I just wanna start by saying thank you . Those are some really curious questions and I hope to illuminate on a few. I hope you will not find it as a slight if I don't address everything. So in descending order of importance with the final being the biggest flaw character specification . OR rather as Matt Lazarus told me specification in general.
The orange light we see in the transition is a bowl of cocaine just starting to be smoked. So picture being very close to the bowl just as it is being sparked. Then the next shot we see a gutter punk smoking the bowl in the alley his face is orange because the ember in the pipe is illuminating it. During filming I would actually just pull away from the bowl as it is being lit to the establishing shot of the street with its flickering street lamp in white pulsation as Coco walks into the scene and meets cobra.
"The white 1965 GT K-Code Fastback whips around a corner. It plays Words by Missing Person. " Let me tell you about my thought process here. White is the color of Coco. You'll see it in many places with her: the albino dog, her hair, her pearl necklace, the milky bathwater, the white fur coat, etc. The song Words is actually my nod of the hat to an aesthetics . When you watch the video you'll see an athletic woman with a shock of white hair. The song it self is about a break down of communication. Like between Nigel and Coco. It's a audio foreshadowing . And there might be a chase scene with these two monstrous cars. I would definitely tie it to Coco.
The blue feather has turning into a homage to Robert Zemeckis . Originally the homage was actually a passage in Victor Hugo's Les Mes. The original scene at the sex club was different . Hugo's passage was " There were corpses here and there, and pools of blood on the pavement. I remember a white butterfly which went and came in the street" I see the contrast of the white butterfly and red blood popped out to me and I thought it was a nice way to tie Cobra's color red and Coco color white together. So the scene, and I warn you this is graphic, was actually white moths in a small murmuration fluttering past a pile of bloody corpses fucked by shaggy black dogs on a marble dais. The dogs white fangs biting into bellies pulling out intestines and shaking them in a wild frenzy. On the sides shadowy businessmen watch headlong on ornately carved ebony thrones . Woman caressed them and poured bourbon into their heavy lead glasses. The image is powerful. Maybe too powerful? Beyond obscene. It didn't really fit the genre either so I cut it. The floating blue feather is really just a relic from that thought process. I'm not in love with it at all.
I spoke with Matt Lazarus and he has some excellent insights into building the script with more specificity . Milking the visuals and getting more specific with the dialogue . Right now it just seems like dialogue for the sake of dialogue. What I plan to do is build a map of relationships and interconnections . The only relationship I have 100% is Cobra and Coco being lovers. I was thinking Nigel was maybe a John... but to Matt they sounded like a married couple whose life went to shit after he got hurt in the war.
Ideally I will give this for all characters: Name, look, traits, and secrets. Their relationships will center around the MacGuffin or their secrets. Once I work out their relationships I can focus on their specific physical , psychological behaviors and dialogues and how to portray that within the genre.
BTW The rape part is to mess with the viewers expectations and build tension. We will never experience Cobra doing that in the film.