Geoffrey Fletcher

Life post-Oscar for Precious screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher has been “very busy in a good way.” The screenwriter teamed up recently with Bombay Sapphire and Tribeca Film on short film competition The Imagination Series, announced during the Tribeca Film Festival.

“Philosophically, we are all on the same page,” Fletcher says of the collaboration. “We all have similar feelings about imagination and opportunity.”

The competition offers a rare opportunity for aspiring filmmakers to make a short film interpreting a “skeletal” script provided by Fletcher. Starting on May 8, all participants will have the chance to submit their interpretation of the script at www.imaginationseries.com.

A global judging panel including Fletcher and industry leaders assembled by the Tribeca Film Festival will select five winners in September from a shortlist.

“It’s really designed with room for the participants to take the story where they want to go,” Fletcher says. “To invest their imagination and their perspective in it. It has structure and it has an enormous amount of room for people to run with this story. It’s a global competition, so we’re intrigued to find out how various countries interpret the script.”

After the five winners are announced they will then produce and direct their own films and present the final cut at a premiere in early 2013.

Fletcher’s feature directorial debut Violet & Daisy, he says, “falls in the spirit of The Imagination Series.” The action comedy started shooting in September 2010 and a US theatrical release is anticipated later in the year.

“It is something I am so proud of and the few people that have seen it so far have responded so powerfully to it,” Fletcher says. “It is a very personal expression, but it is also one that is grounded in traditional structure. It is still very wild and unconventional. It starts and ends in very different places. It’s violent, it’s funny, it’s sad and surreal.”

Another project Fletcher is working on is a script for director Doug Liman about the Attica prison uprising in 1971. The film is expected to open in late 2013 or early 2014.

“While we are writing, Doug is shooting another project,” Fletcher said. “I can’t say for sure because Doug is one of the most remarkable multi-taskers I have ever met, [but] it might be even sooner.”