CHERUB: The Recruit Screenplay

by TristanLane9

I have decided to upload a finished copy of a Screenplay I have written for The Recruit, I have made some changes to the story to keep it fresh for people who have read before, to better translate to film, and to improve accuracy and realism based on my experience. I have ensured everything is possible to have happened in reality if the books had been written before 2000.

Hello,

This is a basic text document to explain that I have written a full Screenplay, with Storyboards included for CHERUB: The Recruit, and I have decided to try and post it here. However the file size and formatting is affected by the website and its layout of words and so on.

As such if you want to read it and get the best experience you can download the PDF file for it, found in the link to the Google Drive, or via the Google Drive link found on the Reddit Page.

I am happy to say that the link here should take you to a Google Drive which has the PDF of the full 311 page screenplay.

Before you click on and enjoy, and by all means do enjoy, feel free to do whatever you like with it, I'd like you to read what I have to say here first.

I started this in an effort to provoke discussion on the idea of "Theoretical Film-making" and what films people would create if only they had the chance, as much as possible I've tried to work casting and crew to being accurate to what is physically possible for each given year.

Rest assured where I can I have put in as much effort as possible to ensure this is as accurate. I've studied hundreds of films and TV shows that are original works and those that are book adaptations, read copious books and notes, seen thousands of hours of video essays (seriously probably ever single video essay about film on YouTube) so it's as accurate as I can make it, I have consumed as much information as I can on any given topic I talk about, particularly if it is one I believe will be a contentious one.

All this being said, if you do see that I've made a mistake somewhere feel free to mention it.

I am aware that conventional wisdom says that a Screenplay page equates to 1 minute of film, however my scripts have dense descriptions of camera work, lighting, costume, etc that aren't typically found in screenplay scripts, this is because I decided rather than writing a separate shooting script and expecting people to just flick between the two I'd combine them into one document although the sheer length began to cause issues for Final Draft 11 and it would crash every time it auto-saved towards the end which caused some...interesting moments, including me having to re-write the whole climax which I lost in a crash between auto-saves.

Due to this rather than the film being 311 minutes long it is more accurately around 171 minutes.

I've tried to stay faithful to the source material, though naturally with all film adaptation scenes have to be cut or combined for the sake of brevity, not that I think this is always bad as sometimes it can improve pacing or remove loose ends or plot holes from novels. That being said I have made some slight changes, I'd love to hear people's thoughts on them.

With regards to the film style I was aiming for something similar to the first Harry Potter film (technically as this film is filmed in 2000 and set in late 2001 to early 2002 there wouldn't have existed that point of reference) obviously keeping the element of realism that the novels have but also trying to add a drop of humour occasionally for the sake of levity. It should probably be rated as a PG, the language and violence might push it into a 12, however it didn't for Harry Potter and there's loads of surprising films that get low ratings, even if we discount the era before PG13 and 12A being a thing. PG13 had been around for 4 years when Beetlejuice was surprisingly rated just PG and a whole bunch of action films such as Taken that get a 12A/PG13 rating despite showing torture.

I have also spent a great deal of time and effort on choosing music for the film, composing a soundtrack that best fits each scene. I decided early on that a stylistic affectation that I wished to implement was that all music should be entirely diegetic and referential. What this means is that I restricted myself to only using music before the year 2000, music would only play when characters could hear it, car stereo, shop radio, mp3 player and headphones, and so on. And I achieved this through the creative use of the left the background music on trope matched with a fading from montage into the scene we'd been hearing all along. By referential I mean that there is something in the music, whether the title, or the lyrics that links to what is going on on screen, so for example a Prison Break might feature "I Want To Break Free" by Queen, or "Jailbreak" by Thin Lizzy. Sometimes it's on the nose like that, and I love it, and sometimes it's subtle as the music won't even mention it in the scene and you'd have to know the song title or lyrics to know why it's playing at that moment, and I love that as well! That being the case the music selected is always a good fit to the scene musically speaking, there's loads of British classics in there, all bangers, first and foremost they had to be great songs. I'd strongly recommend playing the song as you read the scene, especially if you've not heard the song before, all the songs can be found on YouTube by a simple search, and part of the commitment to keeping the British nature of the novel was to use as much British music as possible. Though some example's are quite "on the nose" they are intended to be so that in most cases even the younger children watching can get the joke or reference or be clued into what is going to happen next if they are paying attention, the impact of some choices is somewhat spoilt by me having to literally say what it is rather than the viewer having to work it out by listening.

