Film Brainstorming with Mayor Tim Shadbolt

For our screenwriting this week we had a visit from Invercargill's Mayor, Time Shadbolt.  He had the idea of creating a feature film, initially intended to be the first New Zealand/ China film collaboration.  However Mr. Shadbolt has had some new idea's since then, and proposed a film about Le Quesnoy, a small French town with a significant connection to New Zealand.

During World War 1, the New Zealand army liberated the town without civilian casualty.  In the middle of the night they climbed ladders over the walls of the town with pistols, and shoot the enemy soldiers while they slept.

Currently, Le Quesnoy are trying to sell their mayoral residence and offered it to New Zealand.  However the government has turned down the offer to buy it.  So Tim Shadbolt wants to buy the residence and convert it into a war memorial and hotel.  He thinks if we made some promotional material and a film that these could be used to get the New Zealand Public interested in contributing towards the residences purchase.  



For our first step we defined the imperatives for the film:
1) Promote film making in Southland
2) Showcase Southland => Tourism
3) ANZAC heritage (Western Front WWI)
4) Chinese interests (also consider the Chinese allies of New Zealand)


Tim Shadbolt has heaps of ideas so we have a number of possible topics to explore: 

• Le Quesnay
• Rewi Alley
• Historical/ Period Drama
• Contempory Drama with flashbacks.

From these topics and imperatives we came up with a few potential story lines:

• Rewi's two children (China?), bookend device => Relatives visit France
                                                                              => Flashback to historical drama
• SIT Chinese student researching Rewi  => Researching around Southland
                                                                  => Link to flashbacks of Rewi's life
• Rewi's grandchildren come to Invercargill to reconnect with his past                                                                                          => Links to French by boy/girl romance

This could be really interesting to develop further, although personally I think Le Quesney could easily be a film in itself, perhaps a drama/ war film which could follow a soldier from his home in Southland to the events of Le Quesnoy.  This talk with Tim Shadbolt has also given me a glimpse of what it could be like to work with executive producers in the future.  Mr. Shadbolt has so many ideas that I think there are actually multiple separate projects in his proposal.  The key thing here will be reining in those ideas while fulfilling all 4 imperatives which have been laid out.