This evening I had the pleasure of seeing, for the first time on a big screen, the short film Spindrift: The Barry Blanchard Story. I have a screenwriting credit on the project and both the filmmaker (Andy Arts) and the subject of the film (Barry Blanchard) were at the screening.
It was pretty cool to see words I had written being brought to life in ways I had not imagined way back when I first started working on the project. Though, they weren’t really my words. Some of the script was drawn from Barry’s first memoir, The Calling: A Life Rocked by Mountains and a draft of the sequel (due for publication later this year). There were also interviews with Barry, many conversations with those who know Barry well, reading various articles and interviews, and watching recordings of Barry speaking. Barry’s a fabulous storyteller and I’d also been lucky enough to hear him speak on several occasions.
My point is, there was a LOT of raw material to work with that somehow had to be distilled into a script that wouldn’t require weeks of binge-watching to get through.
When we started working on the project we imagined a 90-minute documentary-style film and had begun gathering archival footage, and compiling lists of people to interview. We had started roughing out the story arc we would then try to capture in the film.
I say ‘we’ because, from the start, this was a collaborative project with lots of back-and-forth discussions with various key players involved - including Barry.
And then, Barry had an accident and nearly killed himself.
Multiple skull fractures and a life-threatening brain injury meant we suddenly had no idea whether or not we were going to have a Barry at all. When it seemed he maybe wasn’t going to die, we weren’t sure if he would recover enough to be able to participate in the project. When he first came out of his coma he had no idea who he was or what he had done in his long and illustrious career as one of Canada’s finest alpinists.
As a screenwriter, I no longer had any idea what our overall story arc was going to look like. There were ethical dilemmas to tackle - should we be capturing footage of a man unconscious in a hospital bed? Should we be telling this now life-and-death/very personal story on his behalf? How do you balance the need for a grieving family’s privacy with second-guessing what Barry might have wanted, if he were to recover and ask, “Why didn’t you get the footage when you had the chance?”
It was complicated. Stressful. Heartbreaking. Sobering. And, in the end, uplifting and beautiful - but, to the point of this newsletter, without the team that worked on the film, Barry’s family, friends, and community - without all those people and a great deal of love, none of it would have happened.
The final version of Spindrift is much shorter than our original vision (though I suspect we aren’t quite done with this subject), and does not feel like a traditional biographical film. It’s still making the rounds of the film festivals, so I’m not sure if it’s widely available yet for viewing, but if you visit the Vancouver International Film Festival website you’ll be able to watch the trailer.
It seems this is a week of collaboration. The other night I stumbled into a gathering that included a couple of musicians and we all found ourselves doing some improvisational singing. I’ll write more about that as it was a) unexpected and b) quite moving. As a writer, much of my work in the past has been done in solitude, but I was reminded as we raised our voices in song that it is impossible to sing in harmony with yourself.
What do you think of collaborations in art? Who ‘owns’ a project when many people have participated? Even a painting with a single artist is a collaboration of sorts - a viewer’s experience of the piece may or may not match the intention of the creator.
Oh, I sense a rabbit hole down which I am too tired to venture. So, for tonight -
Adieu.
By the way, does anyone know if there’s a way to add video directly to a post here? Please let me know in the comments…