Book Review: How to Make a Movie in 12 Days by Fiona Hardy
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This book has the best crafted opening chapter I’ve read in a long time. From there it settles into a pleasant middle grade novel with enough touches of brilliance to make up for a few problematic areas.
Eleven-year-old Hayley is obsessed with films and wants to be a director. She and her grandmother were writing the script for a horror film about a killer rose bush, which her grandmother was also going to star in, when she unexpectedly died. Hayley is devastated. But part of Hayley’s inheritance is a brand new video camera so that she can start making her movie. Hayley suggests to her mother that they throw a party to celebrate her grandmother’s life and screen the movie at it. The only date they can get at the function hall leaves Hayley just twelve days to film all the scenes, edit them together and finalise the movie. Thus the title of the book.
Hayley has prepared well though. It’s the summer holidays, she has roped in friends and acquaintances to act, do special effects and write the score, and she has hired a real actor from her school to play the main role (even though Rissa is friends with jerkjacks, as Hayley refers to them). But things start going wrong almost immediately. A key goes missing, completed footage is deleted, crew members receive instructions to meet in the wrong locations, the composer’s instrument is sabotaged, there are even injuries. Somebody clearly doesn’t want this movie to be made. Dun dun dun!
First, the positives. There are some wonderfully drawn characters. There’s Theo, who has a beautiful rose bush in front of his house and lets Hayley use it as a primary filming location. His speaking style must have been very difficult to write because it was unique as well as being great to read. And there’s Jennifer, Hayley’s five-year-old sister. She has a crucial role in the film, being attacked and killed by the rose bush, she’s obsessed with oranges and she comes out with gems like, “They’re not farts, I am releasing ideas.”
It’s also a very modern setting. Hayley’s mum works and her dad stays at home and looks after the kids. Hayley’s grandmother’s best friend, Nannabel, has a podcast. Hayley’s dad edits out all the nasty bits in M-rated films so the kids can watch truncated versions of movies like Kill Bill.
And I know book reviews are supposed to focus on the story but the cover design is stunning and I think Jess Racklyeft has more than earned a mention for her efforts.
Now for… not the negatives but the things that perhaps didn’t work as well as they could have. If you don’t like movies, then you’re probably going to be lost from the first chapter because this book starts dropping film names from the second page and doesn’t stop until you close the back cover. I personally love movies so it wasn’t a problem for me but a lot of the references are very old and since the target audience of this book is ten-year-olds, it could be an issue.
The one thing that really rankled was the fact that Hayley knows movies and plot lines like the back of her hand but seemed to dive head first into cliché after cliché after cliché. Things are going wrong but instead of talking to her parents about it, she insists she’s fine and soldiers on alone. She thinks her friends are turning on her, so she turns on them instead of asking them what’s really going on and later finds out it was all a misunderstanding. She literally talks about how writers make people in movies do silly things to create conflict and that’s exactly what Hardy has done to her.
In a former iteration, this novel was shortlisted for the 2016 Text Prize. It didn’t win and it’s gone through several rewrites to get it to this stage, which is pretty good. But I actually think it has great potential to be made into a movie itself to get it to a state of near perfection. It’s a very visual story and reading about the movie being made really made me want to see the finished product. Plus being able to include little clips of all the movies that get mentioned would be a fantastic way of introducing the next generation to classic films.
In a word: charming.
3.5 stars
*First published on Goodreads 12 November 2019
