The Hounds of Heaven

In 2012, I completed a Masters of Creative Writing though AUT. My 'thesis', as it's called, was a film script entitled The Hounds of Heaven, and concerned a girl called Jess diagnosed schizophrenic. A couple of months ago, AUT put this screenplay up on the Internet – readers out there who are interested in it can find it easily I imagine by Googling my name and the name of the film. In today's post I want to talk a little about this film and try to explain some of what I was trying to do when I wrote it.

When I enrolled at AUT I did not intend to write The Hounds of Heaven. I was actually partway through a completely different screenplay, about two poor boys who steal a car. Partway through the year I abandoned this project and decided to write a screenplay about schizophrenia instead. I had experience of psychosis that I thought was worth sharing to a public who didn't understand it but, at this time, I had not made sense of my own life and so decided to base my film not on my own experiences but on someone else's, a girl I had met at the end of 2009 and hung out with sporadically during 2011. During this year, 2012, I was no longer a patient of the Mental Health System and was instead having monthly appointments with a GP. My last appointment with a psychiatrist had been the 31January that year (easy to remember as I had been to the Laneway Festival the day before). I had been symptom free for nearly two years and during 2012 was on 5mgs of Olanzapine.

I need to say, first, that the screenplay that has been put up on the internet was only a draft. If people who read my blog take a look at this script, you'll notice that it is full of spelling mistakes and stylistic solecisms. Towards the end of 2012, you see, I had lost faith in it, and had decided that it didn't work as a film. It needed significant revision and I didn't have the time or the confidence that it could be made good enough to made. Second I need to reiterate that the film was not based on my own experiences but on someone else's. I had never asked the real girl her permission to be write a film about her. We had fallen out of contact at the end of 2011. Just before I handed the screenplay in for marking towards the end of 2012 I suffered a crisis of conscience and went through the screenplay changing the protagonist's name to Jess almost throughout. It is not the world's best screenplay.  But it has its moments.

The synopsis is simple. Jess is a girl of twenty-five, diagnosed schizophrenic, who lives on Auckland's North Shore in Takapuna. She has few friends, is unemployed and, apart from her love of books and poetry, has little in her life. The first act depicts her everyday ('quotidian') existence. If Jess is almost friendless it is not her fault: she is sweet and highly intelligent but afflicted by severe social anxiety. The film makes heavy use of voice-over throughout, a device that enables Jess to explain herself to the audience. At plot point one, she meets by chance a handsome Lothario called Rick at a cafe who asks her for her phone number. The two go out on a kind of date and end up back at his apartment where he makes an unsolicited move on her. She flees the apartment and vomits in a rubbish bin. As a result of this incident she descends shortly after into a psychotic episode, during which she decides that she is responsible for the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake. Her episode reaches its nadir immediately after attending a lecture by a visiting psychologist and she ends up in hospital for six weeks. This marks plot point two. In the last act she goes to Christchurch with her father, a civil engineer, and the film ends with the two of them talking in a restaurant when an aftershock occurs.

The film mixes fact and fiction. Many of the details of Jess's life, and her whole manner of talking, I borrowed from the real girl. However, Rick and Jess's family were completely made up.  The earthquake delusion was real. The real girl did, in fact, decide that she was responsible for February 2011 earthquake after it happened: I was involved with her at the time. But truth is often truly stranger than fiction – and if I had described what actually happened it would seem unbelievable.

Although most of the film was an attempt to represent schizophrenia 'from the inside', it was also, very subtly indeed, concerned with sexuality. I believed that the real girl had been  falsely diagnosed homosexual as I believed I had been misdiagnosed. I was trying in the film to prove Jess and, by extension, the real girl was straight. At this time, I believed that the principal reason in my life for my heterosexuality was my loving relationship with my mother and so, by analogy, I thought I could prove Jess straight by depicting her affectionate relationship with her father. I should say that at this time, in 2012, I was working with an erroneous theory of sexuality and have since decided that it has nothing to do with parental attachment at all.

In order to answer the question of Jess's sexuality in the film, I had first to make it a question. I did so in two ways. Early on, when she is attending a coffee=group, I had her say, in voiceover, about the girl sitting across from her, "Katrina is very pretty but I try not to notice that". Later, at Rick's apartment, when he tries to kiss her and she evades him, he asks her if she is dyke. Arguably, the main trigger for the psychotic episode Jess experiences is having a man she was genuinely attracted to ask her if she is a lesbian.

The line about the girl Katrina was a terrible mistake. It has literally caused me sleepless nights since. I was giving to Jess a psychotic symptom that the real girl probably didn't have. In 2014 I lent the screenplay to my psychologist - his view was that the mistake I made was not the passing reference to a girl noticing that another girl was pretty but having Rick ask her if she is a lesbian. My view is more or less the reverse. I think that when there is any doubt about a person's sexuality, it is appropriate to ask – but to ascribe homosexual desire to someone who doesn't have it is deeply wrong.

When, in early 2013, I again suffered a psychotic episode, one of the beliefs I formed was that many people in the media had read my film – and that they hated it. The director who shared in the duties of marking it wrote in his assessment of it that I "shouldn't show it to anyone else in the film industry"... but I nevertheless received the impression, somehow psychically, that many others had if not read it than somehow heard about it. When I voluntarily re-entered the Mental Health Service again around Easter of that year, I was asked by the psychiatrist I saw if I had been unwell in 2012 and I wondered then and have wondered since if his question had anything to do with the film I wrote. I should make things clear now. In 2012, when I wrote The Hounds of Heaven,  although I hadn't then as I said before made sense of my own life, I was completely sane.

I want to say a little more about the real girl if it is permissible. In 2013 I caught up with her again for the first time since the end of 2011. I found that, in 2012, in the period when I wrote the film about her, the real girl had been in hospital. In fact she had spent eight months there and been seriously unwell for much of that time. I feel sure some scandal should be associated with her sectioning. On the second of the two times we met in 2013, I gave her my film script. She seemed to like it, sending me a text saying "you seem to have access to things that I have no recollection of having told you!" Briefly it seemed possible that we might even enter into a genuine relationship but, for some reason that I still don't understand, the relationship never eventuated. I have only seen the girl a couple of times since 2013 - when I saw her in 2014 she had acquired for herself a girlfriend. I get the impression that this girl (who 'Jess' has since broken up with) was a very nice person but at the time I found out about this relationship, and when I met the girl herself, I found it very, very painful indeed. There is more I could say about all this but this is all I can really say about someone else in a public blog.

If I ever revisited the subject of schizophrenia again in a film, I would do so differently. I would do something that I couldn't bring myself to do when I wrote The Hounds of Heaven: I would argue that the major cause of mental illness is the Mental Health System itself. Yes I know that the first episode of depression or psychosis occurs for environmental reasons that have nothing to do with shrinks and therapists and nurses, but it is the system itself that stops people from recovering, that keeps them sick, that can even make people worse. I would like to say this in a film. But I don't know how a film this controversial could ever receive funding and be made.