Jesse Marshall
Screenwriter
Submitted by Amy Terrill
Jesse Marshall
Time to Focus.
The solitude of the last year has been good for Jesse Marshall’s creative process. A 2020 graduate of Humber’s Bachelor of Film and Media Production, Jesse has taken advantage of the relative quiet to find the discipline to work on feature film scripts.
In a normal pace of life, Jesse says it’s difficult to devote three hours a day to writing which is his optimal daily commitment so last summer he took advantage of the time to work on something for his own portfolio. In the winter, this graduated into working on a new feature film script with his friend Josh which they plan to pitch to Telefilm in the fall. “When I was up at my cottage in the winter it was just the idyllic spot – being away from society super quiet allowed me to focus. Some people might say if they were stuck at a cottage all winter just writing and going for walks by themselves, they might go crazy but I discovered I can do that for short periods.”
Walks and other distractions were useful for “defocalizing”, says Jesse. No, that’s not likely a proper word, but it expresses the process by which Jesse would break through a particular writing block by doing something entirely different like shoveling the driveway or going for a walk. “Once you stop trying to focus on what you’re writing or doing, and you go do something else, that’s when you might have a spark of inspiration or work out some creative problem.”
Jesse and Josh completed the first draft of their script by the end of March and are now working on the pitch package for Telefilm. It’s about 100 pages long and is a mystery thriller. “We were inspired by David Fincher and the Zodiac film he did and some of the older thrillers like Vertigo (Hitchcock) and Chinatown (Polanski).” The film is set in the 1940s and involves a medical school that has a shady reputation for body snatching, a missing professor, and a detective who’s battling his own internal demons.
It sounds like the cottage solitude worked for Jesse!
