Writing Blind Panic

Writing is hard, but it’s made so much easier by co-writing; it’s the most fun you’ll have in the filmmaking journey – because everything gets harder from this point on!

A writing weekend away, Paekākāriki.

Background: Blind Panic is the debut feature film of director Mark Willis and producer Matthew Mawkes. The film came about when Mark and Matthew decided to fulfil a long-held dream of making a quality genre movie in their own backyard. Needing a low-budget idea, Mark came up with a story about a man on home detention, while Matthew hatched a story about a blind woman trapped in suburbia. The ideas merged and Blind Panic was born.

Blind Panic was funded by a Kickstarter campaign and filmed on a shoestring budget in Wellington, New Zealand, over 21 days, in April-May 2017. It then took several years of editing and re-shoots to turn Blind Panic into the crime thriller Mark and Matthew originally envisioned. The project also faced a major set-back with the tragic killing of Mark in May 2023. Fortunately, Mark was able to sign off a cut of the film before his death.

This has been a filmmaking journey with ups and downs like no other. But the final product is a crime thriller Mark would be proud of.

I have always been interested in screenwriting – but never had much in the way of discipline until I started co-writing with Mark Willis.

I met Mark soon after arriving in Wellington in the year 2000. He had moved to Wellington around the same time – a move that had something to do with a girlfriend, apparently. For me, Wellington was New Zealand’s filmmaking capital – the place for any aspiring filmmaker to be! And the place I came to study film, which I did at the now-defunct Avalon Film & Television School. It was a thrilling time to live in Wellington, where a certain Peter Jackson trilogy was in the making. Everyone was excited by movies back then, and Wellington found itself rolling out the red carpet for visiting movie stars on a regular basis.

There was a group of us who met regularly at a community centre as part of the Wellington Screenwriter’s Group. This was mostly an opportunity to moan about projects going unfunded, but it was where I met Mark. We had very similar tastes in movies, and somewhere along the line we broke off from the group and started to do our own thing – which was watching movies at Mark’s bachelor flat. Which we did for the next ten years.

The thing was – Mark was just as undisciplined as me. Some say artists are lazy, but I think it’s got something to do with staying motivated when you have no tangible support. It’s hard to have discipline when you don’t have a cheerleader behind you. Someone to get out the pom-poms and shout, “Go…screenwriters!” But Mark and I never really had any specific goals, either. We would both write for the sake of writing, and while that sounds nice, it’s hard to be consistent or productive if you don’t have any goals in place.

Mark and I watched hundreds of movies together over those ten years, and perhaps that was a good grounding for what was to come. Because one day, we found ourselves out on his balcony overlooking Wellington – he was probably smoking, and I was probably drinking wine – and thinking about the New Zealand Film Commission.

Every now and then, the NZFC used to come up with low-budget filmmaking schemes – this one, in 2010, was called the ‘Escalator’ fund – ways to entice first-time filmmakers to make a movie on a shoestring. Not much ever became of these films – but at least for the NZFC, there was little financial risk involved.

The low budget lent itself to genre filmmaking ideas, which is where Mark and I got a spark of inspiration. His idea: A man on home detention after serving time for an armed robbery. Mine: A blind woman, scared to go outside and re-connect with the world. Both characters are trapped in suburbia by their circumstances, which are made worse when a dark figure from the man’s past comes back to get him. Somewhere along the way they meet, and their fates are sealed.

That was the very basic plot anyway, which we fleshed out into a synopsis for the Escalator fund. Nothing came of that fund, of course, but that hardly seems to matter because from 2010, and for the next several years, Mark and I wrote Blind Panic together, weeknights, weekends, up at his little flat – and in the process we became screenwriters.

Blind Panic HQ aka Mark’s flat.

This self-actualisation was life-changing, and so much fun. I would show up to Mark’s, usually with a bottle of wine, and we’d start writing. Mark tended to pace, smoking incessantly, while I sat behind the computer. I tended to structure the plot, while he fleshed out the characters and wrote the dialogue.

I need to talk about the dialogue for a minute – because Mark was just a master of dialogue. He had a light touch – just a beautiful, funny, heartfelt and most importantly natural and realistic way of writing lines. Mark brought our characters to life through the dialogue in Blind Panic. I’d say the result is 80% Mark dialogue/20% mine.

We’d always have soundtracks playing – John Carpenter, Tangerine Team, Lalo Schifrin, Roy Budd, and Jerry Goldsmith being some of our favs. By 2011, we had a first draft, still untitled, and started the process of re-writing.

First draft proudly printed and just some of the titles we churned through for Blind Panic.

This was where the hard slog really began. Time and again, we’d put everything onto cue cards, and pin them up on the wall. Should this scene go here, or there? Where’s our first turning point again? And who’s the protagonist?

Some of those seem like pretty obvious questions, but we had a thriller on our hands, and I think a large part of writing a thriller is writing yourself into a corner – so you can step into your character’s shoes – before writing your way out again.

We wrote and wrote and wrote – and years went by. We gave the script to a select few for feedback, and honed our work based on their advice. But we were always our own harshest critics. It’s difficult undertaking any artistic endeavour. It can be emotionally and mentally draining – which might be where that artistic laziness came back in.

After a period of great productivity, I would show up to Mark’s place, and we’d tinker with the script a bit before heading off to do some op shopping in Petone. We would hit up a retro furniture store, record store, bookstore, and other op shops along the way. A stop at a café would always be in order, and we’d usually end up at the pub. We called it work – and we did talk about movies a hell of a lot – but this was procrastination, no doubt about it.

During these years, we’d also have weekends away at a bach (that’s a New Zealand word for a holiday cabin) somewhere up the coast from Wellington, or further afield. That helped the writing process, and it would lead to big changes to the script. Maybe a weekend away provided some kind of circuit breaker from our usual routine.

A writing weekend away, Napier.

Mark started to become a bit precious about the script, which might have been the part where we started to overdo things. He got to the point where absolutely every single line of dialogue was re-worked again and again – and that was the part where I started to feel superfluous. My role became writing consultant and counsellor.

I wonder what would have happened if we never actually got round to making Blind Panic. Would we ever have finished writing the script? In any case, we got to draft seven (at least that’s what we called it) before the cameras started rolling.

It took me a long time to get back to writing, again, and when I do, I often think of my old friend, and how much I’d enjoy writing with him again – if only that were possible. Co-writing is something I would love to do again, but I would suggest finding the right co-writing partner is exceptionally rare. You need to be of the same mind in many ways – but if you find that special someone, hold on to them, because writing doesn’t have to be a lonely business.

And two minds can make a screenplay something special. It’s not just about bouncing ideas off someone, it’s a built-in voice who can say, “Wow, that’s a crappy line. Here, let me try.”