bias. As we want the viewer to take the role of an 'outside detective' who decides who is in the right. Is it fair that the police shout and make fun out of him? Is it fair that they have to deal with him?

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