This weeks episode of Mark Kermode’s secrets of cinema focused on the famous spy genre.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000gwzj/mark-kermodes-secrets-of-cinema-series-2-3-spies

We were again given 5 tasks we could choose from relating to the video and I chose to do task 3 (writing not story-boarding):

3./4. Here’s your scenario:
Character A is stealing information from Character B.
At the same time, Character B is returning to the place where the
information is kept.
There is tension as to whether A will escape with the information
or B will catch them in the act.

For task 3 or 4, either write OR storyboard a sequence based on this scenario using crosscutting to generate tension. The characters, locations and actions are up to you. Include a rationale for your decisions.

I was wary of choosing this task as it is quite a similar format as last week’s Robin Hood post but none of the other options really suited me and what I am currently working on. So, I apologise if this post feels very similar to last week’s.

So what I know for sure: My scene will portray one character stealing something from another character who is returning to the location of the theft and the two actions will be cross cut with each other. I just need to decide who the characters are, where the scene is set, what is being stolen and why it is being stolen. Shall we begin?

Characters

Before I can start designing my characters I have to first decide who is the good guy and who is the bad guy. Will the audience be rooting for the thief or the chaser? In order to generate peak tension I will make character A the protagonist as I personally feel far tenser when the good guy is about to get caught by the bad guy compared to vice versa. I also will have Character A be the protagonist as I love a good anti-hero.

Character ‘A’

For this week’s homework we asked to watch Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 spy classic, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. This film is an all around masterpiece but one of my favourite parts of the film was the main character, George Smiley, played by Gary Oldman.

I loved how different Mr Smiley was from all the other famous film spies such as James Bond, Jason Bourne or Ethan Hunt. Rather than a young flashy spy, George Smiley represents an older generation even being forced into retirement at the start of the film. Instead of using flashy gadgets and brute force, Smiley uses his brain and spends a lot of the film simply thinking. This creates a great dynamic of the younger generation vs the older generation throughout the film which I would like to copy across to my scene.

My character’s greatest strengths will be his understanding of people and how they think, allowing him to always be one step ahead of them. He’ll also be a master of disguise, being able to disappear seemingly right in front of people. His weaknesses will be that he is aging so he lacks the physical strength and agility of his younger counterparts, he will also lack an understanding of the tech and equipment used by modern day spies. I want to include a subplot about an old man struggling to keep up with the ever changing times.

Like Red and Brooks in The Shawshank Redemption, Character A will struggle to settle into life on the outside of MI6 once he retires and this will be how we first meet him.

I wanted to name my character after a real life British spy and in my research I stumbled across Richard Tomlinson, a member of the British secret service in the late 20th century. After feeling that he was unfairly dismissed from the service, Richard Tomlinson tried to take his employer to court but was denied. So he instead released documents about shady stuff MI6 had been doing which landed him in prison for six months. That idea of spy vs MI6 is a big inspiration for my narrative so this spy seemed like a great candidate for character A’s name.

I would also like to pay homage to George Smiley who is by far the biggest inspiration for my character so, Character A will hereby be known as George Tomlinson.

Character ‘B’

My development of George Tomlinson essentially wrote my character B for me. While George is old, Character B will be young and fresh, a representation of the new generation of spies. Despite this, he is heavily inspired by CIA Director Robert Dewey from the 5th installment of the Bourne franchise in the sense that he is a high ranking figure trying to bring one of his rogue agents under control.

Character B will also be inspired by George Smiley’s counterparts in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the young and impressionable members of the circle who George has to investigate and keep in check.

Character B will not be inherently evil, his motivation will simply be to better protect the British public. His methods, however, will be quite shady which is why George Tomlinson will feel obliged to stop him.

Character B’s biggest strengths will be that he has age on his side, he is physically superior to George. He also has the secret service behind him and has full understanding of how the modern service and its new technology and equipment works. His weakness is that he is too reliant on this new tech and overlooks George almost every step of the way, a mistake made by so many villains.

Like ‘The City’ from my superhero homework, Character B will be the head of the tech department in a fictional secret service simply referred to as ‘The Service’. This will serve the exact same purpose as The City in the sense that it can be related to any secret service agency in the world so that foreign audiences can relate to it just as much as local ones.

