699 - Muggles

Back from Brussels via Kings Cross. We race for the train and settle into our seats. Then we notice the large red steam train next to us through the window. "Hogwarts Express", puffing steam, with spatters of soot on its funnel, right alongside.

There is a buzz up and down the carriage, and camera flashes. An air hostess opposite leans over to take a picture for her daughter. A brisk woman wearing the tag 'Locations Manager' and followed by a policeman steps along the aisle, telling people to please put the cameras away and chat normally (rather than gawp out the window).

Our train pulls out and we see, as we leave the steam train behind, the camera crews and detritus of the filmshoot on platform 4. There's an actorish guy reclining in a director's chair (logic'd suggest a director, but he seemed rather too compact, the way actors can go when they are off-camera but still in the zone).

The word is they've been filming the absolute final scene in the Harry Potter series. E wonders if her orange hat will have been in shot. Further up the train, somone announces they've seen Daniel Radcliffe with an owl.

810 - Whitley Playhouse

The old playhouse saw Ken Dodd and Abba tributes, local am-dram and arthouse cinema. It was a must-play stop-off for big name bands in the seventies and eighties.

The new building (which houses the stage of the old, with the rest of the infrastructure re-built around it) opens in September.

This is taken across the meadow that has sprung from the former site of the Marine Park First School, an oasis of beauty in the town that, I reckon, would make a great nature reserve - the Coquet Avenue Pocket Park?

895 - Simon Beaufoy in the North East

Simon Beaufoy spoke, at the Darlington Arts Centre last night, as a key-note speaker at The Story Engine - the Third Northern Screenwriters' Conference. That's Hollywood to the North East of England in five days. He's a down-to-earth, Oscar-hugging, boat-dwelling, beer-swilling, gent!

His interview, by conference organiser Ian Fenton, concentrated on four films he'd written across his career, culminating with Slumdog Millionaire, launched with The Full Monty, and bridging Among Giants and This Is Not A Love Song.

After revealing that his recent Golden Globe award sits in a thousand pieces at home (though you'd have to chase him for the full story), he proceeded with a detailed strip-down of the processes which brought these movies to the screen. It was an incredibly insightful evening: good psychological nuts-and-bolts, writer's life stuff, with plenty of input from delegates.

I was at the conference to learn tricks about story-making from some of the best and most innovative story-tellers you'll find. These are some of the insights I'll take from Simon:

On adapting Slumdog: that adaption should strip a book to its soul - what is built up from then on, what is woven back onto the piece in its movie form, comes second. Simon is up-front about this when speaking to authors. He travelled to the Mumbai slums to find the soul of the book in the people he interviewed there. He used a trick from his days as a documentary film-maker: to find the heart of a place, ask its people what they would film if they held the camera. Slumdog became a movie about romance, about gangsters, about the naive and glorious generosity he found amidst the violence of Mumbai.

On place: that place is a character and films are about character. So place is considered from the word go in the development of his scripts. In Slumdog it was Mumbai; in The Full Monty it was Sheffield. The Full Monty is as much a hymn to Sheffield as a depiction of male disenfranchisement and the humour that arises from it. The movie is bleak, under all the great gags.

A great question from one of the delegates on Monty: now that we are back in a recession, does this change the way we view the film, no longer nostalgic for the characters, but empathetic? For Simon, you could tell, this question was the reward of the evening, something new for him to ponder after the event, and his answer illuminated because it was about the transparency with which he let us see his pleasure at the questioner's acute insight. You knew that the film had always been about the solidarity he felt with the men he was depicting, their resilience, their pain and fortitude. Political, he said, with a small 'p', meaning a very big 'P' indeed.

Finally, on This Is Not A Love Song, a guerilla piece of film-making that was the first to be released on the web simultaneously with its cinema showing. It lost money, which stymied the production of similar low-budget, on-line movie releases for a media generation, because it became the target of a hacker protesting the need to pay a subscription fee to view the content. It seemed, from the clip shown, to be a raw and very, very exciting piece. The crew behind the film shot, edited and released it in (do I remember?) sixteen weeks, holding down two jobs each (the writer was also the caterer), on digital cameras, and at a minimum wage.

But there was the film, and after a couple of days where the sheer exuberant potential of on-line films and an accompanying 'just do it' mentality had been showcased, here we could see someone at the top of his game, forced in 2002 to push the medium as far as he could, first to protest against the lumbering machinery that was holding his creativity in abeyance, and second, to do something new, truly democratic, hand-held, bright.

There were more insights, of course, but these I found particularly relevant, and directly applicable to my own 'just do it' vision for storymaking, real-life, real-time, without cameras or the crossing of any cultural threshhold, on the streets and in the houses of Whitley.

