ONE COLD DAY - Metropolitan Experience
I came to London in winter. It was cold, lonely and foreign to me. I was too sentimental, alone in front of my computer searching for ideas. After a few outline on some weird ‘Lynchian’ ideas, finally I decided to write about what I experienced in the metropolitan city of London. I love surreal movies and I have done it before but now I want to try creating a story with conventional narrative structure but bundles with symbolisms and social critics. Thus ‘One Cold Day’ is materialised.
This is a story from a critical point of view on modernisation that results to materialistic and egocentric culture that now affect the society with or without realizing, silently killing the morality in men. The story captures from the point of view of an outsider who at first was impressed at the grand establishments of modernism but accidentally discovered the dark sides of it. A tourist who was the only witness of an incident even though the main character was present. The main character’s involvement with this incident remained unnoticed to him. London as a metropolitan city was used as general comments representing this cold modernised culture.
This idea is a resemblance on the theme from Citizen Kane - Orson Welles 1941. A story about a man who lost everything when he was blinded by his vision to get everything which was presented from the point of view of the observer.
Influences
I write this script not from the conventional method of scripting which is everything starts with a storyline, rather this script starts with the visuals and concepts that later leads to become a story.
I. To make a story about an ‘observer’ movie, the best reference that comes to mind is Alfred Hitchcock- Rear Window (1954) one of the most unusual and intimate journey into human emotions ever filmed!
II. Visually I was influenced by Sergio Leone on how he placed his character in a dramatic composition by implementing deep focus from foreground characters to the background. I want to achieve this in my movie by bringing it to a different level by having the foreground character creates a gesture which relates to the scene in the background.
III. Charlie Chaplin in his early black and white movies used ‘rooms’ concept to separate events and scenes. Therefore I want to establish the same concept by using the foreground characters as a separator between an event that happens significantly on his left and right space.
