Susan Gandar
Author, Screenwriter and Story Consultant
I was conceived in the ‘INT. BLACK KNIGHT’S CASTLE :
BACK BEDROOM – NIGHT’. A major chunk of my childhood was spent loitering
around on film sets. Who needs an ‘English education’ when you’re the
eldest daughter of film Production Designer and four Oscar winner John
Box (Dr. Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, Oliver etc.) and you have the
polystyrene-coated streets of downtown Moscow, ten miles outside of
Madrid, to explore?
But then the years of ‘Who Will Buy My Sweet Red Roses’ came to a rather
abrupt end. Reality knocked on the door in the guise of the Metropolitan
Line to Shepherds Bush and the BBC. I worked my way up from production
secretary/researcher on ‘Arena Cinema’ to production manager/first
assistant director in the drama department before moving across into
script editing and story consultancy. The blood and gore of ‘Casualty’
seemed positively moribund compared to the sexual antics of ‘The
Borgias’.
Martin, my husband, was made an offer he couldn’t refuse and we left
England to live in Amsterdam. ‘Ik wil een kilo kabeljauw, alstublieft’
will, if all goes well, buy you a piece of cod - I decided to
concentrate on my writing rather than my Dutch pronunciation.
And now we’re back and the projects are being read
and are liked but it’s taking forever. But what do you expect when
you’ve written a high-budget Faustian psychological thriller with a
streak of ‘Don’t Look Now’ and a touch of ‘The Mummy’?
So here I am: one hundred and thirty pounds of frustrated creative
energy bouncing around on the look-out for a ‘Mission Impossible’. I
research and write, hard and fast when I have to, and have been schooled
in the art of flipping, tiffing and j.pegging. I remain healthily
un-fazed by anything ‘starry’ but still enough of a child to revel in
planes and suitcases. And I can, most definitely, organise a
bacchanalian revel in a cardinal’s palace ....