Film scripts

Over the past ten years I have written a range of film scripts – from an homage to ‘Big’ (called Small) to a supernatural thriller called Creepers, to a drama about heritage and DNA called Lineage to a heist/caper called Five Eyes. I write quite visually and cinematically and enjoy painting scenes with words.

Small

Tom Hanks has it all – success, fame, and a basement overflowing with memorabilia. Tasked by his wife, Rita, to choose something for a charity auction, Tom falls victim to a sentimental moment, literally – he trips over a loose cord on the fortune telling machine ZOLTAR, grabs his creaky hip – and his whole life flashes before his eyes. “Why would anyone wish to be Big?” he laments. “I wish I could be Small again!”

Waking up the next day, turned into a 15-year-old boy, Tom panics and runs away. But life isn’t easy for a newly-made-teenager, and Tom needs help. Seeking shelter at the home of Bill, an elderly neighbour who turns out to be a bigger kid than Tom, he realises there’s no way to get big again for four weeks.

Enrolling at the local high school, Tom meets Jonah, a teenager who reminds him of his younger self. Jonah desperately wants to be an actor, so Tom decides to help him, but, incapable of hiding his natural talent, lands himself the lead role in the high school play instead.

Jonah’s completely in love with the most popular girl in the school – Kelly – who of course doesn’t know he exists. Tom tries to get Jonah and Kelly together – but things have changed since his day, and his romantic advice only succeeds in making things worse. The more Tom settles into high school life – playing video games, having sleepovers and goofing off on stage – the less he remembers about his old life.

As the auction draws near, Rita, sick of no word from her husband, cuts him off. Tom remembers what it’s like to have nothing, and realises just how much he’s lost.

When ZOLTAR doesn’t show up at the auction, Tom’s realises he might just be stuck Small, forever.

Read the first ten pages of Small here.

 

Lineage

Marie Paulo – a poet and professor of language – lives alone in the mountains of rural Italy, isolated, alone. She’s brilliant, but aloof, and has little human contact. One night, she’s involved in a horrific car accident, and a shard of metal very precisely enters her skull. She wakes up in hospital to know no Italian, speaking fluent English in a nineteenth century aristocratic accent.

An English scientist who specialises in behavioural epigenetics hears of this strange Italian woman speaking like Victorian nobility and flies out to meet her. Convinced he can help, he persuades her to return with him to England to his company’s facility, to discover a cure.

The terrified professor has a wealth of knowledge that no one single person can know – hundreds of different languages, memories of events from thousands of years ago – all of which can be traced back through her lineage.

Able to correct historical inaccuracies and translate multiple ancient texts into modern-day English, she is a walking history book. Hugely valuable – and potentially dangerous.

Unbeknownst to the scientist, the facility is a secret government department, researching the part of the brain connected to ancestry and lineage – experimenting with mostly disastrous results. Kidnapping homeless and expendable people off the streets, they are plugging their dormant corpses into computers, attempting to extract information. They know that once they can tap into people’s lineage – to discover what knowledge, skills, talents and abilities lie in their ancestry – they will have a precious – invaluable – commodity that people will pay for.

But this gift does not come without consequence. Along with skills and abilities comes knowledge – and most importantly, culture. Now thinking the same way as centuries-old tribesmen, warriors, explorers, royalty – wherever their lineage has been, that’s what imprinted into their DNA, their personality, their whole being.

Past feuds are reopened, wars started – a whole race of super-beings created. It is up to the anachronistic professor and her reluctant scientist to stem the tide of this super-powerful tribe – before history is reimagined with disastrous consequences.

Read the first ten pages of Lineage here.

Five Eyes

Switzerland. Great skiing, great cheese, great cuckoo clocks. Also home to seriously impressive, and impervious, bank vaults, hidden deep in the mountain rock. Where better to store priceless family jewels, historic artefacts and those treasury bonds you’re not supposed to have than the best-secured vault in the world, deep in the bowels of Europe’s most exclusive casino?  And who better to help foil a potential heist on this prime target than the best spies in the world?

