BSA 204 W11 : Buried Around Back

Marcella can make a short film with the equipment that she has access to at the equipment hiring place where she's working right now and obviously it would be waste not to take full advantage of this opportunity. She doesn't really know what she wants to make though, or what the story should be, so she asked me if I could write something for her. The only limitations is that she won't have more than 2 actors and want to keep the location to just the building and its back yard.

This was quite hard to come up with, especially since she wanted to do it as a silent film originally (since it would be easier on the actors) but she said it also be like The Guilty (2018) which we watched earlier in the year. She liked that film as much as I did and if she made something like that it could help her experiment with the cinematography as well (which is the area that really interests her).

So a contained thriller, wonderful just what I've been interested in. Unfortunately no ideas came immediately so I thought I could pitch her a bunch that I have had in the past and just retrofit them to fall within the film's limitations.

The most recent idea that I thought could already work was the Buried one I had last week, where the guy simply wakes up in a coffin and slowly comes to the realization that he is dead and in a kind of limbo. This is very much the type of film I find interesting, but upon consideration for this project I felt it didn't have much substance really and wouldn't fit with Marcella's personal sensibilities + a coffin might be kinda hard to pull off. But this was a good start because it snowballed into a new idea:

A drug dealer finds his joint raided and his partner buried somewhere in the back yard, whilst he is in the middle of a personal breakdown upon realizing that his livelihood is destroyed he has to rush to try and rescue his friend before the air runs out.

I think this idea is perfect for this project because it appeals to multiple areas of what Marcella wants, as well providing a premise that I think provides ample space for both comedy and suspense. First of all it has The Guilty thing of talking to a person on the phone as time runs out for them to be found, and secondly (perhaps more exciting) is that it can be stylistically executed in the manner of Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels - which is one of Marcella's favourite movies, with her favourite sequence being the drug dealers!

It's hard to narrow down what Marcella's humour is exactly, but one thing I know she finds funny is that scene from Lock, Stock. Coming down to this equation was an accident though, originally I decided for them to be drug dealers simply because I needed the cops not be involved in the story.

Also allows me to figure out how to write intoxicated individuals, as I have expressed an interest to do with the Drugtown idea.

The movie opens with the main character in the room, looking around and screaming "FUCK!" He's just lost everything and its sinking in - where's the shit!?

He looks at his phone and sees all the missed calls, his partner was trying to contact him for some time. He calls back and angrily demands to know what happened, his partner reveals that he was jumped and they buried him in the backyard - they found the confounded coffin that the main character insisted on getting really funny.

After finding out what's happened he immediately turns to smoking one up, the bloke in the box is revealed to have done the same thing in there which is a big problem because he has a very limited amount of air available. They are both high, and getting worse throughout the film, all the while we are learning more about what went down as well as the main character finding ways to rescue his buddy.

It's revealed that the one in the ground betrayed him at the end, and that the backstabber was stabbed in the back by the gang that took everything and buried in the front yard. The protag decides to leave him in the hotbox even though he finds him.

Themes:

- How we turn to pain killers in times of hardship