While my first ever script consultation for Dig Down was overwhelmingly positive, that’s not to say it was perfect. There were a few areas of improvement that were brought up during the phone call.
The first was the issue of Ruth. While I will avoid getting into it here, especially for people who haven’t read the book yet (and if you haven’t, what are you waiting for? Go get on that), but her character plays a vital role in the plot, even though she’s not really featured much in the story, only referenced through most of it. This was something that worked in the book, but that I freely admit was something that needed to be revised for the screenplay.
The notes I got on this were similar to the feedback I got for her character for the Finish Line Screenplay Competition as well, so at least this wasn’t something that caught me off guard. In fact, this was technically something I was looking for when I had submitted Dig Down to multiple competitions to get notes, commonality in areas to improve.
The next note of something to work on was working on differentiating the characters better. This was something I was already looking into heading into the consultation, based off of the character layers template the judge had sent me in preparation of the meeting, but it was still something I hadn’t implemented. This was once again something I feel I had overlooked a little when I was adapting the story to a screenplay, and it was evidenced by a comment like the sicarios both sounded the same. This I felt was pretty fair, and the idea I had for future revisions was for one to exclusively speak Spanish, as though he refused to speak anything else. I also wanted this character to come across as more sadistic and a hothead, so that Javy, the other sicario, would feel more reasonable.
The last remark surprised me however: the judge said the end fell a little flat for him. I thought this had to do with the video he had wanted me to watch prior to our meeting, about endings concluding conflicts on three different levels: external, internal, and philosophical. As it turned out though, the judge felt that I was really pulling my punches at the end. This seemed rather shocking to me, as I feel it would be for everyone whose finished Dig Down.
The judge’s suggestion was to real lean into the seedy nature of the characters at the end, even to the point of calling out all of the horrible things that they’ve done in the story. That explanation at least made some sense to me, and while I didn’t really like the suggestion of exposition at the end, I could at least tell where he was coming from. The good thing here was that during our discussion about it, I actually came away with some ideas of how to implement his notes.
These ideas are something I’ll get into, next time.