![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
delga
Abi Morgan Masterclass
Abi Morgan’s Masterclass was wonderful for a number of reasons. Firstly, it ran the full gamut of her career, from theatre, through television, to film. Secondly, Morgan is endearing, incredibly human, whose fascination with human traits is as explicit in her character as it is in her writing. Thirdly, she spoke candidly about the process behind her various works – Shame, with Steve McQueen, Sex Traffic, My Fragile Heart, adapting Brick Lane, and The Hour. She is as interested in the mechanics of writing as she is in the mechanics of people, and that was evident when she spoke.
Her process involves a lot of research. For Shame, she and McQueen were introduced by their shared agent, and from their first conversation the seeds for Shame were sown. Thereafter they travelled to New York City to scope the landscape, and to speak to professionals who dealt with sex addicts, not to mention some of the sufferers, too. (During the Q&A for the premiere, Michael Fassbender also mentioned talking to sufferers, and the influence that had on how he played the role of Brandon.) For Sex Traffic Morgan spoke to two sisters who had been trafficked, one of them following the other into the life in order to find her, and wrote her script off the story she heard there, as well as the tonne of research sent to her by the BBC. For Murder she spoke to the families of the victims of brutal crimes, and for My Fragile Heart she spoke to paedophiles, and their victims, trying to find the story which could be the root of her work. It’s an incredibly voyeuristic process, but Morgan was clear that she couldn’t indulge in other people’s grief: she took what fascinated her, what she thought was the kernel of the story to be told, and then worked from there.
I was most interested with what she had to say about writing Shame. Repeatedly describing McQueen as painterly and poetic, she mentioned that what eventually went to screen was the first draft minus the first sixty pages. This goes a long way to explaining the why the script for Shame feels so light – it is. Morgan said that she tries to gain “maximum impact with minimum words”, aiming to convey an idea as quickly and concisely as possible.
With regards to The Hour, Morgan confirmed what I had suspected from seeing the show – that it was written to be six hours, with no real view to a second series, though she is excited to be continuing with those characters. I remember being surprised at the economy of language in Shame because The Hour is so very wordy, and Morgan said that she enjoyed the pace and wit of The Hour. Bel’s first scene with Hector – in which she assumes him to be from accounts and he surmises she’s about to head to South America – initially included another line after Hector says that he loves animals: “Which kind, apes?” Unsurprisingly, Morgan confessed that she is an enormous fan of Aaron Sorkin and The West Wing, which I think is evident in The Hour. Having watched The Killing (Forbrydelsen) – and having been watching 24 whilst working on Sex Traffic – she’s extremely intrigued by the long form, and how difficult it is to sustain a story across 20 or so episodes, and having to expect the lulls in pace because maintaining pace across that number of hours is near impossible.
As we finished, Morgan talked briefly about another film she’s written that is also due out in January 2012, which is The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, which, for Morgan, was a study of power and the loss of power. It’s the manner in which Morgan condenses these broad ideas into sharp, swift images that makes her such a wonderful writer to be engaging with right now. She repeatedly talked about how the structure of writing for different forms is interesting to her, but I also think that at the heart of that is a love of the individual’s story. Morgan’s work is littered with characters – true, honest, striking characters – and it’s that ability of hers to draw a person in full that makes me enjoy her so much.
