NYFF 2011: A Separation

Out of four movies I've seen in the Festival, A Separation, an Iranian film written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, is at the top of the list so far. Compared to some of the more self-consciously cinematic films we've seen, A Separation is almost decadently rich in human complexity, while it shows no interest in genre or style. This is not to say that it is not meticulously made. It is an astounding directorial feat, extraordinarily acted and edited, and so powerful that you forget you are watching a movie.
A married middle class couple in Teheran is going through a painful separation. The wife wants to emigrate and take with her the couple's only child, a 12 year-old girl. She wants the husband to come with them. The husband will not go. His father has Alzheimer's and he needs to take care of him. We learn this at a brilliant opening scene, the couple looking straight at the camera, telling their grievances to a judge. Although we hear the judge's questions and admonitions, we never see him, but soon we are as involved as he is in the painstaking minutiae of marital recriminations, since we are watching from his point of view.
This simple separation sets in motion a spiral of consequences that affects far more people than this nuclear family. From the very beginning, we are asked to be the judges, and soon we will realize that it requires beyond Salomonic wisdom, patience and fortitude to figure out what is just and what is true. Life is extraordinarily complicated, and life under the current Iranian regime, makes it more so. This movie is probably the Iranian film that paints the most comprehensive, detailed look at life in Iran today, and it broadens considerably our limited notions of what that is.
This opening scene could be a spectacular short film in itself. People talk over one another, the judge seems either blasé or exhausted about the whole thing, but the law is that the child can't leave without the father's consent and that the divorce needs to have absolute mutual consensus. They are at an impasse.
Good luck to me trying to summarize the plot. I don't think I'm spoiling anything, since in this movie God is in the details, and I am grossly simplifying, but proceed with caution:
The wife decides to move out of the house until the issue is resolved, so the husband needs to hire a woman to come and help him take care of his father. It is evident that it was the wife who bore the brunt of the responsibilities at home, and neither the husband nor the daughter know how anything works in that house. The cleaning woman, who brings her adorable little daughter along, was not told that she had to touch the father, let alone clean up after his incontinence. This constitutes a severe religious problem for her. She can't even tell her husband that she is alone in a house with a man. So the employer lied to her, and she lies to her husband, because she is desperate for work. All lies seem to come from simple fears: the employer urgently needs this woman and is afraid she won't work for him because of her beliefs. The woman is afraid of offending God and her husband. One day, the guy comes home to find the woman and her daughter gone and his father on the ground, disconnected from his oxygen tank. The woman comes back from an errand and he is so angry that he fires her. As he fires her, he pushes her out the door, she falls in the stairway.
Anybody who comes from a country with deep economic divisions will immediately recognize the patronizing tone of the husband towards the cleaning woman, and the endless reserves of frustration and anger from her unemployed, debt-riddled husband towards the well-to-do and educated. We never think of Iran in those terms, because all we know about is censorship and religious rule, but even though this religious reality is essential to the plot, the topic at the heart of this movie is not that, but class warfare. It just so happens that the classes are divided in terms of religion as well: the rich are progressive and not religious, and the poor are devout to the point of superstition. They will be satisfied if someone swears on the Koran (but even they, in a pinch, are ready to bend the rules). The rich could not care less about these notions. You can imagine the clash of cultures.
Once the force of unexpected consequences is unleashed, you sit at the edge of your seat, listening to different people give their versions of what happened. The law deals with absolutes, but human life is mired in nuance and equivocation and ambiguity. This is the source of such unbearable, rising dramatic tension throughout the film that it is no wonder that A Separation is being promoted as a thriller. Rashomon has been mentioned in connection to this film, but the style could not be more different, starting from the fact that everybody is in front of the judge at once and there's a messy debate between the parties. Revelations unravel in an endless spiral of motivated, justified, complex lying. Other people are asked to give testimony and they too suffer the consequences of bearing witness to a simple conversation.
What is the purpose of the truth? Can it be bent? Can it accommodate human mistakes? Who is to blame? Is the law fair or impossible? Can ancient notions of honor coexist with life in a modern country? At one point the judge cradles his head in his hands and we feel his pain. Who could possibly mete real justice on such murky terrain? Even as he refrains from depicting the Iranian regime in simplistic terms, Farhadi's insistence on human fallibility is the strongest point he makes against a regime that governs through divine absolutes.
The wonder of this movie lies not only in that it has an incredibly complex and sophisticated plot, but that it never abandons the wisdom, humanity and the fairness with which it treats its characters, none of whom are purely evil or purely good, but most of whom are maddeningly self-interested, irrational, human. It deliberately leaves some of our questions unanswered. After spending such an intense time with the characters, we probably can come to our own conclusions. But it is much more than an incredibly compelling legal procedural. What makes A Separation enormously moving are the bonds between parents and children, the unbearable loss of family cohesion, for rich or for poor.

