Mental Shelves

I’ve worked with Danny Boyle twice now and one of the first and most useful things he does when he sets up a production office is set up a knd of Library Corner, full of pictures, books and films that have inspired him. He also invites people from the Art Department, the Camera Department etc. to do the same. The Library Corner for Millions was plastered with El Greco reproductions and the films of Satajit Ray, and the short stories of Frank O’Connor.
I’ve been thinking about what I would put in the Library Corner of Triple Word Score.
First of all would be Life is A Long Slow River and Tatie Danielle by Etienne Chatillez. These are two French films about working people in unglamorous locations (Roubaix, on the Belgium border, North of Lille) but which are bursting with fun, colour and odd moments of beauty and poetry. They’re a World away from the formulaic miserabilism of Mike Leigh and Co.
One of the things I’m hoping to nick from Chatillez is his gift for writing really extreme - appalling - characters who you somehow like to watch. Human monsters like Tatie Danielle are as compelling in their way as real monsters like Godzilla or Kong. But you don’t need a special effects budget to get them onto the screen.
Frank O’Connor - swaggering, hilarious, wise, and fearless - is still on my mental shelves and probably always will be.
Danny Boyle introduced me to this terrific poem by Paul Farley which also makes it to the Mental Shelves:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/forwardprize2005/story/0,,1540399,00.html

There’s also this terrific story written (worryingly) by my son Joe about the fallibility of fathers, which is sort of the theme of the film. So this story gets in there next to O’Connor:

http://granddadshorse.bebo.com

Because we want to have fun with Scrabble tiles during the film, we’re also looking at brilliant title sequences, such as those from the Pink Panther films.

Comments

[Nicolás Ricci]

Hi, I'm a 21 years old argentinian crap-writer. I just saw "God on Trial" on tv (it ended twenty minutes ago). I cried, and also did my girlfriend, until now. It was too god damned terrible, too god damned beautiful, too philosophically strong. I don't really know if this is Boyce's site or not (this is the first time I enter here), but if you are in fact Cottrell Boyce... Thank you, thank you so much. Recieve, please, this hug from a young writer from the other part of the world. I just met your work, but and I'm going to read all in this blog and see all the movies I can (you cannot imagine how hard it is to found this kind of films in a third world country only concerned about the pig flu).
That is all, I don't want to bore you. Thanks again, for an hour and a half your script gave me all I'm looking for in a movie. Keep doing good art.

Hurlingham, Buenos Aires
Nicolás Ricci