The
company invited Bayley to be the publicist on an Italian film, Shoot
Loud, Louder... I Don't Understand, starring Marcello Mastroianni
and Raquel Welch. Coming out of the blue, this offer of a career change
gave Bayley cause for some deliberation, but he decided to take the
job.
Other publicity jobs followed soon after, among them
Woman
Times Seven, a Vittorio de Sica film featuring Shirley MacLaine,
and Ryan's Daughter, directed by David Lean,
and filmed in Ireland. Bayley spent 18 months on the set and when
he wasn't arranging interviews for the film's stars, he studied the
filmmaking process and everyone involved very closely, particularly
director Lean. He produced an hour-long television promotional piece
for the film that was essentially a documentary about David Lean.
He decided to become a documentary filmmaker.
Now living in London, Bayley had the opportunity to work on Aquarius,
a popular documentary series on British television. He wrote and directed
several programs on subjects as diverse as Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
the English poet, and South African artists struggling under the apartheid
system. Bayley enjoyed working on real-world issues, and he thrived
on the challenges posed by the documentary form.
Bayley's father was an amateur filmmaker with a personal collection
numbering over 2,000 films. These included old World War II newsreels
and hundreds of travel films. The family had a 16mm projector and
when his father added a new film to his collection, they would all
gather round and watch it. He grew up immersed in, and passionate
about, film. As a young teenager, he remembers the power of watching
Around the World in 80 Days on a huge screen—the experience
made him feel that film was not just enlightening and entertaining,
but that it had an amazing power to transport the viewer to another
place.
Bayley points out that when people think of the film industry, they
tend to focus on camerawork, directing, acting, or editing. But he
contends that writing is the single most important skill—and
a much underappreciated one—in the film industry. He urges all
would-be filmmakers to hone their writing skills. A voracious reader
from a very early age, he encourages reading as the best way to improve
writing skills. There's no substitute, Bayley stresses, for a coherent,
well-structured script. The ability to produce a script that is not
only able to visualize what the final product will look like, but
is also viable as a film, is invaluable. Writing for film, as opposed
to writing for the printed page, involves the ability to think in
images and to describe with accuracy, and in order. As a director,
Bayley has either written or co-written nearly every film he has ever
worked on and believes that, as a writer, he has more of a creative
stake in his filmmaking.
Documentaries, Bayley suggests, call for a unique style of writing.
The spoken words need to be crafted and chosen with care. Most of
the story is driven by images, especially in the IMAX format, but
the viewer needs sufficient information to understand the meaning
of the whole piece. While the writer must be fastidious about researching
the subject of the film, creating the script takes a great deal of
imagination. The challenge is to construct a coherent visual storyline
before any images have been shot.
Watch
Bayley talk about the film (8.1mb)
