Shot List for a Film That Was Never Made

For three years I tried to raise the money for a short film about my grandmother's last summer. She rented the same cottage on the west coast every August for forty years, and in the final August, when she was eighty-nine, she went alone for the first time, against the advice of everyone in the family, and came back a week early without explaining why.

I wanted to make a film about that week. I wrote a treatment, found a producer, applied to four funds and was turned down by all of them. The producer moved to London. The cottage was sold. At some point I understood that the film was not going to be made, and I put the folder in a drawer.

I found it again last month, and in it was the shot list, the plan of every image in the film, in the order I intended to shoot them. I am publishing it here because I think it is the closest the film will ever get to existing, and because reading it again I realised it says something about the film that the treatment never did.

1. Exterior, early morning. The cottage from the lane, through a gap in the hedge. Mist. No movement for ten seconds.
2. Interior, kitchen. A kettle on the stove, beginning to steam. A hand, out of focus, reaches for it.
3. Close. Her feet in slippers on a stone floor, crossing to the window.
4. Her point of view. The sea, grey, beyond a field of cows.
5. Wide. She sits at the kitchen table with a cup. She does not drink it. Hold for as long as the actor can bear it.
6. Exterior, day. The path to the beach. She walks slowly, with a stick, and stops halfway.
7. The beach, empty, from the top of the path. We do not go down.
8. Interior, bedroom, night. A lamp on a bedside table. A paperback, face down, open at the same page as in the previous scene.
9. Close. Her hand on the bedspread, smoothing it. Again. Again.
10. Exterior, dawn. The car in the lane, the boot open. A suitcase goes in.
11. Interior, kitchen. The kettle, cold, on the stove. The cup, still full, on the table.
12. Exterior. The cottage from the lane, through the gap in the hedge. The same framing as the first shot. The mist has gone. No movement for ten seconds. Cut to black.

That is the whole film. Twelve shots, perhaps fourteen minutes. Reading it now, I notice something I did not see when I wrote it. There is no dialogue and no explanation. The funding bodies all asked the same question, which was what happens in the film, and I always answered by describing my grandmother's decision to come home early and what I imagined had caused it.

But the shot list does not describe a decision. It describes a woman in a rented house, doing the things she had done there every summer for forty years, and finding that they no longer held her. The kettle, the path, the beach she does not go down to. The film was never about why she left. It was about the moment a borrowed place stops fitting, and you notice, and you pack.

I am not sure I would have been able to make that film. I am fairly sure I would not have been able to explain it to a funding panel. But I am glad the list exists, and I am glad I found it again. It has taught me something about how to plan the next one: write down the pictures first, and do not answer the question of what happens until the pictures have answered it for you.