Thursday, January 25, 2007

Feature Length Rough Cut

I just left an intense couple of hours in our editing suite watching a cut of our "shoot a feature film in three days without letting the actors see a script or even fully disclose our intentions to them" experiment. If you ask me if I like it, I really can't say. I have way too much baggage to come to any easy conclusion. I will say that the more I resist the pull of my various expectations and look at it as a record of the work that we did and the decisions that were made, it is a tremendously valuable on-going experience. On-going is key. Part of my unrealized expectations is my desire to be done with it. I wonder if that is realsitic. Perhaps it isn't a fair comparison, but am I ever to be done with my children? Surely not. My mother has been dead for nearly a decade and our relationship lives on. Why should I want to end it in the first place? Because it didn't manifest into an award winner? Because it didn't launch my career?

There is one scene that I really like. I didn't write it prior to the shoot. I came up with the idea in the middle of working and ad-libbed it. You can hear me feeding lines and questions to the actors in the rough cut. There's a lot of space in the performances and I think it's the most successful scene in terms of tone. I think had more of the scenes been shot in the way that I asked, there might be more scenes like this. Perhaps not.
Though JKM confessed that he was terrified throughout the shoot and gave up on my approach, deciding to shoot it as a documentary. He just told me this tonight, which was news to me that helped make some sense of things.
Over and over again, I learn that as a director you have to stay on top of your vision. Nobody else is going to do it for you.
Another thing that comes to mind as I watch this film is that I've got to work harder to give up trying to make things work and dig deeper into what I want to see and what I want and need to explore thematically.
There's a lot to learn if I am teachable.

Burning Eyes,
Signore Direttore

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