Some notes on run time. It's long, by my estimate from a full script read through it's 2 hours 51 minutes plus credits, but let's compare to another British Children's Book adapted into a successful film intended for adults and children, you might have heard of it... Harry Potter.

In Harry Potter we see magical things happen in the beginning setting up that he has magical powers, but it isn't until 40 minutes into the film that he actually gets to Hogwarts. In this James gets to CHERUB at 30 minutes in. They have similar aspects to their beginnings as both have to set up the main characters and the world they are going to enter. They divulge a little however, Harry Potter is a mystery that runs under a traditional action adventure, the mystery being the Philosopher's Stone which is introduced earlier but the actual plot about it doesn't begin until 55 minutes in, and whilst we get to see aspects of Wizard schooling and the kids interact little actually furthers this plot until 01:40:00 when Hermione finds a book on it. This isn't a complaint I'm saying it's good a major amount of time is devoted to something other than the main plot, it makes sense, it has to be, if it wasn't we'd have loads more about the mystery but we wouldn't care because the people hadn't been characterised and the world wouldn't be as interesting because it takes a good amount of run time to show us fighting a troll, Quidditch and Wizard Classes and so on. Now CHERUB does the same thing, it spends a good deal of time characterising Kerry and Kyle and Bruce, who are all going to go on to be important, it mentions "Basic" which is where a large amount of the plot lies, the break in mission in London serves as our Quidditch scene (which both coincidentally begin at 1hr 17mins in...) and the CHERUBs are getting punished for the London mission before the kids in Harry Potter get punished for their actions. However the two films divulge at this point, Harry Potter continues to slow burn the mystery and just allow the world itself to provide the entertainment. The finale doesn't actually begin until 01:54:15, when they are then tested on things they've learnt across the course of the film, the main baddy is revealed at 02:07:20 and he is defeated within 5 minutes, by 02:13:00, with the last ten minutes dedicated to winding down, tying up the plot and so on. CHERUB is slightly different, it takes longer over the middle bit showing more training of James as unlike Harry he isn't a chosen one, he isn't especially gifted (not more so than his peers) in fact The Recruit has it's final act, the mission at Fort Harmony only just begin at 02:13:00 but I don't want any complaints over it feeling rushed, even though scenes have been compacted the final mission is around 27 minutes, the climax itself is 10 minutes, twice as long as Harry Potter's, the climax at Green Brooke is as long as the tests from the end of Harry Potter, from the bit where they find they have to get past Fluffy the sleeping Cerberus to the end of the Wizard Chess task is just over 10 minutes.

So as much as this film is (slightly?) longer than Harry Potter I don't feel that the pacing is wrong. My concern was that The Recruit would feel too bloated at the beginning and over devoted to life in CHERUB Campus and less about the mission but honestly not only does that seem like it isn't as much of a problem but comparing it to similar films it seems like it spends more time on it's final acts than most of them do. This is also an estimate that CHERUB would be longer, based off a full script read through by myself, it's entirely possible that it could be shorter than I think.

In order to access the files you must type them into your search bar as the usual "https" with the colon and the two slashes, then it should be "drive" "." "google" "." "com" then "/" "file" "/" "d/" and then the long string of letters and numbers ending with "sharing" where the gap after the "1S" that goes to "Ic7" is actually an underscore "_" not a space. As you can't copy and paste on FanFicton net you will have to type it manually.

I think I've covered everything, please feel free to ask any questions and I'll try to answer in the comments, let me know what you think!

Link to Screenplay:

.com

/file/

d/

1S_Ic7Gm2wvLPC1KeLEBTR5RpmvWziExx/view?usp=sharing

Link to pictures of the cast:

.com

/file/d/1QgLnDc9erWP8XNvjuwzyorShKysJab_/view?usp=sharing