Solstice
I Was In a Movie (Sort Of)!
Several years ago—never mind how long precisely—my friend Ollie told me that he would like to write a short film based upon Shropshire myths.1 We grew taken with this idea, and began a period of research into the old stories from the county in which we had grown up. Once we’d consolidated the myths we wanted to use as inspiration, we began a long writing and rewriting process which lasted from mid-2022 until this year. Then, last week, we finally shot the film.
Or, most of the film. We still have a few pickups left to do. It is a strange thing, though, making a movie. Strange to see just how many people rallied round, simply because a friend and I had sat—mostly in his childhood bedroom—and dreamed a world onto a page. Strange, too, to have found three people willing to come together and speak the words you scarcely dared to hope they might in front of a camera.
So much of the filming process was overwhelming and so much was stressful. But it was also life-affirming and thrilling—breaking me down in order to build me up again. Today, I want to reflect back on the week I just had and, more broadly, what writing this film has meant to me over the years. The process has also made me reflect on an insight which I have been overlooking for several months.
Before I get to that, however, I should introduce the film more concretely. Solstice is a short folk-horror film (though heavy on the folk and somewhat light on horror). It is set entirely in and around ‘The Stiperstones’, a set of peculiar rocky hills in south Shropshire. The story follows Anthony, a man who returns to this area in which he grew up. Now with a young family of his own, he comes back to attend the funeral of his neglectful father. Things, well… things go wrong from there…
There were many realities about the filmmaking process which I knew theoretically when going in to making Solstice, but most only made intuitive sense once I was actually immersed in the production. For example, I knew that most of the time spent making a film is devoted to standing around. But until you are on set, you have no idea how this is going to feel. I also knew that my official role on set as ‘script supervisor’ would require me to look for story inconsistencies that might appear on screen in any way that I could. But I couldn’t have known quite how practical my help would be at times. In many ways, I was a runner as well as a script supervisor, which suited me just fine.
I think my most important contribution to the final film was realising that, as we weren’t going to get any fog on ‘The Stiperstones’, we had to film in such a way that it made sense for the central characters to lose each other without any low visibility. I sent a message to Ollie, who was co-directing, at about 11pm on the night before we filmed this sequence with ideas of how to solve what seemed unsolvable. I think this miniature crisis and its resolution encapsulate the combination of stress and joy that filmmaking is, or, at least, was on Solstice. All members of cast and crew had these brainwave moments in their own way. Whether it was an actor nailing the delivery of a particular line, the Assistant Director working out whose car could get someone from ‘A’ to ‘B’ at the right time or the ‘gaffer’ and ‘spark’ working together to bring to life a complicated lighting setup on the fly.
All of these calls had to be made, but I think my best decision throughout the entire shoot was to jump in the car with Ollie at the beginning and at the end of the filming. On the way up towards the road near ‘The Stiperstones’ where the shoot began, we were able to chat through our worries about the project and our hopes for the schedule and the way the story would land. Then, on our way back from the final day at the reservoir (which, more on that later) I jumped in again with Ollie and we chatted over what we can take away from the experience. Ollie is one of my oldest and dearest friends, and talking through the many things which went disastrously and the mini miracles of those which went well was cathartic, poignant and emotionally necessary.
Ollie was a hero throughout the entire process, taking on three enormous roles—producer, director and cinematographer—of which he normally only performs the third. The experience has made him realise that he doesn’t want to produce films and that his strengths lie in the visuals, rather than in people wrangling. We’ve learned so much about writing, too. We’d like to carry on writing together (and I’ll do much by myself as well), but I think we’ve realised that the film we wrote and the film that exists will be quite different. This means that the minutiae of the writing matter less, perhaps, than we’d appreciated. It matters more to get good ideas down than to have the perfect film in our heads. In fact, as fellow perfectionists, it might be helpful to have a project on which we haven’t spent years in advance. I think collaborating with a team earlier in the process will be especially helpful if and when we do this all again.
Some of you may be wondering why I claim in the subtitle of this article that I was ‘in’ a movie. It’s not a trick of prepositions, I promise; I really did have a role as an extra in Solstice. You see, the second major scene of the film is the funeral of Anthony’s father and takes place in a small, bare, 17th-century chapel. I played one of the service attendees.
At one stage during the scene the camera was pointing directly at me for the start of one of the takes. All I had to do was get up and leave the church with the rest of the congregation. However, the spotlight effect of the lens gave my brain the impression that I was going to be truly acting again! It was oddly exhilarating to be back in this headspace, even though my head was really all over the place in terms of what else still needed doing that day. I did a lot of acting at school, particularly around the age of fourteen, when I played the lead role of Stanhope in my school’s production of Journey’s End. Even though it was only an illusion, for a brief moment I did feel like I was that boy back on stage. Maybe there’s a world in which I audition for small roles and do some amateur acting again. But lay that aside, for now.
The lake scene (shot at ‘Snailbeach Reservoir’) which ends the film was stunningly beautiful. The water was surrounded by snow, which had fallen just the night before. Our actors were really very cold, but compared with the gale force winds on ‘The Stiperstones’ the day before, they were in comparative comfort. The mother of our child actor, playing the role of Molly, had even sown thermals into her daughter’s costume which was a very clever idea and another one of those brainwave moments which were all over the set and which allowed for the film to happen at all.
I walked back from the lake with said actor’s mum, and she asked what I’d be up to in the next few months, once Solstice was over. She knew by this stage that I had written the film. I told her I hoped to do more writing, amongst other things. When she asked what kind of writing, I didn’t have to reach for the answer, as I normally do. Normally, I mention Substack and I mention film writing and poetry and yada yada yada… but filming Solstice had given me a clarity. ‘I want to write books for children.’ When I thought about it, I realised that my favourite book is really a story for children—Don Quixote. I realised, too, that my imagination is, in the nicest possible way, a child’s imagination. I realised what I’d always known, that ‘youth is our home-land: we were born/And lived there long’.2
I lifted the opening eight words of this piece from the second sentence of Moby Dick.
From ‘Listening to Collared Doves’ by E. J. Scovell