Letter to Christopher Hampton

Open letter from Sara Borzì to Christopher Hampton
“My new film”

10 September 2011,

Dear Christopher Hampton. I am looking for a screenwriter for my new film focused on one of the society problems. Two evenings ago I watched Atonement which everybody told me to watch but I hadn’t the time to do it before and I have to say that Atonement is one of the best films I’ve ever seen in a while. You handled the dramatic atmosphere of it marvellously.
Here you are the plot
Donald Wilbanks has a great passion for writing, a passion inherited from his mother that will push him to want to become an important writer but he will abandon his dream when his mother died in a car accident. Then Donald will move to his mother’s sister and her husband’s house. 7 years then Donald became a young man who always push himself away from troubles but one night, while he was reading a book sitting on the sofa, he will be forced by his aunt to go to a party organized by a guy who attends his same school. Here he will meet Emma a young girl who likes talking about herself as a damned poet because of her poetic skills and her tendency to use drugs. Donald will be fascinating by her and Emma will also be fascinating by him because he’s the symbol of the innocence she lost. Emma will slowly push Donald into drugs until he will totally lose his whiteness becoming a monster. They will live a long troubled and tormented love story between hashish and cocaine until Emma will die nipped from an overdose. The event convinced Donald to stop using drugs but her beloved’s loss is too painful to handle so he will push himself into the winding world of drugs again. One evening, after using too much drugs, he took his car to hang out for a few but confused and dazed he invested a guy then he ran away scared. A man, who saw the entire event, took Donald’s car target and he lodged a complaint to police. Donald, haunted by police, was finally found. After a long manslaughter and hit-and-run accident case, he was putted in prison. While he was here, Donald wrote a couple of letters in which he explains his feelings, his torments, his relationship with drugs and his love for his little-wearing high heels- with a beautiful childish laugh woman called Emma to an old friend of his who, from a sweet comforter, became his worst enemy: “drug”. After a week, aware that he lost his self-control and he will find it out again hardly he decided to kill himself leaving a last message on his last letter saying: “I am an issue of a love which generated hatred. I am a sin friend. I was a poet whose wings were broken from the bitter fate. Then I saw myself sniffing cocaine on the shitters of a bar. Man don’t make my same mistake. You’d be buggered in that world”. The day after, Donald’s aunt went to police station to take his nephew’s things and she found his letters out. When she came back home, she read a couple of them and she decided to publish them as Donald Wilbanks. The epistolary novel called: “Letters to a friend called drug” was a big success and everyone wondered why the writer, who is actually a woman, chose a male name to publish it. During an interview she was asked by interviewers why she chose a male pseudonym and she answered that Donald Wilbanks is her nephew’s name who killed himself while he was in prison and the letters were written by him. She talked about his story and about her foundation which has got her nephew’s name who helps drug-addicted guys. A couple of times later she went to the bitch to disperse Donald’s ashes which she preserved for a long at the same point where she dispersed her sister’s ones many years ago. She sat on the beach and while she was watching starts and like she was speaking to Donald, she said: “Did you see Donald? Your dream came true. Years have gone so fast. I remember when we went here crying to disperse your mother’s ashes and now she’s near you. Time stopped when you pushed yourself away from my life to me but now the clock starts to turn again. I saw in those guys whom I am helping a part of your soul and thinking that there’s something of you in me helped me through these years. I am sorry for all the damages I caused you. You’ve never left me because your soul lives in my heart and it will be like that forever. Drug destroyed your wrapping but your thrush soul is still roves around the sky” Donald is like an angel with broken wings. He had an incredible emotional journey. He felt pain, love, strength, the idea of being the king of the world and then, in the end, he felt a sort of bewilderment when he realized he killed a guy like him, he destroyed his life using drugs and his letters are a kind of atonement in which he shows the naked truth of his soul. My story is also focused on the love story between Emma and Donald which, actually, is the point where the story took a tragic turn.

If you are interested, send me an e-mail to stevenssarajane@yahoo.com
Sincerely
Sara

Author: Sara Borzì