You can almost hear the script conference.

“Okay, so we open with this guy checking into a hotel, going up to the 21st floor, having an expensive meal, writing a note … And then he carefully gets out of the window and goes out on the ledge …”

“I’m seeing an overhead shot, whoops, down into the street below … This is New York, right?”

“Yeah, it’s New York.”

“Where was that scene in Mission: Impossible done? Some Arab place?”

“Dubai. Yeah, and they had to CGI the shit out of it. Cost them more than the rest of the movie put together. Focus, dude! He goes out on the ledge …”

“Boom — title: Man on a Ledge.”

“Yeah, that could work. Or not. A ledge, though? Not the ledge?”

“The ledge, the ledge … Mmm, it’s stronger. But a ledge is more subtle. Like it’s almost Swedish it’s so subtle.”

“Okay, okay, we’re getting distracted. As long as it doesn’t confuse people and they think it’s that documentary about the guy who walks on wires between the skyscrapers.”

“Right. Nobody ever goes to documentaries.”

“Okay, so he’s out on the ledge, maybe people in the street below start seeing him, maybe we hold that for later, but either way we suddenly go to … subtitle: ‘Three months earlier.’ And the guy’s in jail and he’s in the middle of a vicious fight, and we’re right in there with the camera, and the guards come running … Next scene, he’s with the prison shrink. We can get any old character actress for that part, as long as she’s got one of those sad ex-hippy Californian faces so she looks like a prison shrink.”

“Noted.”

“Okay, so she asks him if he ever has the urge to hurt himself. He looks at her. Like tough-guy looks at her. And we’ve mussed him up a bit, a bandage on the hand, scratches, bruises on the face … that kinda thing. So he looks at her, tough-guy looks at her. Beat. One beat. No, two beats. And he says: ‘Hurt myself? Never. But I think about killing myself every fucking day.'”

“Fucking brilliant! But can we say ‘fucking’ so early in the pic? We’re what, five, seven minutes in?”

“We’ll deal with that at revision stage, dude. I’m trying to give you the concept here. The shape, the form.”

“Right, right. Go on.”

“So after he says that, we’ve got the set-up. Then we’ve gotta get him out of jail, so he gets the news his father has died. He gets a day pass for the funeral. So then it’s funeral, funeral, not too long mind you, but he’s there in his orange dungarees and his brother’s there too — and the minister winds up, yadda yadda, Amen, and the guy’s coming face to face with his brother, and next thing, blam, a fight breaks out.”

“Between the brothers?”

“Between the brothers.”

“But –“

“Never mind. We’ll sort all that out later. The prison guard, we’ve seen him there, he tries to intervene, our guy grabs his gun, whatever, holds them all up, gets his cuffs unlocked, and steals a great big SUV and then we have the chase.”

“Great, a chase. He gets away?”

“Obviously. Now we’ve got to get him to the ledge, so the movie can really start.”

“Noted. Get him to the ledge.”

“Okay, now this is the next big thing. Pay attention. Once he’s up on the ledge, right, and the people in the street have seen him, and the cops are swinging into action, and we’ve established a few of the cops, like the ones who will turn out to be bad guys, the ones who will be good guys, and so on, maybe we establish a few of the people in the street, too, may come in handy later …”

“Establish, establish … Sorry, just getting this down.”

“So when the first cop sticks his head out the window to talk to our guy, our guy says he’ll only talk to one specific cop — one specific cop shrink, who’s got a history of talking people down from ledges or bridges or whatever. Or failing to talk them down. Hey, that’s good — she’s got a backstory. We can work with that. Anyway, point is, he asks specifically for that shrink. And that shrink is, of course …”

“Of course what?”

“She’s the female lead, doofus. We gotta get her in right then.”

“You mean they’re gonna fall in love?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Don’t worry about that, we can just throw that in at the end. This is a thriller, dude, so from there we’ve got to really plot that plot … We’ve gotta have a parallel plot going alongside, I’ve got that worked out too, and we’re gonna cut back and forth a lot between the ledge guy and the other plot, and it’s all gonna turn out like ‘But nothing is what it seems’ and so on, because it’s all a plot, right? — and then of course there’s a villain, and we better get a real actor for that part, like someone who used to be a leading man but he’s too old now, maybe he won an Oscar way back when. We need someone with real gravitas for that part.”

“Noted … Sorry, how do you spell ‘gravitas’?”