“The City” is a screenplay I wrote for a long film after shooting 4 independent, low-budget shorts. The project lost steam, the team evaporated, and I eventually moved on to other things… That’s life.
However, “The City” represents the kookiest thing I’ve written to date. With a mix of Gondry and Wes Anderson, I tried to create a weird comedy set in the not-so-distant future that would allow me to criticize our society.
In this scene placed near the beginning, the lead character, Gutiérrez, arrives late to work. He’s actually always late, since the city is densely populated and quite unmanageable. Gutiérrez is a programmer and works at a large gaming fit, where he’s charged with designing drops of water for the most realistic video game ever made. In an economy where everyone is jobless, he’s quite happy with his predicament: having to write code to animate every individual drop of water in the sea, do that for 40 years, and then retire. In the company, people are reduced to their functions, Gutiérrez is known as “Water” and his closest colleague is “rock” (she designs rocks, obviously). He gets to the office, and the following scene unfolds:
INT. OFFICE-BOXES. DAY
GUTIÉRREZ arrives at his cubicle box, hasty and sweating. His shirt is splattered with blood. The BOSS charges at him before he gets to sit down.
BOSS
Gutiérrez!
GUTIÉRREZ
Yes, BOSS, sorry for the delay ... Someone killed himself in the Metro ... He jumped on the tracks... It was horrible… I got his blood on me... But he miscalculated, you know? Instead of landing on the rails, he fell between the train and the dock, with his chest on the platform ... The train crushed his legs, but the guy was screaming and thrashing with his upper-body… Ugh.
BOSS
Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry, about that shit. It happens all the time, around here.
GUTIÉRREZ
All the time? There’s mutilated bodies screaming and flailing in the Metro?
BOSS
Calm down, Water. You’re right, you got one of the dramatic suicides, congratulations. Usually it’s just a guy running into traffic on purpose. But people offing themselves is pretty common. Don’t get depressed about it. And stop talking about it, you’re depressing me, for Christ’s sake. Look: your story almost made me lose my hard-on... Deal with it. In fact, if you look out the window, I'm sure you'll see someone jumping off the roof of that building over there, in less than half an hour... Now, come with me.
GUTIÉRREZ
Wait: you say they just jump to their deaths, like that?
BOSS
They’re movie critics, Water, what are you going to do. Somebody asks them to see John Cena's last shit turd of a movie, and they prefer to jump out the window. They believe that cinema is "art" or some bullshit like that. Anyways, Let's go, we need to talk…
That’s kind of the tone for the whole thing.
I’ll be posting snippets of other scenes, because, why not?