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flanaganfilm · 1 year

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Good day Mr Flanagan. please what does "the rest is confetti" mean to you and in the context it was used in hill house??

Okay, here we go. Buckle up for a long read.

To answer this, I've got to explain a little bit about what was happening and where I was when I sat down to write episode 10 of The Haunting of Hill House.

Hill House was not a fun shoot. The picture above is from very early in production, when I was still chubby and happy.

It was my first foray into television. I was absolutely terrified that I'd mess it up. So I'd opted to direct all of the episodes myself, figuring that - if nothing else - I'd have no one else to blame if it went south.

It was the most grueling professional experience of my career. The shoot was by no means a smooth one, every day was an uphill battle from a budgetary perspective, and between the three giant production entities involved with the production, I spent a lot of time fighting over the creative and logistical elements of the series.

I began losing weight. I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

By the end of the shoot, I had dropped almost 40 lbs.

I was very depressed. Every day was a battle, and for the first time in my career, I wasn't excited to go to work in the morning. We were fighting for basic resources, fighting for the show we wanted, and even fighting amongst ourselves by the end. It was grueling.

We hadn't written all of the scripts when we started production. I believe we had finished through episode 7, but the rest of the scripts had to be finished while we were already shooting.

We'd mapped everything out in the writers room, and I had great support on the other episodes, but I was writing the finale solo. I'd thought I'd be able to juggle it with everything else. I quickly fell behind.

I finally got to the script about halfway through production. I'd work on it between takes at the monitor, and then get home to our tiny rental house in Atlanta, where Kate was waiting with our baby son. (One of the rare bright spots of this shoot came when Kate found out she was pregnant about halfway through production. We even named our daughter Theodora, in honor of her origins.)

I'd typically fall down from exhaustion when I got home, but I had to push through it and work on the script. My weekends were spent shotlisting and prepping for upcoming episodes. We didn't have enough time to stay ahead of prep, so every available day was used for that... I went three months without a single day off at one point.

I'd sit up late staring at the script. I was in a dark, dark place. Overwhelmed, exhausted, and feeling like I lived in an eternal present. Each day bled into the next and it didn't feel like there was an end in sight. That feeling of unreality was heightened because we kept returning to the same sets, same locations, and even the same scenes throughout the 100 shooting-day production. Stepping back into the exact room we had shot in days or weeks or even months ago made the whole thing feel absolutely surreal. Making movies is always an non-linear experience, but this one felt particularly so... it was like the days of our lives were happening to us all out of order.

I remember feeling something like despair creeping into my daily experience on the show. And I remember dwelling on that when I got into the scene work of episode 10.

As I worked through the draft, I recall that despair coloring a lot of what was on the page. My filter was breaking down. There's a monologue at the beginning of the episode where Steven's wife Leigh (played by my dear friend Samantha Sloyan) spews out a torrent of eviscerating insults about Steve's value as a writer. That is just me vomiting onto myself. She was voicing all of my deepest insecurities about myself at the time, and of what I was doing with this series.

She says "Is anything real before you write it, Steve? The things you write about, they're real. Those people are real, their feelings are real, their pain is real - but not to you, is it. Not until you chew it up, digest it, and shit it out onto a piece of paper and even then, it's a pale imitation at best."

This was the mindset I was in for a lot of the shoot. The writing became a reflection of a lot of that turmoil, and I knew who I was referring to in that monologue - I was talking about my family. I was talking about how much of their lives I'd used as building material for this show. I was talking about the fact that I'd lost two loved ones to suicide, and seen what it had done to my mother in particular. And I knew I was using - possibly even exploiting - those people for this series.

There's a lot of despair in this episode. The Red Room, as we conceived it, was a place that would feed upon those emotions. Grief, sadness, loss... those were the real ghosts of our series, and where our characters find themselves at the start of the finale. They're being slowly digested - eaten alive - by those feelings.

So finally, it came time to write Nell's final scene with her siblings. I knew from the outline we'd constructed in the writers room what this was supposed to accomplish - she was supposed to be their salvation. She was supposed to take all of these feelings that we'd been wrestling with and finally provide catharsis... finally say something that would free everyone.

I remember sitting with a blinking cursor for a long time. The Crain siblings had just turned and seen Nellie standing by the door, and suddenly were able to hear her speak. But what should she say? What would I say? What would I want someone to say to me?

What she ultimately says lays bare a lot of what I was thinking about when it comes to grief. It exists outside of linear time, much as I felt I existed at the time. That sense of eternal present, that sense of a nonlinear eternity of moments and memories - it all came out in her speech to her brothers and sisters.

