Commentary by Borgus, Writer & Director
 

I'm a fan of Alfred Hitchcock films and his theory of simplicity.  He always kept the audience's needs in mind when creating scenes.  He said "all extraneous material should be removed." What works for his films can be applied to audio, in that you can design scenes that speak directly to the audience.  Instead of characters talking to each other, they are teasing the listener as they speak.

Also important to me was paying close attention to the emotional impact of each scene, and how they flowed after another.  Perhaps this came from my brief experience at webcasting on the Internet. The tendency of audiences to become emotionally satisfied is tied very closely to the pacing and tension of each scene, and the feelings that arise from the listener over time. By timing and pacing, you can control when they think, and when they feel. You always want them to anticipate the next move, and have plenty to consider while the story is flowing past them.

I decided from day one (around December 1996) that this story would be told as a fictional radio broadcast. It started with a few scenes that I wanted to include in the movie - assassination and alien attack.  Those two things could be contrasted in the ways they are covered by the news reporters.

Choosing the laid-back style of a live radio broadcast made the Hitchcock simplicity idea difficult.  Announcers would have to allow time to pass between events.  That made the story flow even more significant.

That's why the movie was so hard to write.  Just ask any of the people who helped design it.  Because it was supposed to sound like live radio, it just couldn't be conceived on a typed page, it had to be heard first and then written. This meant that I would have to record entire test scenes and listen to them, deciding where to cut long winded dialogue or add more plot detail - all during the writing process.  This happened up to the final cut, even after the final scenes were done. The example to the right shows some last minute additions to Act 2 to improve story flow.

To achieve this life-like pace we had to insert a lot of talk and chatter to keep things moving (call it our attempt at reality radio!)  We also wanted to add some character depth. But we couldn't have the characters were running around settling personal issues on the air - it just doesn't happen in real life radio.  Radio causes people to act professional and hide their emotions and motives.

So the obvious problem became: how do we get drama out of shy characters? The characters would have to carry almost no dramatic weight except for a few key scenes.  We had to rely on allusion and symbolism in the writing to carry weight in the story movement.  Much of the plot happens in the listener's imagination, instead of within the characters actions.

This meant the story structure would be even more important, as a way of organising the logic in the mind of the audience.  It is this organisation of scenes that makes a live event take on a dramatic form.  In order to keep things moving forward, each sequence would have to be inherently different in style, movement, and emotion so that it would seem like a new dynamic level at every turn of the plot.  And it would all have to be simplistic, easy to visualise. The example above shows a flow chart for the attack sequence in Act 4.

The process of achieving this was more trial-and-error than anything else.  Before the actors got involved, I recorded the scenes at least 3 or 4 times before writing the final lines.  And, of course there were some changes after they recorded their lines, too.  Up until the last week of production there were sweeping changes being made to the ending.  In fact, 12 minutes were cut from the "capsule crash" sequence to make it move faster.  There was an entire movement that followed President Clinton on his flight to Missouri.  I decided it was unessessary and we recorded a new sequence about Bill Gates escaping.

In this way the movie was built like a sculpture.  We started with a broad idea and kept adding and deleting material.  The result was a production that was crafted and shaped with high attention to detail, leaving us with a highly potent story movement. The attached example shows some notes I took after listening to the space pod sequence. This is where I first came up with the idea of making Bill Gates look guilty, having him escape the hospital (and the big changes to Act Three you've heard so much about.)

Just like real radio, the listener can join the broadcast at any time and catch-up with what's been happening.  And it means that you can listen out of sequence and still not be disturbed. We divided the movie into 4 separate dramatic movements. Unlike other movies, each Act stands alone from the others.  A listener could listen to Act 3 alone and still be satisfied (This is what we mean by ground-breaking scene structure.) 

The most compicated sequence was the ending.  We went through several different ideas - all of them sounded immature or cartoonish.  One was a gun fight, a suicide, at one point we had 4 characters all on a standoff together.  None of it seemed to fit. We needed something simple and visual.  I almost gave up and went with a nuclear bomb ending.  Eventually I went toward the Shakespearean tragedy style which seems to fit nicely with the main character and opened the way for a nice little debate between Bill Gates and Jim Thomas.  Now the whole story is about these two in a hidden chess match with each other - something which wasn't written until the last few weeks.  This was the moment of clarity that brought everything else together.

The end result is a movie that constantly pulls you into a new surprise at every turn, and packs your mind full of vibrant scenery - all with small amount of sound effects.

Having all of these layers tie together is just another monument to the obstactles we overcame in writing and organising this movie.  It was all about making sacrifices and changes to build a coherent web of plot levels, story, and symbolic commentary.

Hopefully, you'll never notice and believe it was all improvised!

Jan 03