In my dream last night there was a film being shot near from train tracks [...] It wasn't period perfect: the scene was supposed to show prisoners arriving at a concentration camp, and this train was at least thirty years too new. But the director nodded. This train conveyed something of the necessary industrial horror. The lumbering anachronism would add weight.

[...] Some are still lost, just vague structures of image and movement, evoking that line about memory being what is left when something hapens and doesn't completely unhappen. I forget who said it. Hybrid scenes, overlapping plots, snatches of story. I started keeping track of films I had seen, films I wanted to see, and films I wanted to make in a notebook. I wrote it in every day until I filled it, when I transferred everything to a ring binder, so I could add pages whenever I liked. If I could inexpensively make this book look like that one, I would. I consider it to be the true original unexpurgated Fictional Film Club and mourn its loss (in a train carriage between Canterbury and London Bridge, January 2000) more than many deaths.

[...] My reactions to films such as Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (1981) and Hans Wilmots' Die Stadt, La Ville, The City (1985) were, initially at least, based on their spaces. All, in different ways, show a crumbling post-industrial Europe. Stalker's post-nnuclear lost space. Possession's dead-ends, where the Berlin Wall has truncated city streets and tracks, creating a dead zone. Die Stadt's layered city levels that go on and go, like Borges' library of Babel, with balconies you could fall from and continue falling forever. These are all ambivalent areas: not simply barren, or violent, or impossible. All seem familiar somehow, as if a wrong turn in any city could lead you right into them. They are quietly uncanny, not specifically Gothic or distant. They are worlds that contain possibility, that do not seem hemmed in; they exist beyond the frame, and before and after the time-frame of the film. These zones, to borrow Stalker's terminology, are so affecting, I think, because, like Walter Barch's eerily calm civil war canvasses, or the deceptively benign blue planet in Joel Scott's New Hebredaeia film cycle, they appear so ordinary. They are seen in grey daylight. Their otherness is established without the fantastical tropes we recognise from other films. They are like a part of the world where two edges meet, and the volume drops, and nobody quite notices.

So Chocolae Cassette is my favourite film, at least until I see it. I've thought of it as a cool title, a terrible one, a clever one, too clever, dumb. It doesn't matter. Chocolate Cassette is a mantra, a promise. No matter how bad things are, don't worry. One day you will make Chocolate Cassette. The few friends I've told about i task what it is about, or ask if I've got any film equipment, or money for the production. This misses the point. Chocolate Cassette exists. If it was made it might not. It is the eleventh film in the top ten, the empty place at the table for the guest who doesn't show up, the prayer you don't say aloud. It is my all-time favourite film that does not exist, and the best tribute to it is to leave it out of this book.

Picking a favourite film from a selection of films that were never made is tough. What do you leave out? There's so much. [...] My only real disclaimer is that if any of these film are actually real ones, I apologise. I have no way of knowing. [...]

[...] I could explain my process. I made a document called CONTENTS with a long list from which I would make the final selections. They were ordered chronologically. (By the year of their fictional release, not the order in which I wrote them.) Some of them were just a name with no film attached. I liked looking at the names in different fonts of varying authority. I liked the page that said CONTENTS so much that I added to the document some of my writing about the films I had selected. I put them in the correct order, with suitable fonts. I printed it out. I did no further work that day. The printing felt like enough. I had achieved something I had, on paper, the bulk of my manuscript. Now theoretically I could carry it with me, look at it on the bus, maybe edit it with a red pen in the staff room at work; inspired, I might take bathroom breaks and pull a folded page out of the inside of my shirt and add some notes. I could take it anywhere now, rather than wait until I got home to my computer to work.

But once I'd printed it out, I couldn't imagine leaving the house without it, and didn't for weeks, during which I did no work on the pages. None. And also, because I'd printed the document, I couldn't work on it on the computer, because then the printout would be wasted, and I'd be carrying an expired version, useless. I had to be carrying the latest version, and I was, as long as I didn't change it. So while having the manuscript in my bag meant that I could edit it on my journey to work, it also meant that I would not. If it is in my bag it is safe, as long as I don't take it out and attempt to improve or finish it. After a while I tried carrying my laptop around with me, so that I could work anywhere. The laptop fit in my bag, but nothing else would. i couldn't take lunch or another book or a notebook with me. The weight of the unfinished book was literal and metaphorical. I pictured the horror and relief of manuscripts lost in two films: at sea in The Second Draft (JOhn Loose, 1999) and floating in the breeze in a parking lot in Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, 2000). I imagined my laptop dropping off the top level of a multi-storey car park and smashing into pieces with some satisfaction.