As character B is only heavily inspired by two characters, Robert Dewey from Jason Bourne and Bill Hayden from Tinker Tailor, it made coming up with a name very easy: Robert Hayden.

Sidekick

While this week’s assignment stated two characters we have to use it never said we couldn’t add some of our own.

To counter George Tomlinson’s dated knowledge of The Service I will give him a young sidekick to help him out, loosely inspired by Benedict Cumberbatch’s character in Tinker Tailor.

Heavily inspired by whistle blower Edward Snowden, the sidekick will become disillusioned with the work he is doing and will be the one who comes to George to help him shed light on the illegal activities of The Service.

Having all the knowledge of The Service’s new security systems and technology, my sidekick will also serve as one of the protagonist’s mentors. Throughout my scene, the sidekick will be speaking to George through an ear piece giving him information he needs to complete his mission, a staple trope of the spy genre. But instead of being sat behind a computer watching security camera footage, he will begin on the ground with George, directly helping in the mission. This idea is straight out of the Waterloo Station scene from The Bourne Ultimatum.

As the scene progresses the sidekick will eventually end up behind a desk watching security camera footage as it just is a great narrative device.

Inspired by Jason Bourne and Edward Snowden I was going to call my sidekick Jason Snowden but the surname Snowden is just too recognisable so I instead named him after a lesser known mountain in Snowdonia simply called Drum. So my sidekick will be called Jason Drum.

Mentor

I’m not going to spend ages developing my mentor as they only appear in the opening of my scene. The only things you need to know when reading the scene is that she is an ex-member of The Service, like George.

As we learned during the superhero homework, the mentor has to give your hero something that will help him in his quest. George’s mentor gives him a key she kept as a souvenir when she left the service, George uses this key to eventually break into their facility.

As the mentor plays no real part in my scene I won’t try to come up with a clever name for her, I will simply call her Barbara. This is because she is meant to come across as a typical old lady and Barbara is a very popular name amongst the older generations. It is also the name of my grandmother who has been very supportive of my career in film for many years, so shout out to her.

Plot

The plot is heavily inspired by current affairs and how everyone is worried about the government spying on us through our phones or home AI technology (i.e. Alexa, Google home, etc). It is common knowledge that websites track our online activities to give us personalized ads but my story plays into the fear that someone else is watching.

After retiring from The Service following a very successful career, George Tomlinson will find himself with little to keep his brilliant mind active. To quench his thirst for adventure, George begins spying on the agency. He has no particular objective he simply likes watching, keeping an eye on any new recruits and trying to piece together what operations The Service is currently working on, more of a hobby than anything else.

Through this hobby, George begins to notice one particular new recruit who strikes him as suspicious: Jason Drum.

One night, George spots Jason stealing top secret files from The Service and believes he has caught a mole. Knowing he cannot simply report Agent Drum to the authorities and risk getting in trouble himself, George decides to confront Jason himself.

George discovers that Jason has been stealing documents which outline how The Service has been tapping into people’s devices to spy on them, something George is very opposed to. George decides to team up with Jason and help him blow the lid off this operation as it is completely illegal and breaches everyone’s right to privacy. The documents Jason has stolen so far have only hinted at the illegal activities of The Service and don’t contain any concrete evidence so George and Jason hatch a plan to steal the official operation documents which outline everything The Service has been doing in great detail. The only problem is they are kept in a safe in Robert Hayden’s office at the heart of The Service.

Setting

The location of the documents will be in The Service’s top secret facility. Inspired by Churchill’s Bunker in 2012’s Skyfall, the setting will be an underground base where all The Service’s top secret operations take place. I decided on this location as it seems like one of the hardest film bases to casually stroll into and the whole underground aesthetic creates the feeling of entrapment, adding to the tension.

Another great thing about using secret tunnels for the location is it gives George another chance to use his age as an advantage. When he was an agent working for The Service they used almost the entirety of the tunnel system as their offices but as time went on they closed down many of these branches moving them to flashy offices above ground (a metaphor for how the new management cares a lot more about wealth and image than the older generation) only keeping the most Top Secret facilities underground. Because of this, George is the only one who knows his way around the tunnels and he uses this to his advantage.

