Our day job involves us getting into lifts a lot and it’s made us think about the potential for a new film based around scenes shot in lifts. Whether it’s fighting, loving, or keeping it all bottled up inside, the enclosed space and forced intimacy is the perfect platform to bring out the best and the worst in people. Some attempts have been made, in fact, to film an entire movie inside the pressure cooker of an elevator. The soothing ding of the elevator, the often-incongruous hum of placid music, and the plain interior (usually wood or brushed metal, sometimes there’s a mirror) all provide the perfect blank slate for whatever kind of scene you want to set. And don’t forget what can happen outside the comfort of the lift walls. All those cables, grinding gears, and heavy-metal parts did provide an almost irresistible temptation to the bombastic action directors of the 90s. But the deceptively calm interior and the dangerous exterior are nothing compared to the elevator’s most cinematic feature: those sliding doors. Outside of an antiquated wipe transition, it’s cinema’s best answer to the stage curtain. Our idea was to create a Frankenstein’s monster of a script (one which is made up of other scripts from scenes which happen in lifts) and have an extended lift scenes from an unknown, untitled film.
