Playlouder - Music is the Network

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no - you enter a fucking title

I'll enter a title, and so will my wife

surrender monkey

Titles can be tough to come up with, although a lot of the time I know exactly what a film's going to be called from the first moment, and it doesn't change. Like The Calm or Blind Chance, for example. Or Camera Buff. That's what the films were called right from the beginning. Those were the titles when the screenplays were written.
But with Veronique, I kept thinking about the title right from the moment Piesio and myself started working on the screenplay. It was much easier in Poland if you didn't know at first what the title would be. Publicity around a film wasn't all that important so I'd find a title once the film was edited. At least, by that time, I'd know what it was about, which made things easier.
In the West, a title's got to be found as soon as possible and the producer was rightly cross with me for not being able to decide. The screenplay was called Choir Girl - not the greatest of titles, let's say, although it accurately describes the main character's profession - she is a choir girl.
However, it turned out that this had bad connotations in France. Somebody, having read the title, said, 'Oh God, another Catholic film from Poland.' The main character's called Weronika/Veronique, and right from the beginning, her name seemed to be a good title. But it was impossible. The ending of the name in French - 'nique' - describes, not very elegantly, an activity which occurs every now and then between a man and a woman. So, again, we abandoned it.
The producer, de la Fuente, is a jazz fan, so he kept finding poetic titles of jazz numbers - 'Unfinished Girl', 'The lonely together' - which seemed somewhat pretentious to me, so we abandoned them. I had about fifty titles in my note-book and I didn't like any of them. The producer was pressing me. Everybody was involved in looking for a title. My wife and daughter suggested all sorts of words. The assistants read Shakespeare's sonnets because they thought that the Bard had a pretty good brain. Travelling across the city, reading posters, announcements and newspapers, I caught myself constantly looking for an intelligent title. I also announced a competition among people working with me, with a good money prize. In the end, we decided on The Double Life of Veronique. It doesn't sound bad in Polish, French or English, is quite commercial before you see the film and renders its contents quite accurately after you've seen it. It has one fault - neither I nor De La Fuente are really satisfied with it.
Keep searching for a good one Kristy!

i can't touch onto krzysztof's answer. but my personal way of dealing with titles is that they usually come after the creation of the piece, whatever form it takes. I have an idea of what my piece is about, or the subject of it, but the name is born through the process of the birth. do you name your child before you have seen it's face?

Up side down way is also very creative, it's a funny exercise that I used to do whith a litlle character. The idea was to find a cool title and then invent a little story for it. Sometimes the title tells a lie so why not start whith a title and try to get the content fit with it ?

I once heard that The Sun have a massive database of good headlines awaiting an article to go along with them. "Super Cally Go Ballistic Celtic Are Atrocious" was apparently on file for years waiting for an appropriate football result.

Paedo in Speedos - was one of these. Although I had thought of it (possibly before them) as my band name. Bastards. Obviously they had a picture of Gary Glitter in some Speedos - God knows how much they paid for it. The story was... well, there wasn't a story as such. http://www.myspace.com/pydosinspydos Boo!

The Sun on John Savidant getting chived the other year: "I've Been Stabbed I say, I've Been Stabbed!"

"The Sun also rises"

Well, glad I didn't title this with anything related to words of misty dogmas in theology and/or metaphysics.

i think a fucking title is fairly metaphysical

No, that's just limey imputation.

i guess it could be a bit dungeons and dragons - you enter an etc - to your left is a poison limey imp