River: Early Script Writing




For our Media Studies project, we took a few weeks to come up with a genreal idea for a film. It depicts the ferry man, a mythical being who transports the dead from the life to afterlife. However our depiction twists this, as it portrays him as a normal guy who delivers souls for his dayjob. 

 Now granted, this idea is not ultimately perfected, as there is not a full plot. However, I got tasked with writing the initial screenplay for the film, trying to outline the
different shots we would use to help shape the idea better in our heads.

 This is also not the first idea we had. We wanted to create a film around a character that was mute. This brought up many ideas as to how the character would perceive and communicate with the world around him. The character was going to use sign language to communicate and the story was centred around his school life. We went through many different interpretations of this idea, such as a love story and comedy but we ended up going with a thriller.

We enjoyed the possibility of filming this but as we started to develop the idea more, we started to come into some issues with how long the film would be and how the story plays out. We realised that revenge stories are somewhat cliche so we decided to stop production on this idea before it was too late.



 When writing the Script for River, the characterisation of the characters was very important, as you had to understand how they would say things before making them say things. I wanted the ferryman (Ron) to be experienced and quite a cynical character, while the soul he deals with throughout the film to be his foil, an inexperienced and confused dead guy, called Kevin. I took a big amount of inspiration for the dialogue of these characters from Django and Dr. Schultz from the movie Django Unchained. Dr. Shultz is the wise, confident character while Django is unknowing at the start of the film, in contrast to the doctor. This is shown when Dr. Schultz asks to take Django from the slave traders, and all the characters except the doctor and filled with confusion.Tarantino Displays their opposite characters effectively at the beginning even before dialogue.



It was the way that Tarantino's script appearevisually that inspired me when beginning to write River.

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