More on Mark Ravenhill
From a Guardian interview
“In Product, Ravenhill plays a script executive who’s pitching his film to a young, unseen starlet, ‘a Sienna Miller type’. He tells her the story as a Hollywood action adventure, though actually, it’s about her falling in love with a suicide bomber. ‘So there’s always this tension between corny story-telling and quite real story-telling,’ he says. ‘Sometimes it’s almost Bridget Jones goes Jihad: because she falls in love with this man, she’s prepared to go on this suicide bombing mission.’
Ravenhill is interested in both the idea of terrorism as a subject (‘it’s been floating around for a while’), and as a form. ‘An al-Qaeda bomb, or planes going into a tower, doesn’t have a story, unlike an IRA bomb. That had a story, in that the IRA would say, “This is going to happen”, then there would be a bomb, and afterwards there would be a claim saying, “Yeah we did it, and we want troops out of Ireland”. That’s your beginning, middle and end. But with al-Qaeda, there’s nothing like that, they just do it. I think that’s one of the things that unsettles us, because we want a story. So my character tries to give suicide bombing a story.
‘Also,’ he points out, ‘if you look at today’s TV news, it’s always oscillating between a real emotion and a Hollywood one. We do it ourselves: you find yourself telling a story of your life that’s quite true, and then slipping into a way of talking about your life that you’ve learnt from Heat.’”
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[...] Mark Ravenhill (see previous posts) writes very thoughtfully about Sarah Kane, here. [...]