The Five Eyes – an intelligence alliance whose origins date back to the Second World War –comprise the best secret agents from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Able to monitor billions of private communications worldwide, without having to abide by pesky international security treaties, the Eyes are a force to be reckoned with. That’s the idea, anyway.

Severin Brandenberg, the elderly owner of the Golden Riviera in Zurich, is convinced his casino is about to be robbed. He can’t involve the police – if his high profile clients get whiff that his ageing security systems aren’t up to scratch he’ll never recover from the scandal. Instead, he invites representatives from all Five Eyes to come stay at a luxury retreat at his resort, intending to put them to work when they arrive.

But not all goes to plan. Perhaps Severin’s intel is a little out of date, but the five super sleuths he ordered – at great expense – are a motley crew indeed. From the Cheltenham toff who thinks he’s in a Bond film to the surfer dude who can’t cope with the freezing temperatures of Switzerland’s winter, the Eyes are more intent on rinsing the casino’s minibars than cracking its vaults.

But perhaps not all is as it seems. Are the Eyes really as inept as they act? Is the threat that Severin is so worried about actually real – or does he have an ulterior motive? Just what is in those vaults? And just what is it with all these cuckoo clocks?

Ocean’s 11 meets Austin Powers, FIVE EYES is an international comedy caper that takes more twists and turns than the casino’s underground vaults – challenging allegiances, defying cultural stereotypes (or perhaps proving them), and demonstrating that, sometimes, you can’t trust what you see with your own eyes… 

Read the first ten pages of Five Eyes here.

Creepers

Set between the college town of Berkeley, California, and the redwood forests of Oregon, Creepers is a supernatural thriller in which an English scientist uncovers a terrifying discovery in the course of her research into vanishing twin syndrome, a rare biological process that occurs during the first stages of pregnancy.

Michelle Morrison, a twin herself until her sister died in suspicious circumstances, must figure out what is causing recent troubling events in her small community, not least to her own husband and newborn child.

Neither Michelle nor her stay-at-home husband, Jamie, have taken to life as parents well. Michelle is obsessed with twins, lectures on genetics at her Ivy League University, and has long, intimate conversations with her deceased twin, Lindsay, who died in a tragic accident when they were eighteen.

Michelle wants to bond with her baby, and to let go of the ghost of her long-dead sister. Jamie is increasingly concerned about his wife, and the effect her obsession with twins is having on their relationship.

A pupil of Michelle’s, Samuel, undergoes a séance, to ensure that when his own twin, Robert, dies of the cancer he is terminally ill with, their souls will stay together, and live as one. But the medium who performs the séance accidentally opens a portal to the souls of unborn children who never got the chance to live.

People start to notice doppelgangers surrounding them, identical in every respect. These ‘creepers’ ape their every movement, and start to take over their hosts. The phenomenon comes right to Michelle’s doorstep – her baby son, Christopher, gets his own creeper.

Michelle discovers the phenomenon relates to a rare condition called Vanishing Twin Syndrome, whereby what starts out as a multiple pregnancy ends up with a single foetus, taking over in the womb. She realises that the Medium has somehow allowed all the souls of the unborn twins to take over the lives they feel are owed to them. When the medium disappears, and the creepers take a stronger hold, she starts to fear for her baby’s life.

Samuel, heartbroken that he can’t feel his twin living within him like he hoped, wants the medium to finish what she started. Whilst Jamie thinks they should lay low, both his wife and her student try to track the medium down. But the medium is dying, and demands that Michelle – as a scientist – helps her overcome her failing body. When she refuses, the medium threatens the life of her baby – or is it really her baby?

A psychological and supernatural thriller, the story keeps the viewer guessing throughout as to what each character’s motivations really are, and what, deep down, they each really want.

Read the first ten pages of Creepers here.