I remember feeling, looking at my insane present and looking back at my past, how strangely overwhelmed I was by memories. That I wasn't experiencing time in a straight line, and hadn't been for a while - for the better part of a year, I'd felt more like I was standing in a whirlwind of moments. "Our moments fall around us like..." Nell said, and I recall sitting back and trying to find the words.

"Rain," for certain, but there was something too uniform about that. The moments of life as I experienced them weren't that orderly, they weren't that small. They didn't fall the same way. Some sailed by, fast and unremarkable, while others lingered in front of me, twisting and stretching. So it was a good word, but not the right word. I left it on the page though.

"Snow" was my next attempt. Better, in that I imagined the snow blowing in the wind, swirling and dancing and feeling more organic. More chaotic. More like life. But for some reason, the word that stuck with me, the word I felt Nell Crain would connect with was...

"Confetti."

And that was because I was thinking not of Victoria Pedretti at this point, but of Violet McGraw.

Violet played Young Nell, and I wondered what she might have said if she experienced time this way. As an adult, Nell was despairing. Nell was overwhelmed. But as a child... there was an innocence to the word. There was a joy to the word.

I imagined moments falling around her, this little girl with the big smile and the wide eyes. Her moments would be colorful. They would be of different shapes and sizes, some falling fast and some falling slow, flipping and turning and dancing in the air, independent of the others. Sparkling, whirling, doing lazy summersaults as they sauntered down to Earth.

I thought of myself, and of the members of my family. I thought of those we'd lost. I realized what I hoped for them, and for us all, in the end... was to look upon that mosaic of experience, that avalanche of days and minutes and moments... and to smile with some of the joy we had as children.

And this, I thought, was something that gave me hope. This gave me a glimpse of some kind of salvation for them. This was also how I hoped my life might seem if I was a ghost - a cascade of color and light and shape and movement, something I could dance in.

So Nell smiled and said... "or confetti."

It stuck with me. The rest of her monologue gets heavy again, and gets to the real point of the show - the point of the whole series, if I'm honest - and that's forgiveness.

I figured the only thing that would let the Crain children out of the Red Room was to be forgiven. I thought of the losses in my own family, and I thought of what I wished for my mother and for my aunts and uncles and cousins and I tried to pour that into her final words.

"I loved you completely, and you loved me the same," she said, "that's all." And this was the point I wanted the most to make. That at the end of our life, if we can say this about each other, the rest doesn't matter. The rest is that rainstorm, or that blizzard, that fell around this one central truth, and maybe built itself in piles around it, to the point we lost sight of it along the way.

And I thought again of that little girl, and almost as an afterthought, wrote "The rest is confetti."

I liked the way it sounded, but I was insecure about the line. I almost took it out, in fact. I remember asking Kate to read the scene and talking about that last line with her. "Is it too cute?" I wondered. She was on the fence. "Depends on how it's acted," she said, and I figured she was right. We could always take it out if it didn't work. The scene could end with "I loved you completely, and you loved me the same. That's all."

Why not shoot it and see what happened.

I turned in the script, we published it quickly so that we could start breaking it down and prepping it. And the next morning I was back on set. I'd deal with episode 10 when it came down the pipe again, sometime in the coming months. We had a lot of shooting to get through before I had to worry about it.

I recall Netflix asking me to cut a lot of that monologue, and I remember them also having questions about the "confetti" line. I pointed out that it didn't cost us any extra to shoot it all, it was only words, and fought to keep the script intact.

Ultimately, they insisted I make a series of cuts on the page. I begrudgingly agreed, but left Nell's speech alone. I made superficial cuts around it, throughout the draft, and even considered changing the font size to fool them into thinking it had gotten shorter (I ultimately was told I wouldn't fool anyone and not to risk starting a war). But Nellie's final goodbye stayed intact.

It must be said - Victoria Pedretti SLAUGHTERED this scene.

By the time we got around to filming it, things had never been worse for the production. There was almost nothing left for a lot of us. Tensions were sky-high, resources had been exhausted completely, and we were all ready to give up.

Filming in the mold-ridden Red Room was depressing, morose, and led to a lot of arguments and unpleasantness. The room itself just felt gross, always, and we were in there for days at a time. The last thing we had to shoot in there was Nellie's goodbye.

