From Issue 8, January 2003:

Bunker Mentality

by Clive Dawson

Love the film or loathe it, the screenplay of the micro-budget feature The Bunker helped shape the career of writer Clive Dawson. Here he describes some of the ups and downs of the lengthy development process. Names have been omitted to protect the guilty!

This may seem strange, but I didn’t write The Bunker with the intention of having it produced. I hoped it might be, of course. But with something like 99.9% of original screenplays never seeing the light of day, the best I was realistically hoping for was to create a good calling-card script. This, apparently, I succeeded in doing. Almost universally, the response to the screenplay was positive. It helped me on to an MA screenwriting course, prompted numerous industry meetings and landed me several lucrative commissions along the way.

Taking pride of place on my office wall is a quote from actor Jack Davenport, interviewed in Cinefantastique 3:33: ‘I’m in The Bunker because the script scared me to death the first time I read it. It’s a fantastically taut piece of writing. As a study of ensemble fear, exhaustion, paranoia and the questioning of authority, it’s absolutely wonderful.'

Going back even further, my original aim wasn’t even to produce a calling-card script. The Bunker began life merely as a spec writing exercise I set myself when I first started writing seriously and my sole aim was to teach myself how to write. The first screenwriting book I ever bought was Syd Field’s Screenplay, and it was around his famous paradigm that I first began constructing crude early versions of the story.

Contrary to some suggestions that I’ve read about, the inspiration didn’t come from Michael Mann’s The Keep. It came from illicit schoolboy excursions into the eerie underground bunkers and tunnels left behind by the occupying German army on Guernsey. Those silent, pitch-black tunnels are deeply unsettling locations and I always felt they would make a great setting for a ghost story. Years later, the next piece of the puzzle arose in the form of a particularly vivid nightmare. What prompted it I’m not sure – although I know I’d been reading Bram Stoker around that time – but in the dream I’m a soldier in World War I, helping to extend a trench and inadvertently digging through an ancient plague burial ground in the process. Corpses are dropping from the walls. Then they begin to come back to life...

Ghosts, soldiers, plague pits and tunnels: all the ingredients began mixing themselves into countless permutations in my head as I struggled to formulate a coherent story. Into the pot went various other influences. I’d loved fantastic cinema and literature since childhood, so at least I knew the type of story I wanted to tell. It would be part Val Lewton psychological horror, part M.R. James classic ghost story, all tied together with a Richard Matheson/Roger Corman-esque bow. Having studied Val Lewton whilst on a degree film course at West Surrey College, his influence was particularly strong. My third-year dissertation on Night of The Demon, the classic spine-chiller written by Charles Bennett and directed by Lewton alumnus Jacques Tourneur was another major influence.

After much debate I settled on German regular army soldiers as my protagonists. I’d tried it with both British and American soldiers but something was missing: they didn’t carry enough psychological baggage. I needed my characters to be on the edge of madness even as the story began, and what better way than to make them representatives of a doomed army, haunted by their experiences and knowing, in all likelihood, that only death awaits them. Schenke, the villain of the piece, neatly embodies the insanity of Hitler: revelling in death and destruction, fighting on against impossible odds, and finally ordering that everything around him be destroyed rather than let it fall to the enemy. At the other end of the scale, Baumann represents the ordinary army conscript caught up in the madness of the times. The remaining characters fill various shades of the spectrum inbetween. At the heart of the story is Baumann’s redemption as he finally rescues the young conscript Neumann from Schenke’s poisonous influence.

Progress on the story was hellishly slow. I was still working full-time in animation, television commercial and pop promo production, and little energy was left at the end of the day for tackling structural arcs and deep character. I was also writing other projects along the way: short scripts, short stories, television treatments and a comedy drama feature. Piece by piece, however, the narrative fell into shape and I wrote a treatment of the entire story, followed soon after by a step outline. Finally, locking myself away one summer in my sister’s empty house in Guernsey, I began the screenplay and those damp, creepy German tunnels were nearby whenever I needed inspiration. 

CONT. in Issue 8.