Your First Feature Film

You are not an established writer/director. You are looking to make your break-through or just to get that first feature film financed and produced. Here are some thoughts on how to make that script.

Keep it simple. One novel provocative idea. Strong characters.

Keep it simple.
This is key for several reasons. You want to minimize your budget. Makes it easier to get the project financed and produced. Failing finding a producer, you might even be able to produce it yourself. Keeping it simple also let you focus on maximizing your strengths instead of trying to accomplish everything. Example: Instead of wasting your energy on directing many different actors/characters, you can focus on a few, strengthening their performance and the audiences relation to those characters. Simplicity is not the opposite of complexity in this context. Complexity in the sense of a fascinating, inexhaustible art-work comes from simple ideas connecting to create complexity. By working under the rule of simplicity, limiting your number of location, actors, plot-lines and so on, you will be forced to make meaningful connections between the elements you have - creating complexity.

One novel, provocative idea.
The criteria for your basic idea of your script should be novelty and provocation. The novelty can take many forms. It can be the world of the drama is a world we have never (or rarely) seen portrayed in film. It can be the way you shape your drama. It can be a basic conflict we have never seen before, or at least not seen treated like you plan to do. The provocation is required for your script and film to break through the carpet bombing of film projects and releases. You need to stand out. What is provocation? Basically to question in any way a well-established truth.

Strong Characters!
In a low-budget film you can't have all the expensive stuff that attracts people to film. Instead you can utilize the one fundamental thing we also love about drama - the characters. They are not expensive. But they demand all of your creativity, logic and sense of drama. Pour all your energy into them - making them stand out, being unforgettable. The kind of characters you wish you knew in real life, or in your dreams (if that's the kind of film you are planning), or that you yourself was one of them. Really, push yourself on this aspect. And it's not only about writing great dialogue for them. Its about their conflicts (external and internal), how they deal with them, their courage, their strength and weaknesses.

A sample of breakthrough films that have these characteristics. Find more yourself.

• Sex, Lies and Videotapes
Small ensemble cast. Good actors. Main character has a huge problem - he can't commit to a relationship. The novelty is that he deals with this by questioning convention and videotaping peoples most intimate, private stories. In doing so he stirs up status quo of their lives. By shaking up their world, finally somebody emerges to shake up his world. The provocation: Questioning the existence of love. A romantic lead who is everything he is not supposed to be.

• Reservoir Dogs
Ensemble cast. Few locations. Main character is thrown into the dangerous task of infiltrating a criminal gang - posing for one of them. The novelty is that this is not a film about a detective solving a crime. This is the crime-film as an existential metaphor regarding identity. The main character bonds with a father figure among the criminals, and when they are all lying dead or dying, he realizes the futility of all his aspirations - the bond between him and the criminal was what he cared most about. Added novelty: voluminous, imaginative dialogue. The provocation in this film is the blurring of black and white - ex: Our mixed enjoyment/vehemence at the torture of a police officer.

• Festen (The Celebration)
Ensemble cast. One location. Main character has a huge problem - he can't continue his life because of his father's abuse of him and his sister in the past. The novelty is two-fold: This was one of the first Dogma-films shot on DV. It was one of the first 'mainstream' films to talk about incest. This is also more or less its provocation, but its provocation has a deeper level. We are led to believe our main character's intention is to expose his father (get justice) and in the end of the film he succeeds - but he is not really happy about it. The main character's true intention is to find reconciliation with his father, to gain a real bond between them - and this is truly provoking as the gut-reaction towards incest-perpetrators are pretty much to castrate them (socially and physically). This film actually ends up siding with both the victim and the perpetrator.