Genre: Sci-fi Drama
Premise: A pair of aliens masquerading as humans take over a farm house on earth. The female alien then begins to lure men into the house, and KILL THEM.
About: Co-writer and director Jonathan Glazer doesn’t make movies often, but when he does, they usually make a lot of noise on the indie circuit. His best-known film is Sexy Beast, but in 2004, he made a movie called Birth that had one of the creepier scenes I’ve ever watched. The film is about a woman who’s convinced her dead husband has come back to her in the body of a young boy. The scene in question has them bathing together. I’ll let you figure out the rest. The point is, the man takes chances, so when he puts something together, it’s worth paying attention to. Under the Skin hits theaters this April (in the U.S.), and stars, surprisingly, Scarlett Johansson. It was developed with the assistance of FilmFour and the UK Film Council. Glazer got his start in commercials and videos, and won MTV’s prestigious “Director of the Year” award back in 1997.
Writers: Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer (based on the novel by Michael Faber)
Details: July 10th, 2008 draft – 121 pages
Under the Skin was pitched to me as a thinking-man’s sci-fi drama inspired by movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey. I don’t know if the person who said this had actually seen 2001, but I am here to tell you, this is definitely not 2001.
WHAT “Under The Skin” is is another question entirely. We have a writer-director here, which almost always means someone who sees the writing aspect as a means to an end. Indeed, if you watch a movie like “Birth,” it’s more about mood and tone than dialogue and story. And when you start saying things like, “directing is more important than the script,” you get people like Carson riled up. Because while a strong argument can be made that that’s true, a director can’t do anything unless something is written first. And it doesn’t matter what kind of imagery you put in that cineplex if your story sucks. So why not get the script right?
Under the Skin starts with a farmer in the Scottish highlands who swears he saw a dead man, a little black alien creature, and a bird, having a conversation the other day. His friend, of course, thinks he’s hilarious, not realizing that he’s serious. In fact, the bird comes and visits him at home some days and talks to him. Of course, in true indie form, this trio has little to nothing to do with the story.
Meanwhile, two aliens are born in outer space and turned into human beings, who then land on earth near a farm. Lucky for them, the farm was recently deserted, so they come in and start living there. The male alien is named Raymond, and his “wife” is named Laura.
Laura is shapely and beautiful and everything a man desires. Which is important, because her sole purpose seems to be pulling men in then sending them to her barn prison, which has an alien liquid floor that traps the men inside before slowly dissolving them. Why she does this is not clear, but who are we to question an alien’s motivation?
In the meantime, Raymond, the hubby, becomes obsessed with building a fence around their new property. He saw some chaps hunting foxes on his farm the other day and that just isn’t okay with him (a possible intergalactic PETA connection?). So he spends, literally, the entire movie setting up the construction of this fence.
Eventually, one of the men Laura entraps escapes, dying before he can get to the cops, and an investigation begins (with about 20 pages to go). Will the locals discover that their neighbors are really aliens? And if so, whatever are our human-impersonators going to do?
I can just tell that the way Glazer will shoot and score this, it’s going to be creepy. You can feel that eeriness on the page, which gets into lots of little details, the way these mood-dependent movies often do (“A drone slits the air and a fly lands on the female’s collarbone. She freezes, held by this intrusion. The fly moves on.”).
But it kills me because despite every little wonderfully descriptive passage, the story here is glacial. Very little happens. And what does happen is usually some variation of something that’s already happened. Like Laura luring men in for example. I get that that’s what she’s here to do. But each instance of these men being entrapped is virtually identical to a previous instance. Whether it’s on the street or in a club, she lures the guy in with her looks, chats him up, then brings him back to the barn.
Repetition is one of many mortal enemies of the screenwriter. Stories should evolve, change. If all that’s happening is the same stuff we already saw 10 pages ago, and then 10 pages before that, we’re going to get bored.
Now there are some scripts, like this one, where the very nature of the plot requires the protagonist to do repetitive things. Laura is here to lure in men, so I get that we need to see her do it again and again. But for that to work, each one of her attempts must feel new and different, with unique challenges and stakes.
That was the thing. Laura’s experiences were never difficult. Every guy she approached was so damn easy to get. There were never any obstacles. They looked in her eyes and she had them. Without obstacles, there’s no drama. There’s no, “Oh my God, how’s she going to get out of this?” The reader being unsure about what’s going to happen is what makes us want to keep reading. If what’s going to happen is never in doubt, we get bored.
The thing is, even if Glazer and Campbell were able to make this work, the script still had a couple of steep mountains to climb. First, I had no idea why Laura was trapping these men. It wasn’t like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the goal was clear (you get more humans in order to turn them into aliens). She just seemed to want to kill them. But for what reason? Are you really going to travel billions of miles to come to earth to become a serial killer? If I don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing, it’s hard for me to care.
Also, both characters, because they were emotionless aliens, had very little presence on the page, which made them boring. This is a problem you’ll run into EVERY TIME you try to write emotionless characters. It’s just hard to make those characters pop. One solution is to add another character with a big personality to balance out the lack of personality in the silent character. With The Terminator, for example, The Terminator is emotionless and doesn’t say much, but Sara Conner’s pretty prickly. She’s got some personality, which evened things out. We didn’t get anything like that here.
One of the benefits of studying screenwriting and reading so many scripts is you figure out the things that consistently work and the things that consistently don’t. It doesn’t mean you can’t use one of these “proven bad things” and figure out a way to make it work. It just means you make the job harder on yourself. And the more of these “proven bad things” you stick in your script, the more you skew the odds against yourself.
Here we had a) characters repeating themselves throughout the script b) doing things for reasons we didn’t understand c) never encountering obstacles when doing these things (it was always easy) d) who lacked personality. I’m not saying it’s impossible to make a story like this work. But I can guarantee you it’s not going to be easy.
Sometimes I feel like there’s a book out there called “Indie Screenwriting” that only indie writers and directors know about. In this book, you’re taught to take a really long time to get to your plot points. You’re told to avoid conflict because too much conflict is “cliché.” To make your main characters really introverted and therefore devoid of any emotion. And to never explain what’s happening. Just have things happen.
If more indie writers took traditional approaches to storytelling, I feel they could be telling the same stories they want to tell, but reach a much bigger audience, because there will be clear goals and stakes for the audiences to get involved in. I mean one character in Under The Skin spent 80 pages talking about building a fence. Not even building it. Just talking about building it. What are the stakes behind that? Why do we care if this fence is built?
If he needed to build a fence quickly because they had bodies piling up that Laura was accumulating which they needed to bury – then AT LEAST now the fence would have purpose. But to keep out hunters who have no influence on the story? Who cares, right?
It’s just little things like that that, if taken care of, make the script much better, whether it’s an indie or mainstream movie.
Not going to lie, this one was a little frustrating.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If things are too easy for your protag, we get bored. Laura catching her prey (men) was way too easy. It’s okay if the first one is easy, but each successive man should be harder to get. The stakes should be higher. Things should go wrong. Bigger obstacles should get in the way. That’s how you infuse drama into your scene. You create doubt!