933 - Into Great Silence

I saw the film (trailer here) last night at the Star and Shadow. The good people at the cinema handed out free soup before the showing - chockful of Jerusalem artichokes, with whole peppers and spices I couldn't identify. Third time of watching this open hearted documentary, which catches, in light beautiful, the life of a community of Carthusian monks.

The first time I watched the film was with E, in 2007, at the Tyneside. "You didn't tell me it was a subtitled film!" she protested. "It's about silent monks - " I defended. "There are no subtitles!"

(To sell Whitley to film buffs, the town is within forty minutes, by public transport, of two multiplexes and three arthouse cinemas - four, if you count the Playhouse which, until it shut for refurbishment, played Brit flicks alongside summer blockbusters, between its caberets, comedy and Am Dram.)

Into great silence. Zeitgeist films, blurbing the movie, wrote:

One of the most mesmerizing and poetic chronicles of spirituality ever created, ... [it] dissolves the border between screen and audience with a total immersion into the hush of monastic life. More meditation than documentary, it’s a rare, transformative theatrical experience for all.

For me this has been the case.

But I come back to Whitley to a different kind of silence. Two more big-name shops are going from the High Street: Marks and Spencers, and (sadder) the local family firm T & G Allan.

Now that the Co-Op has downsized, and Woolworths, shop-soiled, be-shuttered itself, the four empty premises, all between St Paul's church and Fitzgerald's, stand like dead front teeth in a broken gob.

"Bring in the artists!" I said, talking about it at the Star and Shadow. I meant, let's be defiant, rave at the wake, find new life and foster it. Clara, who heard this, was right to press: "People have lost their jobs. They are really, really desperate." Someone else said, "The shops sold commercial tat." (And he was right, too.)

Into great silence. Grief before new life.

954 - Waltzing with Bashir

E and I saw Waltz with Bashir at the Tyneside yesterday. I am adding it to my list of favourite movies.

Mary Corliss in Time wrote: "The message of the futility of war has rarely been painted with such bold strokes."

E and I scarcely spoke on the journey home. Some strange, terrible beauty.

The BBFC gave the film an "18" certificate. (For comparison, Platoon was given a "15", in 1988). Not because of the violence, though reference was made to its violence, but because of "one scene of strong animated sex". At least the BBFC acknowledged that 'the film, containing profound observations about Israel's relationship with its Arab neighbours and the senselessness of war, is clearly not a sex work.'

It's probably not worth commenting on the availability, online and on mobiles, of sexual images to the average teenager; or suggesting that an animated erect penis in such a movie is not going to cause the downfall of civilisation; or drawing attention to the systematic dehumanisation that young men and women undergo from the age of 16, before, at age 18, they are dispatched to kill for their country.

Though the MOD doesn't bother with the figures (Quote from Hansard, 30th June: Mr. Bob Ainsworth: Information on recruitment by region is not held centrally and could be provided only at disproportionate cost), I suspect I'm not the only one who believes there are a disproportionate amount of young recruits drawn into the Army from the poorer regions of the UK, including the North East.

968 - Whitley - The Movie (1)

Robert McKee delivers a seminar about Story. His homepage states that some 50,000 screenwriters, actors, directors, novelists and journalists have attended in the 15 years it has been running. Former students have written WALL-E, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Enchanted, Scrubs; have won 27 Academy Awards and 141 Emmys. You get the picture.

His book (from which I've been quoting already) expands on the thesis of the seminar. What you realise, pretty soon, is that it is not just about screenwriting - it's about the ways we make sense of life. This from his website:

in ALL creative work, everything works in the shadow of classic story design.

So if community development is creative, then it is story. If taking reponsibility for your life is creative, then it is story.

Religions realise this - traditional Christianity is the invitation to participate in a massive story arc, one of cosmological as well as personal scope. So too Islam, Hinduism, a myriad others. Though it would be a truism to say that, realising this, we live in a post-religious age.

Still, we cannot avoid seeing life in terms of story. The regeneration of Whitley Bay is a story. Here's a pitch: tiny seaside town blossoms as pleasure resort, but internal and external pressures conspire to see it fade. Will it succomb? When all seems lost, it rediscovers its heart. Belief returns. A newer, braver, wiser Whitley rises.

Robert McKee charts twenty five movie genres - twenty five basic pitches: love story; horror film; modern epic; western; war genre; the coming-of-age story; redemption plot; punitive plot; comedy; biography; animation; fourteen others. It'd be very fun to pitch 'Whitley - The Movie' in terms of each of these. Then, having selected a pitch, to make the movie by living it.