I don't write quickly.
I've been working on the same feature script for five years, and it still needs a great deal of work. My last film, gravida, took about two months to write and it isn't exactly the most complex script in the world, even for a short. I like for my stories to hang out in the back of my head, to percolate in my subconscious. I like to live with them for awhile.
If I have to, I can work quickly. I've done it before. Back in college I was known to knock out a five-page paper in two hours. But this, three weeks to write and do pre-production on a feature, is probably closer to doing a doctoral thesis in a long weekend. You can do it, but it probably isn't a good idea.
Working on this sort of timeline, it's imperative to take as many shortcuts as possible, so I spend the first afternoon going over all my old story ideas, sorting through them for ease of execution and use. I consider the option of remaking some of my short films, as a lot of the groundwork would have already been laid. Problem is, none of them even remotely work. The small ones would either take too much scripting and rehearsal time or would require a location that isn't Pittsburgh (for example, I want to make a film that takes place in locations specific to Chattanooga, Tennessee). So I need a new idea.
I have a group of five or six people whose judgment I trust on story issues, so I send them an email, and the results are spotty. My old roommate suggests his oft-discussed story of a talking coffee mug that teaches philosophy [1]. And that's not the worst idea of the day.
The thing is, everyone you know has at least one idea for a movie, but a lot of those ideas are relatively complex or pretty stupid. Either there's a lot of characters or it's long or it needs a detailed script or there's zombies or, you know, stuff blows up. Think about it. What sort of film can you shoot in four days? Something with a lot of dialogue and not very many locations, right? You can't have car chases or explosions or 300 extras. You just can't. And what can you write and pre-produce in under three weeks? Lots of dialogue takes lots of time to memorize and rehearse. You almost have to improvise a rather big chunk of it, and you still need to keep locations and characters at a minimum. But improvising is scary. You have to cast well and get lucky.
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