However, like in Churchill’s Bunker, the base will be connected to a maze of underground tunnels which will eventually connect to the London Underground (specifically Charing Cross station) . I made this decision as I wanted part of the sequence to take place in large crowds as a lot of my ideas for how George and Jason will pull the robbery off require everyday people to be present and also because some of my favourite action sequences in spy films take place in crowded spaces. You only have to look at these scenes from famous spy films to see how much it cranks up the intensity.

We will also follow Robert Hayden in his car as he travels back to the facility. This will help keep the tension as we are aware of him constantly moving closer and it also is a little nod to the underlying theme of old vs new as George will only ever travel by foot compared to Robert who travels around in high tech flashy cars. Robert will of course be driven around in an Aston Martin. I know I shouldn’t technically put a bad guy in the Aston Martin but I couldn’t resist.

Time

George will be relying heavily on large crowds to mask his way in and out of The Service’s underground bunker so the robbery will take place at around 6pm on a Friday, when everyone is most eager to get home.

The Scene

Before you read the script I have written there’s a couple of important details I will have established in the film before we reach this scene.

1. The robbery takes place on the day that Robert Hayden is scheduled to have a Meeting with the Director of The Service which causes him to be away from his office.
2. The documents George and Jason are after are located in a safe in Robert Hayden’s office.
3. The Director is an extremely secretive man and nobody, except the highest ranking agents within The Service, actually know what he looks like.
4. George still has one former colleague he knows for definite is still working at The Service, but there are a handful more he is unsure about.
5. Jason is quite high ranking within The Service and can access a lot of areas using his keycard. However, he doesn’t have time to make a replica card for George who is forced to rely on other people opening doors for him.
6. One of the files that Jason steals at the beginning of the film mentions the password to Robert Hayden’s safe. This piece of information is what gives George the idea for this whole operation.
7. Robert Hayden joined The Service the same year George retired and wouldn’t be able to recognize him based on appearance alone.

Right, with that in mind, here is the script…

Inspiration

The plot was born almost entirely from one of the most enjoyable pieces of television I have ever seen, Derren Brown: The Great Art Robbery.

I highly recommend you watch this if you haven’t as I think it is absolutely brilliant. The premise of the show is quite simple, Derren recruits 4 elderly people to rob a painting from an art exhibition (the painting in Robert Hayden’s office is going to be the same painting they stole in this video to pay tribute to it).

Derren makes it even more difficult though by telling the owner of the exhibition which painting will be stolen, what day the robbery will take place on and even what the eventual robber will look like. He finally adds that one of the members of security will actually help the robber escape unknowingly.

Derren pulls this off by playing on society’s view of the elderly. Society doesn’t think older people are capable of much anymore and therefore tends to often ignore them and certainly not think them capable of a crime.

In my scene, George Tomlinson utilises the same methods as Derren, even going further at times.

He too abuses society’s dismissal of old people, he relies heavily on distraction techniques and takes advantage of how easily people believe you if you just act with confidence.

The Service’s offices are littered with high tech security and well armed guards but George manages to take them down just using psychology, a briefcase, and a credit card.

Side Characters

A number of other characters appear in this scene so I will quickly list off why I included them in the scene.

THE CLEANER

The cleaner, or ‘the man on the inside’, is put to demonstrate the ideas shown in Derren’s experiment. He is able to walk straight past a beeping metal detector just because the security wouldn’t suspect an old man of anything.

THE RECEPTIONISTS

Jane and Eve are a representation of George’s relationship with The Service. On the outside, represented by Jane, it looks as if The Service has outgrown George and he no longer fits in there. But at the heart, represented by Eve, George still has a lot of allies and power, George is able to steal documents as a result of his age and how long he has worked for The Service. I wanted George to use his age to his advantage a number of times throughout the film and this seemed like another good opportunity.

The receptionist’s got their name from the famous Miss Moneypenny from the James Bond films. Throughout her on-screen life, Moneypenny has been referred to by two different names, Jane and Eve.

THE DRIVER

Robert Hayden’s driver is the final side character who plays an important role. He is there to show how dismissive and disrespectful Robert is to the older generation but his main purpose is to symbolize how little thanks the elder generation get. Everything we have today was made possible by older generations. While not everything they gave us is brilliant, it is true that they do not get as much credit as they deserve. The driver represents this by being ignored and insulted as he drives Mr Hayden around, making his job possible.