Victoria came to set having to push through pages of monologue, and she did so with captivating bravado. I recall being teary-eyed at the monitor watching her work. And when we finally made it to the last line, I watched her deliver it with... a smile. A sincere, innocent, longing, joyful smile. A smile informed by the sadness, grief, and loss of her own situation, of her own life... but a smile that finds forgiveness and grace after all. Pedretti knew how to say the line, and how that word would work.

And as she said it, I knew it would stay in the show.

Over the years, that sentence has become something of a tagline for The Haunting of Hill House. I'm always a bit mystified and touched when I see people approach me with the line on T-shirts, or even tattooed on their bodies.

I started signing it with autographs back in 2020 after enough fans asked me to. Now it's my go-to when I sign anything related to Hill House.

The line, for me, represents a lot of things.

It's about the insane, chaotic, non-linear experience of making that show. It's about trying to find and hold onto joy, even in the grips of despair.

It's about the way the moments of our lives aren't linear, not really, and how we may be unable to understand them as we exist in their flurry. It's about finding hope, innocence and forgiveness in the final reckoning.

And it's about how, outside of our love for each other, the rest is just... well, it's fleeting. It's colorful. It's overwhelming. It's blinding. It's dancing. And, if we look at it right, it's beautiful. But it's also light. It's tinsel. It flits and dances and falls and fades, it's as light as air.

The rest is the stuff that falls around us, and flits away into nothing.

It's the love that stays.

#haunting of hill house #the rest is confetti #that was a very long story #man I was not okay while we were shooting that #forgiveness #heal

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psalacanthea · 11 months

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was listening to the Disco Elysium soundtrack (video link to song) and thinking about Kirkwall, as one does. 1500 words, just a small thing about love.

...

“Hey.”

The call didn’t pull her from her staring across the city, eyes focused past the facade of Hightown. Lights gleamed on the dark water, but they were pale reflections of the glow of Hightown, like the ocean revealed the truth of that fragile and bitter shell of respectability and power. Her eyes weren’t there, but deeper, into a place where the darkness of the water swallowed any light, where crumbling cliffside walks and hollowed homes clung desperately to what remained in hope of survival.

The real heart of the city, where she’d lived when things were hopeful.

Down there it was poor and dirty, people living on the edge of starvation, but that was when her life had been happy. Well, no. Happier. Varric wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her genuinely, only happy…while sober.

“What does it mean anymore?”

“I don’t know,” Varric said to Hawke, leaning up against the railing next to her.

“Something has to plug this hole in me that seems to keep losing things drip by drip. But I can’t seem to. I feel so hollowed out.”

“You’re the one with all the platitudes. Do you want me to pull them out? Sometimes it can be good to hear things you already know, I’ve heard.” He smiled, faintly, at the blank sidelong look she gave him. “No. Not me, huh?”

Her chin fell into her hand, and then she winced at the contact with the wound on her neck and jerked back. The blood on her fingers didn’t gleam as she stared at them in the moonlight, it was dried, dark. Old. “Platitudes don’t work unless one of us believes in them.”

“I know what optimism is, at least.”

“I don’t,” she said, a quaver in her voice, a splinter of pain that hurt too much for her to feel the full truth right now.

“Sorry, Hawke. One of us has to be the optimist, and I already called ‘not it’.”

She fell into silence, so they just watched the city and its lights for a while. Lights that gleamed across the feet of the statues of slaves standing sentinel in the harbor, chained forever to the city that had slaughtered them. The bridges, the pits, the quarries. The statues.

“Weep,” the statues said to the refugees who had come here seeking hope. “Weep, because your suffering has only begun.”

But her eyes weren’t on the statues. They never were. She said it was because they made her too angry, and bad things happened when she was angry. Varric knew it was true. She’d lost too much to not be a dangerous person, and with Bethany gone…

No, Hawke didn’t look at the statues, and she didn’t look at Hightown, or even its reflection in the water. She looked at the dark places, the pits, the quarries. The places where there were grooves in the roads to carry the blood of slaves. The places where people still died for no reason.

No reason at all.

Hawke breathed in, reaching up and wiping dry eyes. “She said I made her proud. But that was bullshit. Because I knew…I knew if she hadn’t died, in the next breath she would have turned around and made it my fault. And– and now that she’s not here, that’s the only voice I hear. The one blaming me.”

“Leandra was a complicated woman. It’s hard. Having a mother who can’t seem to give you what you need.” Varric braced his hand against her lower back, and she leaned in towards him.

“Maker. I know you’re not talking about your feelings because you’re incapable of it, but please don’t let this be a metaphor, either.”

