RED

Synopsis
Dario, a middle-aged writer is driving down to a coastguard cottage on Camber Sands to try and complete a troublesome book when he has an untoward thought. This thought comes from nowhere as he is stuck in traffic and surrounded by red brake lights and troubles him greatly because it suggests he will never return. From that moment on the colour red has an ominous significance, it is a warning, and he sees it everywhere.
The cottage is lovely, and the environment very freeing, but the writing is still not happening. Dario is distracted by his premonition and the prevalence of the colour red, a brake light that won’t go out, warning flag beside the adjoining military firing range and many other instances. But he starts to doubt his own sanity when he also begins seeing visions of himself as if from a future timeline. In one of these, he overhears himself describing finding something on the beach inside the firing range. When he goes to investigate, he finds his own drowned body.
Annabelle is his agent’s assistant, and she holds a secret candle for Dario. When he shares his fears with her, she immediately travels down to support him, but is sceptical of what he describes, and fears he is drinking. Dario overhears the owner of the cottage describing some tragedy. Later, Dario and Annabelle nearly die from carbon monoxide poisoning and are only saved because Dario connects the dots regarding what he heard the owner say. Thereafter both accept that these manifestations are a reality and conclude they are a puzzle that must be solved to save Dario’s life.
As they become closer, Annabelle pushes Dario and he reveals a deep lack of confidence and a self-hatred. This pressure results in a fight where Dario comes close to violence; afterwards, he tells her the ruth about his troubled childhood.
The next morning, feeling there is no hope, Dario decides to end his life in the sea, but is stopped when he sees his doppelganger enacting this exact intention, but from a few minutes into the future. Shocked, he watches himself die, turns away from suicide, and feels reborn.
Annabelle admits she is in love with him, then awkwardly tries to progress their relationship, but fate conspires to frustrate her. This leads to an exchange where Annabelle revels her own deep wounds. She has been let down in love many times and now runs away at the point where things become serious. When that point comes with Dario, she runs again, but Dario persuades her to stay.
That night they attend the Rye fire festival, a pagan celebration. Dario sees another version of himself in the crowd and follows him, leading to him seeing a poster concerning self-kindness in a shop window. As he reads the words red turns to green in his head and he knows that it is over. Then as the Rye fireworks break in the sky, Annabelle and Dario kiss.

Creative Proposal
Camber Sands and the Dungeness peninsula is a quite unique place. It is wild, windswept, barren, and exposed. It feels inhabited by history, by ghosts. And all within ninety minutes of London. The location is a distinctive character within this film. The coastguard cottage where we will film is also unique and distinctive, but in a different way. It is built to survive, beautifully realised as a welcoming residence, colourful, natural, and cosy. If the cottage represents civilisation and a haven, then the exterior is a world filled with threats, both obvious and hidden, it is the wild, the unknown, and it has power. The environment can be stunningly calm, but it can become hugely dangerous very quickly. This environment is alive with nature, moulded by the forces impacting upon it, and bristling with harsh truth.

This story is based on my own experience and though I did not see myself from another timeline, I did experience an untoward thought and the colour red became a terrifying warning to me for many months until I happened upon the answer to solve it. This story is about what we don’t know, about ourselves and about our world, it is a question to which I only know part of the answer. It is about what hovers just beyond our perception, which we can somehow sense, but not see, making us peer intently into the shadows.

Dario and Annabelle are both dealing with profound and denied emotional wounds; by the close, both, with the others help, have stepped into their own shadow, and pulled something back into the light. In performance terms, most of the real action happens in the subtext, in doubt, hope and swirling fears, and I will be seeking lucid expression of that from the actors. Their environment though, and the forces they are subject to, are and must remain a mystery to them, all they can do is react to what they can see, even if they cannot explain it.

Filming and sound design will seek to suggest what we sense but cannot see. Framing might include dark corners where something may move unseen, moments of peace interrupted by wind that cries and howls, rain driven by gales drumming on thin glass windows, a natural world that is both redolently alive and threateningly bloody in tooth and claw, muddy waters that swirl unpredictably, and shapes appearing in the flickering flames of fire.
Everything is battered by the elements; our characters will be increasingly battered by their experiences. As the story progresses, everything will become more shrill, more extreme, chaotic, and less explicable.

The sky there is vast, sunsets vivid and the night sky acutely dark. The colours are clear, blues, yellows, and some reds, but muted and washed out by exposure to the sun and sea. Contrast is strong. Even in the distance the vastness of Dungeness nuclear power station squats like a sleeping giant and is a significant presence. I have watched magnesium flares drifting out in a stream over the channel at night from the firing range, lighting up ten miles of coastline; it was a breath-taking sight, and I would like the MOD to put on a show for us.

The story ends at the Rye Fire Festival, an extraordinary and semi pagan event, where hundreds of people march through the streets, their faces painting, carrying flaming torches and dragging carts of burning hay. They bang drums, they chant, they howl. The air of the narrow streets is filled with smoke, it is a health a safety nightmare, yet it is traditional. The march ends at a vast pyre where an actual boat is often burnt, and participants throw fireworks into the fire and dodge as rockets ignite and stream over and sometimes into the crowd. We are in Wicker Man territory with the fire festival, it is another England altogether and very exciting. We will use multiple camera crews to really capture the essence and experience of this unique event which forms the backdrop to Dario’s discovery, and which expresses a willing descent into a chaos within which he finally discovers his answer.

This film is intended to be an experience, a subtle weave of subtext, narrative, colour, and form, with none overly explicit, that builds inexorably, providing information, but limted answers, in order to engage the viewers imagination, to pull them into this world and get them wondering at mystery and thinking, ‘could that happen to me?’
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