Grande Enchilada: Auteure

Greetings from Mexico City, darlings, where I am shepherding my little short at the 6th International Jewish Film Festival. It is great to see the audience's reaction, which is very different than in the States. There, people laugh out loud, whereas here they just titter. Mr. Ex-Enchilada thinks it's because sexual innuendo and harrassment are way too common here. Perhaps.
I got a huge kick of showing the short at the Cineteca Nacional; the audience there was very appreciative and engaged. One guy gave me three optional endings, one of which struck me as quintessentially Mexican, as it involved the services of a lady of the night.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a woman demanded to know what my short and the other movie showing were about. Go in and find out, lady. Am I the only person who finds it annoying when people expect others to do all the work for them? War and Peace, what's it about?
I was pissed off, as in the second screening on the other side of town, the projectionist screwed up and showed my film with the wrong aspect ratio so everything looked scrunched and ugly. I raised hell but Mexico is the land of excuses (instead of solutions, for instance) and one just capitulates after too many of those. I participated in a very interesting talk with other Mexican Jewish filmmakers that soon turned into a polemic about the misperceptions between Mexicans and Mexican Jews, that had little to do with cinema. Such are the vagaries of living in a country that, tolerant and generous as it is, is not a melting pot. This is endlessly interesting and fodder for a lenghtier post.
In the meantime, I'm trying to organize my eating strategies so I can cram the most Mexican food in without going overboard (good luck to me).
All I know is I can't wait til Wednesday when I'm eating my tacos de carnitas right across from where the short is screening. Nana, buche and cuerito, here I come.

Short Order

Darlings:
I'm just back from my very first film festival, the reputable Palm Springs Short Fest, where our short Close Relations premiered for the first time in America. I was happy to see my short perform very well, and I was ecstatic to show it in front of an audience comprised of filmgoers and filmmakers. The audience reacted the way they were meant to, laughing and cringing in all the right places, which means I did my job.
I had a great time at the festival, meeting wonderful, talented people and making new friends. And of course, watching a bunch of short films, some of them excellent.
I was lucky I attended Palm Springs, a very good festival, run super professionally, with a great breadth of shorts.
I learned many things that may be apparent to people with more experience than me in this circuit but to me they were kind of news.
The neglect of short films, the lack of interest and the lack of support of young filmmakers in this country is taking a noticeable toll. For the most part, it is not a coincidence that the best shorts, the awarded shorts, tend to come from countries that help their filmmakers: the U.K, Spain, France, Canada, Israel, etc.
Here, such a thing is considered communism, and therefore the American shorts (and for that matter many independent features) simply and for the most part do not have the level of their European counterparts. Not in production values, not in storytelling, not in originality, not in craftsmanship. It is interesting, right after the Olympics particularly, where Americans reigned supreme, to look at one niche in which we are losers; people mired in cinematic poverty. This is not to say that there were no good American films, but really, we can't compete.
It is ridiculous to expect our government to help. It doesn't do it with life and death issues like health care... But what appalls me is that we have the biggest film industry in the known universe, a place that generates thousands of millions of dollars in profits (by creating mostly appalling, immoral shit), and yet this industry gives almost nothing back.
I think that the only way Americans can understand how stupid and counterproductive this policy is, is to couch it in competitive terms. The Europeans are kicking our ass, big time. Now, they will tell me, who cares? Nobody cares for short films (unless you can put them in a cellphone screen). There is no market for them here, because it's not in the industry's interest. Instead of showing shorts before a feature, they show commercials. Would it be unthinkable to show 5 movie previews and one short?
But the problem is deeper. If young filmmakers had somewhere to go to for serious funding, and, having been given the responsibility, were encouraged to ply their craft with excellence, America could find its next wave of fantastic filmmakers and could compete and win in this arena, which in other places bears splendid fruit.
It really is not only about short film, which is as valid an entertainment and an art form as features, but it is about finding real talent for films. It is about the future of film. It's really just sad and ironic that American independent filmmakers have to go it alone.

