New Indie Film About the Love of Whisky

@AKGcandlefish I'm not on the Zuckerberg-page but I like that you are really willing to make that movie. Best of luck to you guys!

Sounds interesting. I'll pass the word along to friends. Best of luck on the film. Look forward to it.

I would love to see an indie film about whisky, great idea! Unfortunately, I don't and never intend to use Facebook. Anyway, the best of luck to you ; )

This is good intel: scotch drinkers hate Zuckerberg. Ha. Either way, thanks for the supportive words. I'm very excited about the project.

Just make sure there's a decent plot and not one long pastoral scene after another in whisky country with a meandering and loose knit plot. I really enjoyed Angels' Share and Sideways. Both have quite good plots, which function in tandem with whisky and wine respectively.

Character development is crucial to a film such as you are describing. My advise: don't let the local accents in Scotland get too thick. Angels' Share could have reigned that in a bit and still retained the authentic nature of Glasgow. Sideways kept a great balance between plot and wine. Yes, it was more about characters and plot than wine, but it still snuck in a lot of info about wine and especially the appreciation of wine.

I always enjoy films in which the viewer knows more than some of the characters. Both of the films I mention accomplish this quite nicely and it adds some punch to the plot.

Road trip films can be boring if you're not careful. Even On The Road did not score well critics or audiences, earning a "rotten" mark on Rotten Tomatoes. Road films are quite challenged when it comes to maintaining a plot that does not meander.

Be this as it may, the entire Lord of the Rings series, including The Hobbit are road trip plots and they work handsomely. No Country for Old Men is a road trip film, as is McCarthy's The Road, of course, which was made into a film. The first one was better, I thought than the latter as a film. Thelma and Louise is taught in film schools for budding screenwriters as the quintessential road trip and women's liberation film.

Audiences today are much different from the day of Don Quixote when a string of pearls plot was especially enjoyed. Mad Max is today's equivalent, perhaps, of Don Quixote, and that's not an especially flattering pronouncement when one considers how much philosophizing and intellectual meat is missing from Mad Max no matter how entertaining it is.

My advise on the plot: have at least one character "settle down" at a distillery or in a village in Scotland to really connect with the locals there. It's very hard to develop characters that just keep moving. The audience wants to learn more about more than simply the travelers. That can get boring. And whisky is a subject best unveiled by locals that make it, rather than travelers that merely drink it. Try to weave in the locals along with the travels are fully developed "round" characters, rather than merely flat backdrop characters.

One thing I've always been fascinated by is the potential for a whisky mafia in Scotland. Does it exist? One would think so, but I've heard nothing about such a thing. It's just a guess on my part that such an organization could have sprung up right along with whisky in the days that Whisky was born.

A film that features one of the travelers getting caught up in a whisky mafia predicament could be interesting. Say, a character falls in love with the mob boss's daughter or something like that, and she comes along with the travelers with the mob on their trail. This could even be made to have some comedic elements without getting heavy and too action-adventurey. Sideways certainly "went there" with the tow truck driver and his wife.

Even a particularly menacing distillery owner could provide some impetous to the plot if he and his men were pursuing the travelers through whisky country due to something they have or have done that merits being pursued.

Good luck!!!!

Thanks for all the feedback, @rigmorole! You're clearly passionate about what you do and don't like in a movie. I can't promise I'll take all your suggestions (especially the mafia bit, which wanders a bit from the spine of my story), but I do appreciate your thoughts and will keep them in mind as we continue to develop the script. One of the reasons we've launched the Facebook page is to really get the audience to participate by offering their thoughts. We obviously can't incorporate them all, but the conversation is fun and could result in making a better film.