If I had the budget to make any film I could, I'd make one of these two films.

a) an adaptation of John Fowles' The Magus. Guy Greene made a version in the sixties with Anthony Quinn and Michael Caine, but so I hear (I plan on buying it soon), it is hit-and-miss, and going by the duration, it wouldn't be anywhere near as dense as the novel. My version would have to be at least three hours long, maybe even four.

Nicholas Urfe - Paddy Considine
Maurice Conchis - Derek Jacobi
Alison - Radha Mitchell
Julie - Kate Winslet

I'd film it on the same island where Godard filmed Le mépris (which, I believe, is what Guy Greene did too).
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or:

b) a film entitled C, which I originally posted about here. This is what I typed:

January 05, 2007.
3.44 am.

An idea is like a disease. And that is the only way I can start this. It lingers and screams, wanting to be brought out, brought out into the open, but it might kill its owner in the process. This is evident in the complete and utter emptiness I will feel once this page has been written.

I lack the patience to fetch it into some kind of pitchable story, but there is a narrative of loosely sketched events that keep haunting me. In my head I know exactly what happens. I know I know because it feels so right when I think it. But I cannot really explain it. I don't imagine it entirely in images of the mind - though certain pictures haunt me specifically - and nothing much really happens in the way of cause and effect, but it is like some kind of abstract excitement that crawls under me. As soon as I bring it to words, it not only loses its self-contained impact, but the idea of making a film seems both ludicrous and exhausting - and practically impossible.

But it's about a cult, or maybe one guy who comes across a cult; and the cult is obsessed with the camera, with the moving image, much in the same fetishistic way as the characters in Cronenberg's Crash. (I see Elias Koteas' intense stare in the dark loneliness of the cinema, his face by flickering, projected image, and perhaps he is recieving a blow-job from somebody offscreen.) And the cult sees Cinema as a form of magic, a circus, and its members all compete to see who can "perform" the most impressive "tricks". Not on camera, but with a camera.

I see scenes wherein our protagonist is willingly drawn into a world that masturbates frequently and openly to films where the camera is the primary source of meaning. They cum on their TV sets to the likes of Touch of Evil's opening shot, and fall in love with what they call "the camera as interrogator" in the likes of Robert Weissman's documentaries.

The cult wish to better this magic they see, or to become it, to live it out. One member might attach a camera to his cock while he fucks someone; another might have an operation which replaces a leg with a dolly or hand with an actual camera; as they compete to better one another and find what they call "the ultimate truth" (the notion of becoming Cinema, of being the medium), the stunts and ends to which they go become more and more dangerous, until the final act...

Our protagonist sets up a multi-angled shot of his own suicide - jumping from a building onto a pavement. Perhaps the cult set their own TV station up and air the death live, with a POV shot... Perhaps, in the film's world, it would be possible to replace an eye with an actual camera, a recording device, and people can watch what other people see - or perhaps only our protagonist, our TV producer, is the only person who has one of these "eyes", and his live, recorded death is a means of publicly bringing together the "purists" of the world, and secretly ridding himself of his own suffocating disease of ideas that never come to fruition.

... I did better than I thought I would in translating that into words; in fact, in doing so, I've created a rough, improvised narrative in which my idea might exist. And I am wholly pleased that the end, concerning a man who rids himself of his own overflow of creative inertia (by killing himself no less), takes a deeply self-reflexive slant.

Now, if only I had some funding.