The other thing I learned, or rather I confirmed, because I had heard it before, is that many festival programmers like to treat short filmmakers with condescension. Last year I was in a similar panel at the IFP Film Conference in NY, and in Palm Springs I attended a couple of panels in which these programmers are supposed to give us their pearls of wisdom about festival strategy. Some of these people have even written helpful advice books on submitting films to a festival (trying to make a buck by helping out, nothing wrong with that, right?).
To give you an idea, one of the books is called "How not to make a short film".
But that's all good. What is really offensive is the tone they use. They love recounting bad experiences with difficult filmmakers, and stupid things we all do. They forget that among us not everybody is a film student or a total amateur (and even if this was the case, this is not an excuse for the patronizing, disrespectful tone of the whole deal). Tough love is good. Contempt is not. I know the difference when I see it.
But does any filmmaker stand up and say, "don't you talk to me like that"? Did I? Nope. Why? Well, because these people wield the power to select your film or not. You don't want to antagonize them, and they know it. So they become this chummy, cliquish squad that supposedly talks about you and your film when you are not looking. So you better be on your best behavior.
I don't take these things personally. I believe they have every right to reject or accept my film under the set of criteria they see fit. But many filmmakers like me were very put off by their patronizing tone.
Still, you can always count on at least one asskisser in the audience, thanking them for all the hard work they do. He almost asked for forgiveness.
I would respectfully suggest to programmers they should stick to giving helpful, well-intentioned advice and zip the sob stories (my job is so hard, I have to watch 5000 films) and particularly the sarcasm, for their little clique. They talk about being tired of clichés, but if I ever hear a programmer again say that my film has to come from the heart, I will tear my heart out of my chest and eat it.
Filmmakers do not deserve to be treated like morons. We spend a lot of time, money and effort to try to make a film, pretty much on our own. Then we spend a lot of time, money and effort to try to make it into festivals. A little respect is in order.

In The Desert You Can't Remember Your Name...

Today, for instance, I was so happy to take a swim right outside my door early in the morning, that I locked myself out of my room. Apparently, it happens with some frequency in the rarefied desert air. However, since it is so darn hot, it was quite refreshing to wait for the maintenance guy in my dripping swimsuit, which pretty much dried out in seconds. While I waited, I even attempted some tai chi in the grass. Blame it on the heat, my darlings.


Then I took a ride through town in my ovenmobile, found the little downtown nestled against the spectacular hills (see below) and went to see Rosemary's Baby, whose amazing DP, William A. Fraker was there to tell stories about this legendary movie. He said he loves, admires and respects Roman Polanski. So do we! He said Polanski is a visual storyteller and that's because he comes from the Lodz film school. Hear, hear. (Yet listen to the way he uses sound. It is unbelievable).
The film still holds up. Visually it is a marvel. It is entirely disturbing in ways that one can't really rationalize. It is also very funny and over the top and it still gives one the creeps. This amazing film is 40 years old, people. It is fresher, and more daring than most of the crap made today. I have written about it elsewhere in this blog. I am a die hard Polanski fan.

At sunset, these mountains look incredible.

It's a good thing it is barely bearable to be outside in the middle of the day, because otherwise I'd be at the pool or communing with rattlesnakes in the desert. As such, I'm happy to go to the events of the festival where I will learn how to market my film, be discovered like Lana Turner at Schwab's and my life will change forever. Seriously, I want to see some shorts as well. See how we fare among the competition.

Inland Empire.

In the Desert

Greetings from Palm Springs, California, where we are attending the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival with our film Close Relations. It's big, well organized and cool.
I love the desert. It is beautiful. My ugly ass rented car feels like a sauna only a Russian could love.
It seems that at 5-6 pm it's hotter than it was at 1 pm. It's so hot, the airport is outdoors. It's so hot, you can have a delicious swim at night. Which we didn't do because we were busy going to opening night and the opening night party.
Yours truly was all alone and dreading human interaction, but interact she did with some fellow filmmakers who all share the same insane obsession. Some were very nice, others not so much, but it is all very interesting. This field definitely attracts some artists with narcissistic tendencies (and that includes moi).
Everybody and their mother is making films. On the other hand, here are the few, the proud, the indebted or the rich or the well connected.
The attendees, a motley crew, are a mix of suntanned retirees, gays and filmmakers. And mysterious people with badges that say "industry". Those are the ones I'm supposed to talk to. For there is apparently a short film industry. It's like the munchkins in Oz.
It's all very glamorous.

