For Daniel Audet, the idea of confining his two female characters to an old, rusted car sunken into a coulee at the edges of town was just the beginning of his screenplay. He needed a ‘spark,’ a punch line – an image he could build up to throughout his story; that's when the idea of a burning car popped into his head.

To reveal more would ruin the twist of his story, but suffice it to say, once Dan found the ‘spark’ to Rusted Pyre, the third-place winning entry in the 2008 Canadian Short Screenplay Competition, the rest of the writing just flowed. Now this Alberta native and film school grad will see his short screenplay become a film later in the year, as part of his third-place prize in the competition. “So far this is going to be my first real project and the first screenplay of mine that will be produced into a film,” he says. “I actually didn't even enter any other competitions because I was really only interested in seeing my script get made, rather than prizes, and the possibility of having that done with a professional crew was too exciting to pass up.”

Dan first heard about the competition from his girlfriend’s mom, who read an article about Year of the Skunk Productions and the CSSC in the local Lethbridge Herald. An aspiring filmmaker who completed his BFA at the University of Lethbridge and took Digital Film Production at Langara College in Vancouver, he decided to enter. “I didn’t think I would actually get into the position where I’d be making it,” he explains. “I was just hoping to get some feedback from someone who actually reads screenplays.”

After a few tries at shooting and editing his own work (he likens his earlier works to “trailers I had to explain to my audience”), he turned to Rusted Pyre, a short script he had written a couple of years before. In brief, Rusted Pyre is about one very trippy evening shared by Ginny and Sally, two high-school girls in a small town in the Prairies. When Sally lures her friend into a so-called ‘haunted car’ at the outskirts of town, what starts as a practical joke turns into a terrifying experience that blurs the lines between fiction and reality.

With shooting set to begin later in the year, Dan is hoping to see the shoot and “just learn a ton from it,” perhaps even make it into a potluck community event with free beer and pizza. He’s also working on a longer script about his tree-planting experiences, and hopes to use this unique opportunity from the CSSC to build up his portfolio when he re-applies to the Canadian Film Centre’s screenwriting program. “I feel that the production of actual winning scripts makes the CSSC a very important one,” he says. “I believe that having my work produced will not only be a tremendous learning experience for my future scripts but also a very strong element in my portfolio.” As an added bonus, he will get to meet with top literary agent Glenn Cockburn of Meridian Artists to pitch his ideas.

For other aspiring screenwriters out there who don’t know where to start – or what exactly a short film is – Dan was in the same boat. “I didn’t quite know what a short film was at first,” he admits. “What poetry is to a novel? A commercial for a longer film?” For starters, he found the books The Anatomy of Story by John Truby and Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch to be particularly helpful, as well as In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch. “Even though it's a book on editing I find that an understanding of the concept of editing to be very useful when writing,” he explains.

He also recommends starting with a good, sharp concept and writing as much as possible, even jotting down snippets of script ideas on note cards, letting them percolate in a pile, and when an idea pops out, to take it and go with it – just like he did with the image of a burning car. Some solid inspiration doesn’t hurt either; Dan admires how directors David Cronenberg and David Lynch put their own spins on the horror genre. “I’ve been strongly influenced by their use of horror and fear as vehicles to explore much stronger themes and stories than your typical ‘scary movie,’” Dan explains. “I’m also particularly interested in Cronenberg's career as a Canadian filmmaker who has carved out his own niche of atypical Canadian content.”

Written by :

Miriam

 

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