There it was.

The spark, the little light that never seemed to go out. The grace of humor. Who could live in Kirkwall without it? This whole place was just one of the Maker’s funny little jokes, after all. But, well…she was right.

“Sorry. It’s a metaphor.”

“Shit, Varric.”

They laughed together, bitter and sweet, staring down at the city that seemed to go on forever, deeper and deeper into the desecrated earth. It should have been rotten to the core. But it wasn’t.

There were people down there who were living, despite it all.

To spite it all.

“Love is…complicated. Or so they tell me. Especially love for our parents.”

“It’s like I can’t think about her without resenting her, and that’s not what I want for my memory. That’s not what I want for my life.”

“Give it time. It’ll get better.”

“Ah,” she said quietly, voice holding a rasp of weariness. “Platitudes. But no. Love is…love isn’t complicated at all, Varric.”

“No?”

Hawke shook her head, eyes finally shifting, gazing slowly across the cliff face in the distance, higher and higher. “No. It’s everything else. I wanted to be– be a dam.”

“A damn what?”

Hawke smiled reluctantly. “A damn hero. I wanted to be the one to hold back the tide, but I’m…”

“Full of holes?” he guessed.

“Full of holes,” she agreed, chin dropping, eyes falling. “And the things that escape only ever seem to hurt the people I care about, and I– is it worth it? To lose everything to keep this place from being washed out into the sea? Is it worth it? Should I let them drown?”

They both fell silent as he tried to think of what to say. His instincts said no, but was that for her, or for him? He never knew. Usually, his instincts led him in that direction, and that was fine, it was smart, but…that wasn’t good enough.

Not for Hawke.

“It is,” she said to herself, and to him. “And you have to promise to believe it, for me. I know it goes against…against who you are, and what you care about. I know. You look to your people first, and damn the world, but…I just can’t do it, Varric. If you really are my friend, you’ll do it for me. Believe it when I can’t, that this is all worth it.”

“Well, I am a pretty good liar,” he acknowledged, not really comfortable with what she was asking of him. “You can’t badger people into belief, Hawke, trust me. It doesn’t end well.”

And she knew that, because she gave him a sidelong smile that held a shadow of the wicked mischief that would crop up at the worst possible time. “You believe in things beyond your friends. You just don’t want to. But you’ll do this for me. Because if I’m gone–”

“Come on, stop it,” he interrupted her, discomfort growing worse. Unconsciously, his fingers tightened, holding onto the back of her shirt.

“Because if I’m gone, I know you’ll protect them for me. And you’ll love them. Because love…love is the easy part, Varric.” She didn’t wipe her eyes this time, and they stayed dry apart from a single tear that gathered in the corner and never fell. Her eyes were back on the city, the edge of a smile on her lips. “It’s everything else that’s hard.”

It brought up things he didn’t want to think about, not here. Not now. She was already going through so much, and it wasn’t like his life was ever going to get unknotted, so…what was the point? It wasn’t about him.

It was about her.

“Do you want to get out of here?”

“And miss the soiree at Lord What’s-His-Face’s?” she asked with playful sarcasm. Her voice lowered, bitterness creeping back in. “Yeah. I want to get the hell out of here.”

He pulled back and extended his hand to her, and she took it, pushing away from the railing. Leading her out of Hightown and back to the pits and quarries, they walked side by side with the ocean crashing below, a darkness that swallowed the lights of Lowtown. Back into the darkness; home.

In the distance, above it all, centuries-old statues of weeping slaves heralded the fate of those who dared to live and love in Kirkwall. Pain, suffering, death. Why had he ever thought they could escape that fate? Why had he ever thought she could?

But even if he wanted to condemn the damn place for everything it had done to her, everything it had taken…

He couldn’t.

It was his fault, not the city; that was what had betrayed her in the end. He’d done everything in his power to save her, to keep the world from consuming her whole, but he couldn’t do it. In the end, it had him. When their eyes had met for just a moment at the end, he hadn’t seen blame, or regret, or pain and suffering.

Only love.

And so he took her burden onto his shoulders and went home to try and find a way to save her city. It wasn’t going to be easy. The place was rotten to the core and cleaning it up would take more than his lifetime, but damned if Varric wasn’t going to try. Because he loved her, and she loved Kirkwall. And Kirkwall...loved her.

He could take care of the rest.

#Dragon Age fic #Hawke x Varric #or #Hawke & Varric #take your pick #either way it's about love #the rest is confetti

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