Short film = toddler

Making a short film is like having a toddler. Once he's out of the womb, it's a full time job to keep the creature alive and in festivals. It is also as expensive, almost.
This is mainly the reason why I haven't been able to write this week.
I'm happy to report that our humble short Close Relations has been selected for the Palm Springs International Film Festival, the first festival in US to invite our short. Close Relations was screened at Swansea Life in Wales (in competition for best short) and is due to be at the Salento Film Festival in Italy, all of which makes its mother extremely proud. But until Palm Springs came calling, I was wondering why the Americans did not want to play with my child. As the very perceptive Magnificent Arepa pointed out, perhaps the demographics of Palm Springs (retired people) make it relevant for the festival (my short is about an older gentleman hitting on his niece).
I'd like to think it's because it is a brilliant piece of filmmaking, but I'm the mother.

Time to Brag

It has been rejected by a lot of festivals here in the US, for reasons that are truly mysterious to me, but my short film Close Relations has been accepted at the Swansea Life Film Festival, in Wales, and it is in the Best Short competition.
I've always liked the Welsh. They gave us, among other treasures, Richard Burton, and my beloved Christian Bale, so I am immensely grateful.

But what I really want to do is direct

The reason, darlings, why you have not heard from me lately, is I was ensconced in a grueling, week long, independent film conference from IFP and I just couldn't blog. I was busy listening to "industry" people offering all kinds of contradictory advice to the gazillion aspiring screenwriters and film directors like me, who dream of becoming the next Stanley Kubrick (sans weird antisocial quirks).
I learned a lot of things. Mainly that:
1. Nowadays everybody and their uncle wants to make a movie. And seemingly everybody and their uncle ARE making a movie. This includes yours truly. (Everybody and their cousin are busy making documentaries).
2. It's really about who you know (and if you have to pay money to learn this lesson, as I did, you are a bit of a putz). To the credit of the IFP, the money we paid to learn such obvious pearls of wisdom was quite reasonable. It also got me a free beer.
3. People who want to make films are angry at Hollywood for not caring about social issues. PUHLEEZE do try to get over it. As if.
4. You have to have a film festival strategy. This presents a bit of a paradox. On the one hand, all festivals want to discover the diamond in the rough, the next super original whatever. That sounds great, since everybody and their uncle think they are the next super original whatever (this includes yours truly). But, you can't be sending your puny little film to every festival because then you are a festival whore and nobody will touch you.
7. There is way too much cinematic offer and dwindling demand. This is a serious lesson. More movies get released than people have time to see. I see this as a major problem. Everybody and their uncle seemed unfazed by this predicament.
6. If I hear the phrases follow your dream, be passionate about your vision and do your homework one more time, I will kill someone.

In a nutshell: the main paradox in the quest for the moviemaking holy grail is as follows:
It's About Who You Know, But They Want To Find Someone They Haven't Heard Of.

I wish dear Bertie Russell was on hand so that he could help us wrap our minds around this one.

You can divide everybody and their uncle in two groups:
The pushy ones, who know it's all about who you know; and the ones that hate networking with all the fibers of their being and try as hard as they can to approach someone in the hopes of getting to the stage of "who you know" (which in this case basically means detaching someone from their business card). Sadly, I tend to belong to this last category. But not for long.

Stay tuned.

Editing DIY

Dear dears: I'm editing my short movie myself. At the beginning I was totally panicked because me and technology are in shaky terms, like two clumsy dance partners who keep stepping in each other's toes. But after three days pushing cursors and cutting footage, I am loving it, even though I get into major problems that then I don't really know how to extricate myself from. Yesterday a wonderful solution was found for my floundering. Set the program at 99 undo commands. It's the only way.
Editing is fun. It is also somehow beautiful. It is playful and exciting, requires mechanical skill but also much more than that. The intangibles of knowing when to start and end a scene; what makes something funnier or more dramatic; what makes the story move at a good clip. You can change the tone and meaning of a scene just by cutting off some frames. You can make an actor's reaction more powerful by choosing just to show the meat of it. I know this may be obvious, but it is a wonderful discovery to do it yourself with your own little fingerinos.

There Is A Rough Cut!

