Ray Milland And Composure

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The script for my new feature film was completed earlier this year. It’s a neo-absurdist mystery noir, a psychological twilight thriller, called Composure. Here’s how Ray Milland influenced it’s direction… 

 

Ray Milland’s performance as the chronic alcoholic, Don Birnam,  in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend is one I can never forget. Milland infected me with it and I have never been able to get it out of my system.

While I was working on the script for Composure, moments from Milland’s performance emerged from my imagination and made their way onto the page. This is not unusual, in fact, it’s normal for your imagination to suggest moments from other works as a way of solving creative problems. However, I have always been mistrustful of such moments. My preference has always been to discard them or work through them until I uncover a personal truth instead. But this time I have decided to work with these moments.

Rather than resisting them, this time I wonder if allowing them into my work will exorcise the ghost of Milland’s Birnam. Perhaps they are a creative stepping stone. Perhaps by the end of my film’s making, these moments will have become exhausted and faded away. I may even have forgotten Ray Milland’s performance all together by then, or perhaps I will remember with shock how important it was to me at the start of the process. Either way, I’m going to work with Milland on this one.

Which brings me to Webster, the central protagonist of Composure.

My original idea for Webster had been that of “the cool villain who’d lost his confidence“.  It was an idea that charmed me, and one that would provide me with the ironic, tragi-comic potential I crave.  As I worked more and more on the script, however, I discovered that Webster had more than lost his confidence – he was a mess; in turn cool and suave, treacherous and insecure, but also depressed and delusional, violent and hopeless, clever and naive. And all this brought me back to Ray Milland. This time his gentlemanly pseudo-murderer, Tony Wendice, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder. It was then I understood that Webster was, to a certain extent, a cross-pollination of these two Milland screen representations – Wendice and Don Birnam. Webster was no longer “the cool villain who’d lost his confidence”, but the “urbane villain in catastrophe.”

I will post a full statement on the film in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, if you’d like to receive project updates, subscribe to the newsletter here.

 

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