).... So, for those that want to watch the film again, go for it! (Oh, BTW, the title of the film in the US is "Pulse", as they thought that "Octane" sounded too much like a car movie)
Anyway, there's an excellent discussionwith the original screenwriter (Stephen Volk) who describes the process of writing the screenplay and then watch (with dismay) the plot/characters/location change over the course of filming... Oh, I wish this version had got made instead of Marcus Bent's....
"Here is what happened on Octane, for the record:
The idea came at the Membury Services late one night in 1995, when I saw a woman and her 12 year old daughter sitting at a table and thought “Who are these people here at 3AM?” The idea of vampires posing as the emergency services living off human road-kill on the M4 immediately took shape. I pitched it to Ruth Baumgarten and we got it commissioned by BBC films and brought in Lesley Manning, whom we’d worked with as a team on Ghostwatch. But gradually it became clear the BBC were nervous of “horror” in general and “women in jeopardy” in particular, so Ruth tried to set it up as a feature outside the BBC.
Enter Alistair Clark, whom I’d met years before, who loved the script and wanted it for his new company Random Harvest. I took it to Alistair with Ruth’s blessing. At that stage I thought the script was in good shape but not perfect.
A couple of drafts later, Alistair and his co-producer Basil Stephens signed up Marcus Adams as director. He was rumoured to be “hot” after Long Time Dead, which hadn’t opened yet.
Then the changes started, shepherded by Lisa Neeley the head of development at Harvest.
Now, a screenwriter has a choice: he can do the notes he disagrees with, or resign (and someone else will do the notes anyway). For better or worse, and no stranger to collaboration (difficult or otherwise), I hung on in there and tried to do what Marcus & Co wanted to the best of my ability. But looking back, over the next two years or so I was made to alter my screenplay almost beyond recognition.
1) Feedback from the distributors was that they’d prefer the story set in the US. I said I believed strongly that the UK motorway system was uniquely hermetic and peculiar, and a US setting would make it too much a “me-too” to Near Dark. The producers disagreed.
2) Marcus was adamant that we come off the motorway in Act 3 to a “lair” in which he could stage some “classic horror” as in Aliens. I said it wasn’t Aliens: it was about being trapped in cars on a motorway you can’t get off. Marcus disagreed.
3) I was told (by Lisa in particular) that all our characters must be “young, cool and hip” to hit the “horror teen market.” Marcus said he didn’t want any character in his film to be over 40. So the evil gang became uniformly Buffy-like (instead of a bunch of varied archetypes), and what had been a sinister middle-aged British caravan couple became an ill-defined Winnebago duo. Worse, my vulnerable 12 year old girl was made a 15 year old brat: (hence my original concept that this was the night of the child’s first period, a catalyst for the vampires, went out the window).
4) Senga, the Madeleine Stowe character, was given a back-story to explain events. I strongly disagreed: I thought it had to be “wrong time wrong place”: but again I was outvoted.
I was shocked by the realisation at the shooting script stage that, remarkably, all my witty lines had been gradually cut, some of the scariest scenes had gone, and the character of the Recovery Man, once a co-lead, had been diminished into a bland, virtually wordless cameo.
When the movie entered pre-production and the team decamped to Luxembourg, I was left completely out of the loop creatively from there on in. I was later to learn that the script was being rewritten on the spot by Marcus and the producers. And one lead character was cut entirely due to a piece of miscasting.
By the time, months later, when my agent asked the producer if the writer could perhaps see the film, I was prepared for the worst. It wasn’t actually as bad as I imagined it would be and I tried to convince myself my misgivings were personal. But it was certainly far from the off-beat British psych-horror film I’d written years before. I was told the version I’d just seen was a “picture lock,” so clearly my opinion was not required. It was a fait accompli.
When the film was shown at the London Frightfest, though it advertised a Q&A with the crew, I was not asked to attend, nor was I even told about the showing (I read about it in Time Out.)
So whether or not, as Chris Fowler imagines, Marcus “lost interest in the shoot and thought fuck it,” I couldn’t say. But if so, he lost interest in the film that he himself wanted to make, and a script changed extensively to suit his director’s vision. At the end of the day it bears the title card: “A Marcus Adams film” and that is what it is. "