You must have thought I had forgotten all about the little short I shot. Pas du tout, as we say in French.
I just went to Paris for a month and left it in the hands of an editor, who worked on it while I was away.
As you can imagine, the suspense was killing me, but I finally saw the first rough cut yesterday. It still needs a lot of work, and it is extremely rough and it has lots of problems, but I think it works. It is a very strange feeling to see the bits and pieces one shot in the course of three days, strung together into a story. Some stuff that I thought wasn't going to work, amazingly does. Other parts are going to need major tinkering, but with some sleight of hand we may make it work. It's the first time I feel something distantly related to exhilaration.

The Death of Film

Yesterday I attended a talk about Apple's Studio 2, or whatever it's called, which is the new bundled program that includes Final Cut Pro and a bunch of other things. I'm trying to learn the technical aspects of the craft, you see, so I don't stand like a moron in the middle of my next shoot, looking like a Neanderthal in Einstein's lab. That means that I go to shilling sessions like this, where a major geek explains horribly complicated (to me, that is) digital shit to other geeks.

Yesterday, the geek in question, who was a very nice guy, was talking about the cameras of the future and the postproduction of the future and the workflow of the future and I detected some terrifying glee in his voice as he spoke of the imminent demise of film. Hollywood is going digital, bla bla bla, soon film will be a thing of the past, like 8 Tracks or Betamax or even CD's.
To me this is tragic. Why? Because film is beautiful and digital video, as far as I can tell, is not. Because film spools and purrs and breaks and scratches and digital video is zeros and ones living in a scary virtual limbo of data files and hard disks. Film is sensual. Digital is not.
I know, we will get used to it. Supposedly, the visual aspect of the technology is going to improve. They are trying hard to replicate the beautiful textures and depths of film in digital video. I know for some my apprehension must seem like pining for a computer the size of a fridge, instead of enjoying a laptop. It's like those people who still prefer LP records to mp3's. Same thing. Mp3s are wonderful and the iPod is the eighth wonder of the world, but we miss the sounds and the touch and the hiss and the purr of the old technology. I miss the sound of rotary phones. I miss the hum and click of the IBM Selectric typewriter. That doesn't mean I don't love my laptop (I do hate my cellphone with a passion).
I look at the footage of my film, shot in HD. The actors' features, good and bad, are enhanced, as if you were looking at their every pore with a magnifying glass. Not even the most flawlessly beautiful actor in the world can withstand such scrutiny. And still everything seems kind of flat, or too perfect. Too defined. Human sight doesn't seem that defined to me. It has softer edges, no?
Sure, digital has huge convenient advantages: there is minimal processing -- it's called downloading and it's a bitch, but it's not like taking the negative to the lab. Video is also cheaper to produce. You don't have to worry about burning feet of film; now you have to worry, like I do, of losing footage that was not copied correctly, that is irrecoverable. I hate technology.

The Moment of Truth

The time has come to edit the footage I shot last week. My editor is back from Buenos Aires where I hope he fed himself with great beef and ample quantities of wine, cause he's going to need it.
David Mamet mentions in his book Bambi Vs Godzilla that it is said that you make a movie three times; once when you write it, next when you shoot it and finally when you cut it. I already know this is true from the first two steps. Because as you shoot what you wrote, you may realize it's too wordy or too slow. Mamet advices the neophyte director: pick up the pace. I had the instinct to do just that in a couple of instances, but I'm afraid not enough. One of the things I criticize in other movies is when actors seem to move in slow motion. It just kills the pace of the film. It's very amateurish. But that's what the editor is for, among other things, to chop things up to a reasonable clip.
When you are standing on a set, the takes may look better or worse than when you see the footage. I'm really curious to see whether the takes I thought had nuggets of good in them, actually do.
Film is a multi-craft product. It takes way too many special skills. I was thinking of when I simply write. It is myself v. the page. It is only me and whatever skill I possess as a writer. Movies, on the other hand, depend on the very specific and different skills from a little platoon of people. And everybody better know what they're doing! The beauty of even the most horridly mercenary American films is you can see the astounding level of craftsmanship. But that you can also see in a much more satisfying way in modest, but spectacularly well made French films. You look at the way they are acted, staged, shot, edited, and it is a sheer frisson of joy, they are so well made, and so not vulgarly calling attention to their expense, like our unfortunate American counterparts do.
So I need to learn to do things well in film. There is a lot to learn...

