By Michelle Houle.

Antonia Bogdanovich

Phantom Halo was adapted from Antonia Bogdanovich’s short film, My Left Hand Man (available to watch at the end of this article), after longtime writing partners Bogdanovich and Anne Heffron were inspired to expand the short into a feature film.

Anne Heffron

A gritty LA film noir, Phantom Halo, follows brothers Samuel and Beckett who are forced into a life of crime by their father. The film asks the question, “How do you break free of the lives that your parents essentially hand you?”

Creative Screenwriting talked to Bogdanovich and Heffron about the influence of Shakespeare, the hardest scenes to write, and the joys of having a writing partner.

Why did you decide to adapt the short, My Left Hand Man, into a longer feature?

Antonia Bogdanovich: I did the short to see if I liked directing. I’ve always thought it would be better as a feature, but it certainly changed quite a bit once Anne got involved.

Anne Heffron: It was such a compelling project. Even when you were working on the short, people kept asking when you were going to make something bigger out of it. It’s such a larger story.  It was like you were walking into the room of the story and you told a little bit of it, but there was a whole lot more to tell.

What was your original inspiration for the short?

AB: I thought it would be interesting to make a short about bringing Shakespeare to the streets. Shakespeare wrote stories about the everyman. Yes he wrote stories about kings, queens, and princes, but the majority of his characters are everyday people living real lives.

A lot of people are put off because of the language. I thought it would be visibly good to see kids performing Shakespeare on the street. I always wanted to write a story about two brothers because I have sisters. I’m always thinking about the relationship of brothers. I think they are very similar but different because men and women are so different.

AH: How do you break free of the lives that your parents essentially hand you? This is the question we were trying to answer.

With the characters that we created, it was about putting as much pressure as possible on these two boys, because they were stuck in a really ugly situation. Samuel wanted to escape. Beckett was so busy just trying to keep the ship afloat that he didn’t even have the time to dream of escape.

It took us a while to figure out how to push these boys hard enough to where they would finally leave. That’s when the violence came in because they had to be pushed hard. It’s hard for people to change. People don’t want to change.

Rebecca Romijn as Ms Rose and Luke Kleintank as Beckett Emerson in Phantom Halo

What were the challenges of adapting the script to a longer feature?

AB: We ended up using the inspiration from the short and two scenes from the short. We know the father’s going to die at the end. We decided we weren’t going to have the older brother die. There was this scene in the bathroom that defines the father and the shape of the film thereafter. I can’t imagine that we even used the short at all after the first twenty-five pages, or the first four meetings. I feel like we had to start fresh.

It was a lot easier for me to write a feature than it was to write a short because it’s harder to tell a story in twenty-five pages in essentially seventeen minutes. I felt like mine was more of a featurette. Shorts I really like have a very simple concept. Mine was a little bit too complex for a short.

What scene did you find the hardest to write?

AH: For Antonia, when Beckett held a gun to Warren’s head, that’s when I saw Antonia be the bravest that she was as a writer because that was her line. She said, “You let me down every fucking time.” That took a lot of guts.

Antonia pushed her characters to the very edge. She may have even been crying when we wrote that. That was not an easy scene to write.

AB: I couldn’t think of the right line. What line do you say when you have a gun to your father’s head and then you pull the trigger? What words do you say, and what does he say, when you actually pull the trigger?

It was hard to think of a line authentic enough. When you don’t have the actors there saying the lines in a certain way that makes it sound better. Those are the challenges of the screenwriter. It always sounds better when a good actor says it. You have to think it in your head first.

Some of the other scenes were hard because they were plot points. We had to move the plot forward. Why does Little Larry let Beckett get involved with the counterfeiting? Those were hard scenes to get right, but not emotionally right.

Sebastian Roché as Warren Emerson, Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Samuel Emerson and Luke Kleintank as Beckett Emerson in Phantom Halo

How did you two first become writing partners?

AB: We were introduced by a mutual friend. I was saying, “I live in San Jose, I don’t know a lot of people here. I’m a writer. I don’t know any writers here. She said, “You’ve got to meet Anne. She’s a writer too. She’s working on a novel.”

We were both working on novels. We were in the same circles, and we ran into each other at yoga class a couple of times. I knew that this was the Anne that my acquaintance had mentioned. I went up to her and I said, “You’re a writer too.” Anne started talking about her friend who was an ex-bank robber. That was the first thing she said to me. I thought, “This woman’s very cool, she’s down-to-earth. She has that edginess to her that I have experienced in my life.”

