Original observation:
I was stuck in traffic driving home along Punt Road and while I was just static in amongst a long line of cars, I started to hear this loud yelling coming from the side of the road. I turned my music down and just watched this moment between these two people. A man and a woman were standing on the footpath outside a closed bar, and they both had their hands on this bike. Not in a way that looked like they were fighting over who got custody over it, but more so just leaning on it. This seemed so strange to me because they were yelling at each other incredibly, but still had their hands quite close together on this bike. They seemed still so intimate in such an aggressive engagement.

Film idea:
Instead of staying true to the observation itself, I want to just concentrate on the idea of conflict. I was thinking of going into the relationship and  conflict between a mother and a daughter, and show how life is often interrupted by these moments of conflict between people.

I want the film to be set very late at night or early in the morning, maybe 3am, with the weather being very hot, maybe 30 degrees, in this suburban setting. The girl is in her room trying to cool herself down by opening windows and turning on fans. She starts to walk to the kitchen for a glass of cold water but can hear muttering coming from the dark of the kitchen. She turns the light on and sees her mum sitting alone on the small round kitchen table, with fallen empty bottles and dried tears on her cheeks. She is very clearly still drunk. I wanted to write quite an emotionally abusive dialogue here coming from the mother towards her daughter. I want it to be very one sided, so all the dialogue is from the mother.

So the monologue is given without the mother realising in her head that it is actually her daughter that is in the room with her. She talks about how she blames her daughter for her divorce, and how her life is ruined because she was burdened by an unwanted pregnancy. She could’ve been famous, she could’ve been extremely successful, but the birth of her only child ruined everything for her.

I don’t want to give too much context in the monologue, I want it to be sort of a voyeuristic experience. Like if you saw two people arguing in the street you wouldn’t know any of the details, you’d just sort pick up a few bits and pieces about the situation. So I don’t want the audience to know why the mother is like this, or how this all came to be, I just want to have implications in the dialogue.

I wanted to then follow this journey with the daughter, as she escapes the situation by climbing out of her bedroom window. She ends up at the local roller skating rink that she works at a few times a week. We have a scene of her standing in the middle of the rink, bare foot, swaying to the music playing. The lights are bright and colourful, with lots of movement. She has her eyes closed and her arms above her head. She is crying.

I think that even though there’s no dialogue in the second setting, I think that it would still be as filled with as much emotion as the first scene because it’s sort of this solitude after this tirade. She’s just alone in this usually packed environment and that in itself is kind of emotional. It’s kind of like for me, whenever I’m in like a schoolyard at night or on the weekend and it’s empty, I get this feeling of like melancholy. But I also wanted to exploit the duration in the roller rink, and have it a similar time but filled with nothing in comparison to the kitchen scene. Sort of to juxtapose it, in showing these different moments.

So the format of the piece doesn’t have a beginning and an end, I sort of want to treat it as just viewing these moments. The layout of production would be a normal drama pre production, production, post production format. I’ll need to focus a lot on finding good actors, and locations. But I think time would be the biggest factor of this project.