Close Relations, The Shoot Part II

As you can imagine, yours truly was so exhausted after three nights of filming that I could barely speak in coherent sentences and thus I let a few images tell you a bit about the shoot.
It seems to have gone well, considering it was my first outing into the wonderful world of do-it-yourself cinema. The only horrid thing that happened which is eating up my entrails as I speak is that we had problems downloading all of the digital information into our hard drives, which complicated things considerably after the shoot. I still need to see if everything we shot is safe and downloadable.
In the new world of HD video everything is a digital file. No more rolls of film, no more celluloid, no more tapes, no more film purring through the camera as you shoot (I really miss that sound). This is very practical and saves a lot of money. But as everything that's to do with technology, it is a ghost in the machine kind of thing. It feels much less tactile and in a sense much more fragile than good old film. As long as the material was saved, I will be relieved. If not, I will be armed and dangerous.
I think I surrounded myself with mostly utterly professional, talented people. Starting with my fantastic actors, Dick Latessa and Annie Meisels, who were real pros and extraordinarily talented. It also helped tremendously that they were extremely nice to everybody and seemed to bond instantly. I can't imagine what may happen when actors don't like each other. It must be hell on earth. But these two got along like a house on fire and made all of our lives quite easy.
My DP (director of photography) Manuel Billeter was very thorough and it looks like he did a great job. Of what I could see from some footage, it looks great. He had an amazing crew of three or four, who worked fast, and fabulously. I was particularly impressed with our gaffer, a super talented chick who solved every problem in a second and had great creative ideas.
My producer Susan Leber, did a great job putting the production together. She was unfortunately stuck, among her other responsibilities, to making sure we were fed because we had no catering person, a thankless, boring job.
My friend Marta was my art director/wardrobe/propmaster and she was fantabulous. Marta is so dedicated and thorough and meticulous, she could do this job and excel at it forever, like she excels at other matters of creativity and style. My friend Laura helped me with script. Continuity is the bane of my existence, people. Never again will I make fun of a movie where a character enters a scene with a hat and leaves without it. And neither should you. That stuff is a tedious bitch, because you have to constantly remember where were things before you moved them around. Was the curtain open or closed? Was she wearing the scarf or not. Did she use her left hand? GEEEEEZ. And don't get me started with the eye line business and the crossing the line business. I know for some people this is easy as pie. Not for me. Poor Laura tried heroically to keep me honest in this continuity business, but I just don't have the head for this minutiae. It's the last thing you want to think about when you have to worry about keeping the performances fresh, the camera moves meaningful.
Bea drew magnificent storyboards (which came in really handy) and helped with the boring job of downloading. Our sound guy was an eccentric character from somewhere in Eastern Europe called Andrej, who made strange pronouncements and warbled Beethoven's Fifth incessantly. The sound seems fine so far. I hope it is because we won't know until we edit the monster.
In any case, everybody was fine except for an asshole assistant director who made it his business to be thoroughly disliked by a few people, including myself. He talked a good talk, which is why we hired him, but he was always late and worse, thoroughly disinclined to be respectful or cooperative. He was one of those geniuses who thinks he knows better than anybody else, an arrogant wiseass with no class, no manners and no discernible talent. He kinda knew what his job was, but he didn't do it well. He was incredibly inconsistent. As I said to Laura, his personality got in his way. I hope he is reading this. If you are, Josh, let me put it this way: The name of your job is ASSISTANT Director. That means that you assist the director. You are at the service of the director and you also make sure the director is aware of the realities and constraints of timing and production issues. Your job is not to question the director's or the DP's decisions, or to harass the director when she is taking five minutes to finalize wardrobe after waiting five fucking hours for the set to be ready because you are not doing your fucking job. Neither is it your responsibility to give unsolicited, snide directing lessons. Your job is not that the director has to ask you where are the actors and to tell you where to go fetch them because you don't know. And if you are supposed to show up at 1:30 for a pre-pro meeting, you don't arrive at three and without one word of apology. Truth is we should have fired your ass that very day, but I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt and I will not forgive myself for this one. I should have talked to Susan immediately, who also complained of your rudeness the next day and we should have sent you packing. But we didn't. Lessons learned. I learned other lessons as well. Some of them technical, interesting, some of them painful. All of them useful. At one point I was thinking that directing was wonderful, except you have to deal with people. But in general, most people who converged for my little vanity project were fantastic.
Marta asked me if I didn't feel a bit of post partum depression after it was done. I did not. I was hugely relieved and happy it was over. I think I will feel the baby blues when I edit it and finish it and send it out into the world.

