7th September 2014
This week has been blighted and coloured by the loss of three close colleagues. One in a week would be too much.
But some joy with meeting my sister in London for the RSC Wolf hall/Bring Up the bodies double bill, a trip to the Tower of London and then a boat trip down the Thames. An action packed 24 hours - the image of the sea of blood poppies pouring out of the tower of London, and splashing round the moat in a frozen cascade will never leave me. art at it's most powerful, most daring, most simple, most imaginative and most accessible. It simply works and moves visitors to tears. astonishing. The tudor intrigue of the plays was equally exciting and clear and thought provoking. A tailed description from the headsman about the etiquette of beheading Anne Boleyn was uncomfortable and provocative in view of recent events. Have we learnt anything. Governments can still twist the law to serve their needs, throwing up the religious card to justify their contradictions. Surely we should live our lives based on common sense and common decency, not as the result of a fairy tale?
And with all this, work has continued on the series and with my script. The latter has taken an unexpectedly dark turn....lovely.
And Boxtrolls is out this weekend. The standard of animation, of technique and technical achievement will be raised considerably. Interesting that all three Laika films have been about characters crossing over into secret hidden worlds, whether benign or malignant, but ever since Rosalind went into Arden, Alice went down the rabbit hole, Dorothy went to Kansas, this has been a major plot device. in the film I'm writing, it's not that straight forward, but there is another time period overlapping the present, rather than a different geography.