RICHARD BAGSHAW
 Richard Bagshaw
Where do you live (City, State, or Country)?
I live in Birmingham, England. Your script stood out among hundreds of others. What was the inspiration for your story? DeepView grew out of two ideas. The first was watching how completely technology has taken over our lives, and how readily people now believe everything they see and hear. We spend more and more of our time, consuming content, and creators are under constant pressure to make theirs stand out. I followed that logic to its darkest conclusion: murder as content. The idea of crime as entertainment isn't new, of course, so I pushed it further by imagining an immersive platform of 3D, 360-degree video, where the audience can witness every angle of what they're watching. The second idea was about how that platform would take hold. I felt that the combination of murder and content would be the fastest way for a new start-up to get noticed, and to vault almost overnight from obscurity into the mainstream. Why did you write a script instead of a short story or a novel? A short story could never have held the complexity I was after — the way ordinary people can be manipulated into doing things they would never, under normal circumstances, even consider. I also wanted room to trace my female protagonist's full arc, from betrayed housewife to potential killer, and to give that transformation the space it needed to feel earned. The plot itself is tightly interwoven, with threads that pay off across the whole story, and a feature-length script let me show the full extent of where this world can lead. How long did it take you to write your script...and what is your writing process? Do you outline...use index cards...white board...or just start with FADE IN? I tend to start with a single scene — an image or a moment that grabs me — and then I just begin writing to discover where it leads. I'm less of an outliner and more of an explorer; I find the story by writing it. That approach is rewarding, but it's also why the script took a couple of years to reach this stage. Feedback is a big part of my process too. I like to share drafts to see what's landing and what isn't, then take those notes and keep reworking until I arrive at a version, I'm genuinely happy with. What is your ultimate ambition as a writer? Being recognised by Wiki has been an amazing start, and I'm grateful for it. More than anything, I want people to see my work as genuine, something made with real care and intent. And of course, the dream is to one day see DeepView on the big screen — that would be extraordinary. Was your entry at The Wiki Screenplay Contest a full script or “the first ten pages”? Why did you make that choice? I entered the complete script because I wanted feedback on the entire plot — to be sure that everything held together as a complete story. I already felt confident about my first ten pages; everyone who'd read them had told me they worked. It was the rest of the script I needed reassurance on, the parts that hadn't yet been tested by fresh eyes. What’s your all-time favorite movie or television show...and why? That's a hard one — I love films, and I've seen so many that picking just one feels impossible. I have a real soft spot for slasher movies, and when I first started writing DeepView I assumed it would end up as a slasher screenplay. It’s funny how these things turn out — it became something quite different. The films I can happily watch over and over are The Empire Strikes Back, Back to the Future, Somewhere in Time and Scream. Not much like the script I eventually wrote, but each one taught me something about how to keep an audience hooked. What advice do you have for writers hoping to win a contest or place as a finalist as you have? Never give up, and don't be disheartened if your script doesn't place the first time out. Take the feedback you're given seriously, even when the reworking feels like a never- ending process, and just keep going. Persistence is everything — the writers who succeed are usually the ones who simply refuse to stop. What else are you working on that the world needs to know about? From the beginning, I imagined DeepView as a trilogy, which is why the ending is deliberately left a little open. My next task is to decide where the second story goes. I do know that Nathan James will take on a far more prominent role — he now has both the money and the power behind him, and that shifts the balance of everything. I have an idea involving people being abducted and taken to a cult, though I'm still working out exactly what that cult believes and what it wants. There's a lot still to discover, which is the exciting part. |
