It’s mid-March and I’m in a cold shed, (re)writing the screenplay for Tilo in Real Life, a story I’ve carried in my head for seven years or so. I'm reflecting too on why I write the kind of stories I write. I can’t say whether I had a uniquely cruel or deprived upbringing, but I do admit a tendency towards the dark side, thanks to my late mother, whose death twenty years ago resonated with me as Mother's Day came and left, uncelebrated.
Perhaps in another life I was a Victorian author of horror tales, given my talent for creating films with strange, disquieting auras, judging by the effect they have on others. When a plasterer came to do some work in the house recently, on seeing the posters for my films hanging in the hall he remarked on how they looked ‘ominous’; he’s not the first.
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