Cross the Great Water

Concept

Cross the Great Water is a producer-driven project, which is now at the stage of attaching an appropriate director.

Below is the vision for the project, as articulated by the film’s writer, Jodi Smith.

“James Sweetbaum, who worked with me on the conception of Cross the Great Water, always referred to the film as Wong Kar-Wai meets Black Narcissus. For me, the extreme and painterly palette of Technicolor heightened the sense of tension and tragedy – you see it so clearly in films like The Red Shoes, The Godfather Part 2 and Ju Dou. This was the style that I visualized while writing Cross – swathes of intense colour, backdrops that look (or in the case of Black Narcissus ARE) painted, and languid shots where, as the camera moves, you can almost feel the heat and humidity – as with Chris Doyle’s photography in In the Mood for Love.

I studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and I went there because I loved British experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman, who studied there in the ‘60s. But I wanted to make Cross as commercial a film as possible, an epic, so I spent about two months breaking down mainstream movies – mostly Hollywood love stories – graphing them out on huge pieces of paper. Friends would come into my office and say how it looked like the room of a serial killer – I was obsessed! Intuitively I knew how love stories were structured, but to visually map them out taught me more than any published genre anaylsis could. Armed with my own interpretation of the structural conventions that Cross the Great Water could be expected to follow, I started writing.

After completing the first draft (which only contained the Sister Catherine and Jack story) I felt that the structure and its pacing couldn’t express the emotional and historical landscape I felt the story warranted. I happened, at the time, to be re-watching The Godfather Part 2 and that’s when I realized what was needed. The device of bifurcated flashback sequences could resolve my dissatisfaction with the draft. I had always wanted to tell the story of my pioneering great-great grandfather, and it occurred to me that the relevance of this family history would directly enrich the classic love story that already existed.

But I needed a device to link the two stories together because they essentially happen in parallel, and that’s when James and I came up with the idea of using the I Ching to pivot between the two. Incorporating passages from the I Ching was not only a way to unite the two generations metaphorically, it was also a way for me to weave the poetry of another sense of time into the script.

Love stories are targeted at women. The scope and value of female consumers has in recent years been overlooked. If women really enjoy a film, box office statistics show that they’ll see it again, taking their partners with them the second time. I believe that Cross the Great Water will appeal to a wide audience. Realising the potential of this project will require a director that possesses cross-cultural sensibilities while also being able to portray an epic style (with a not so epic budget).”