Saudade

Being careful what is wished upon you.

A new project has crept up on me with rapid deliciousness. An old project, but new too. A project I first conceived of on 20th August 2014, as a wee 21 year-old with much less life experience than he believed he had at the time. When it first appeared on the transom of my mind, I told myself to file it away - it was an idea too rich and hungry for real lived experiences to be explored by someone as naive as I was, and despite my huge ego at the time that I was someone who already had the world pegged (like every 21 year old, right?) - I knew it wasn’t the right time.

The last month or so, I’ve felt compelled to explore romance in my writing. Every film I’ve written has been imbued with romance, and normally they are ways for me to immortalise the love I have for whomever I’m idolsing at the time of writing, but I have never really quite cracked beneath the surface of these romances. The romance is always secondary to some grand plot. I’ve never written a film expressly to move someone, to make them cry. I’ve always been too obsessed with ideas, and philosophical musings, and psychological analyses, to ever really stop and smell the roses of the human condition in my work. So lately, after absorbing some beautiful, slow and pensive cinema, I felt compelled to swim in that ocean for a bit. To see if I could do it.

I wrote this note on my laptop yesterday:

Romance film brewing….

Someone desperately trying to seek their ex and win them back?

But why?

Adn waht is the grand philosophical science behind it?

Answers on a postcard.

Summit to do with the grandiosity of time I reckon

Typos and all.

I just felt compelled to fold everything I’ve ever felt in all the romances I’ve ever experienced. I felt the deep need to really put it forth in my writing. I’ve found myself in a safe and secure place lately - secure in who I am, in who I want, but also in how to be alone, just by myself. It has felt nice. It wasn’t at first, of course, but I walked through the forest and learnt a lot about the people I do and don’t want in my life, both real and imagined.

So today, in the car on the way back from a meeting with a client, I was searching my brain’s filing cabinets for inspiration. This elusive, faceless ‘romance film’ was still teetering on the edges, and I felt like I was close. What is it I want to explore? So in that moment, in the car, as my client was on the phone to the hospital and I was left to not make small-talk (though it’s not small-talk when my client is an eccentric 66 year-old Canadian rockstar with a Wikipedia page and a self-proclaimed “I’m famous!” quote from just an hour earlier). In this silence, I decided to explore a different possibility: what ideas do I already have, in the thousands of mental index cards, that could fit the bill?

And then it just appeared.

That elusive idea from 11 years ago.

Not even an hour later, an entire film was written in my head. And feverishly on my laptop as I journeyed on the train. An outline. Characters. Themes. Dialogue. Even the ending. The song that it ends on. Everything.

I am so fucking excited. Yes, I have another script that has been gestating for about five years now that I’m still yet to finish, but that one is something so cerebral and philosophical that it strikes me differently. This one here? This is pure emotion. This is going to make you cry like a motherfucker. This is going to be so powerful, so evocative. Oh, God, it really is going to be fucking magical. I am so God-damn fucking excited.

It’s called Saudade. That beautiful Portuguese word that is one of those famous “untranslateable” words. Of course, there are always lovely translations. Here’s my favourite:

“Saudade is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present.”

Aubrey Bell

It’s the idea that there are things, people, moments, places, that evoke in you a strong sense of yearning, of longing. But it’s more than those things. It is a desire and powerful need for time travel to be truly possible so we can go back and re-experience the exactness of those moments. It isn’t about wanting to see a person again, it is about wanting to find the photons that are spraying through the universe, that left the Earth on that day you spent with them on the beach in blue hour, and let them enter your retinas again. It is needing to breath the same air, at the same time, as you breathed on the beach that night. It isn’t about feeling sand between your toes - but the sand that sat on the beach on that very night. Every single grain.

The original idea I had, all those years ago, is so simple. It’s a story about love, and what it means to love and long for someone, and what it means when you can’t stop that.

You’re going to love it when it comes.

In the final scene, down at the bottom of the initiation well at the Quinta da Regaleira, as Ella closes her eyes and makes a wish with the talisman squeezed in her palm, “Afterlife” by Arcade Fire plays. She opens her eyes and looks at him. The only light beaming from far above them. Her palm opens. The talisman slowly floats up, but their eye contact is with each-other. She smiles. Cut to black.

That ending makes no sense to you, but it means everything to me. It encapsulates all of the loves I’ve ever had. It puts to bed all of the women who I’ve carried with me, some for almost 20 years, unable to truly ever let go of any of them. It makes the saudades mean something.

I can’t wait for you to read it.