{"id":1148,"date":"2009-04-19T21:05:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-19T20:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dickonedwards.co.uk\/diary\/?p=1148"},"modified":"2009-04-19T21:15:35","modified_gmt":"2009-04-19T20:15:35","slug":"in-praise-of-dvd-extras","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/archive\/in-praise-of-dvd-extras\/","title":{"rendered":"The DVD Extra As Creative Alibi"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Saturday afternoon + evening: to Wanstead for a screenplay writing session with Stuart N. Never done this style of writing before: two people in a room throwing ideas about, writing them down. It does force you to get something done: I refuse to leave until we&#8217;ve plotted out the rest of the story and given it an ending. And we do.<\/p>\n<p>The distraction with two-person writing sessions is, of course, to just sit and chat about shared interests, or gossip about friends or people in the news, or show the other person a book or film or internet article that they&#8217;d like. We do that too, but just about manage to keep it in its place. The sense of needing to get back to work is doubled, and harder to avoid. It&#8217;s easier to work than not work.<\/p>\n<p>We both chat about the excellent film In Bruges, for instance, but Mr N also praises the deleted scenes on the DVD, which I hadn&#8217;t seen. So he shows me them on his TV &#8211; but only AFTER we&#8217;ve finished writing.\u00c2\u00a0 And indeed, there&#8217;s two memorable cut scenes which are frankly better than some entire non-deleted movies.<\/p>\n<p>One scene stars Matt Smith, now known as the next Doctor Who. He plays the younger version of Ralph Fiennes&#8217;s Kray-like gangster in a flashback to the early 70s, strolling casually into a London police station to enact revenge on a detective. The revenge itself is violent, surreal, highly unlikely, and really rather brilliant.<\/p>\n<p>I can see why the scene was cut, but given the expense and effort that went into it &#8211; period hair, clothes and locations not used elsewhere, actors hired purely for that one scene &#8211; plus one special effect &#8211; it must have been a pretty hard decision.<\/p>\n<p>Another quick scene features Ralph Fiennes on the Eurostar, quietly dealing with an irritating passenger via a fantastic put-down straight out of Derek &amp; Clive. Like the Matt Smith scene, it justifies the invention of DVD extras, those digital alibis of the cutting room floor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Saturday afternoon + evening: to Wanstead for a screenplay writing session with Stuart N. Never done this style of writing before: two people in a room throwing ideas about, writing them down. It does force you to get something done: I refuse to leave until we&#8217;ve plotted out the rest of the story and given [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[160,161],"class_list":["post-1148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-in-bruges","tag-matt-smith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1148"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1155,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148\/revisions\/1155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}