A couple of weeks later, Anne said, “Let’s write a screenplay together.” I said, “Fuck no.” I was like fuck no. I’m never going back to screenplays. I had grown up in it and seen a lot of tragedy. Anne said, “It’s always been my dream to write a script.” I had read some of her stuff. I knew she was a really good writer.

Anne planted the seed and a week later, I must have just called her up and said, “Let’s go have a beer.” I told her that I’ve always had this idea that I want to write a treatment about a woman who goes to find the baby she gave up for adoption twenty years before. Anne said, “So she goes out to find this daughter that she gave up.”

It turns out Anne is adopted. I knew that when I was telling her that I wanted to write this script, but it didn’t really dawn on me how much that would mean in the creative process. My mother had given up a baby before I was born and before she met my dad. It was something that I always asked my mom, “Do you ever want to find her?” I think I even told my mom it would be cool to write a script for a movie about it. A week later we met and Anne had the whole thing outlined. The outline was pretty in-depth.

That was our first script. I think our lives really changed once we started writing screenplays. I can only speak for myself in that, I was always supposed to be a screenwriter, and I was always supposed to be a director. I was ignoring my calling because both my parents were screenwriters. I don’t know if other people struggle with it, but I personally did in many ways. It was my own insecurities, not just my parents’, of them being who they are.

Antonia, how did having parents involved in the film industry influence your screenwriting and directing?

Peter Bogdanovich

AB: I don’t know how much it influenced my writing because I think I’ve always been a writer. The directing part definitely influenced me.

All you can do is watch. When they’re not shooting it’s kind of boring, so when they are shooting you watch. It was quiet so there’s nothing to do but watch.

My dad {Peter Bogdanovich} talks about movies all the time. He’s a cinephile. He knows the history of cinema. My mom {Polly Platt} was a production designer. She understood all facets of filmmaking. She was the wise girl who knew how to make a movie. My mom understood the nuts and bolts of every role because she was a career production designer.

You can only learn how to direct by directing.  Nobody can explain how hard it’s going to be, how many decisions you have to make every day, how people are coming at you, and you just want to think about the scene.

I found the mix of both highbrow and lowbrow culture with Shakespeare and comic books interesting. Can you comment on that?

AH: Antonia and I both grew with parents that were more on the highbrow end. While we liked that and that was part of us, we also liked what’s mainstream. It’s fun to play with the idea that you could put those together.

Whether you’re a street performer or whether you’re a thief, or if you’re living under your parents’ influence, you still want to be free.

If you’re a writer or you’re a director, you still want to have your own voice. It’s very difficult to step out of your parents’ shadows, even if they’re good shadows. By combining those two things, we were putting our own voice out there. We as artists were breaking free. I love the image of one kid reciting Shakespeare while his brother is pickpocketing people. Antonia had come up with that.

Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Samuel Emerson in Phantom Halo

How would you approach your next screenplay differently?

AH: We were so excited that we immediately went to revise the first one that we wrote. We certainly had a better clarity of vision as far as the whole story goes. We were more powerful as writers so we were able to give our characters even more power. It was more fun. 

AB: When you’re a less experienced writer, you’re in a certain place in terms of self-esteem and confidence. You spend a lot of time changing your writing and criticizing your writing, and it is such a waste of time. What I do is rewrite it. Writing is rewriting. That is something my parents taught me.

We will write down the characters’ needs at the beginning of some of our scripts. Sometimes after a certain amount of drafts, we still don’t know what these characters want. Characters’ needs inform the dialogue and inform the arc of the character.

What advice would you give to aspiring screenwriters?

AH: Having a partner was wonderful. Having someone who was going to push me when I was ready to quit, really made all the difference. I know that not everybody can have a writing partner, but it was magical for me.

AB: I think a really good partnership is when you complement each other. We’re both good at certain things but I’m better at certain things and she’s better at certain things.

My first advice for young screenwriters is, “don’t give up.”

The other thing is rewriting. If you’re not happy with what you have, you have to continue to rewrite. You have to rewrite your whole script.

You can’t expect that first draft to be perfect, unless you’re really good at what you do. You’ve got to rewrite. If something’s not working, you’ve got to kill your baby. If you really like your characters and really like the scene but it’s just not working in the overall structure or story arc, you’ve got to cut it.

I was going to go in this meeting and I thought they were going to love the script. They had tons of notes and I thought they were being super critical. They were trying to make the script better.

They said, “You’re better than this script.” I’m sure the script was already good, but it wasn’t as good as it got. It wasn’t ready. We did better. We could always do better.

Before you go, why not watch their short, My Left Man?