Close Relations: The Shoot Part I

Art is so hard, director sips Red Bull. Director doesn't sleep for three nights in a row. Not so much because of the awful, if effective, beverage, but because the shooting days are from 3 pm to 3 am.

The director watches the action. One thing that happens on a set, to judge from photos taken, is that the director constantly sits and watches as other people spin themselves silly trying to make things happen.

The fantastic Dick Latessa and Annie Meisels. My fabulous actors.

Countdown to the Shoot

We're less than 24 hours away. In one word:
AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!
Having said this, as I told my friend and fabulous production designer Marta, I'm so calm, I'm worried. This atypical (in me) lack of worry troubles me. But it sure feels nice. Either I am in some kind of shock, or I feel that I am prepared. Okay, lack of worry may be overstating it a bit. On the other hand, seems like I'm blessed with a group of very talented people who are working hard to make it all happen, so why indeed should I worry? Really, more than worry, I feel boundless excitement. I feel like I have a pogo stick inside me that's out of control. Squadrons of Mexican jumping beans. However, witnesses claim I seem calm and collected.
Let me tell you, this is one of the wonderful things about not being a spring chicken anymore. Age makes it all feel more grounded. I strongly recommend it.

Three Days to the Shoot...

...and I'm having the weirdest dreams. I love it!

Yesterday I dreamed I was chewing gum and it got stuck to one of my fillings and I tried to pull it out and I pulled gobs and gobs of chewing gum that felt like concrete and I yanked my molar out and out came also my two front teeth. And I thought, oh great, I can't shoot a movie like this, without my two front teeth. I looked like a homeless junkie.
All of you amateur Freudians, you can go to town on this one. All of a sudden I'm having a very active dreamlife. I had a horrid nightmare that revealed to me part of the theme of my movie, and more interestingly, my deepest fears about making it. All I can say is, the subconscious rules! Too bad it happens while we're sleeping. On the other hand, if it happened in broad daylight, we'd all be living in a Ken Russell movie. And we don't want that, really.

Moviemaking 101

My friend and acting teacher Rob recommended that I read the book "A Film Director Prepares". And I'm glad I did. It tells you the really basic stuff that you think you know, but not quite, and it's been really useful.
Perhaps you already know this, smart readers, but through this process I have been discovering that film indeed works like a language. We get it instinctively, like babies who learn how to speak without knowing the rules, but it has a definite grammar and a set of rules and processes that you can learn and that are super smart and highly intuitive. I know, DOH, but bear with me.
So I love looking at the stuff I kind of know instinctively, and then finding out what it's named and what it really means and what it's good for, what it is supposed to communicate. What blows my mind is that film language and the process of making a film are really very smart and well designed. It's like musical notation or math, a crowning achievement of human thought, as far as I'm concerned.
Who came up with this wonder, of stringing images together to tell a story not in real time? What a beautiful thing.

My Name in Lights

Darlings:
I'm in a high state of excitement, because by this time next week, I will be on my second day of shooting my modest little film. That is to say, if everything goes as planned. So far, it's been a blast. It's fun to feel excitement and fear and, at the same time, feel strangely calm as well. Okay, not that calm, but also not that fearful either. Modestly intimidated and hugely motivated.
I've tried to prepare as much as I can, but I also don't want to overdo the preparation. I know I'm going to screw up somewhere and that's part of the deal. The trick is to screw up less than reasonably expected. It's fun to be involved in something that you don't know all the answers to (hell, you don't even know many of the questions). I haven't felt like I've learned this much in a long, long time and it feels great. Cause you know what, advertising pays well only because otherwise nobody in their right mind would subject themselves to such enforced, and useless inanity.
But in this little, complicated movie world, I'm in my element, my dears. Let's face it: it ain't no secret I enjoy bossing people around. I'd like to think I do it nicely and politely and collaboratively, but I love to feel people are paying attention to me. Didn't need too many years of therapy to figure that one out. And as long as something worthy comes out of it, why not? It's very bracing.
I have written film reviews for years and I'm very happy to have the tables turned on me. Eat some humble pie.
I wish I could tell you some juicy gossip about this process, but I don't want to compromise anything before we start, because this is a public site, read by the six of you, but one never knows. Besides, there is really not that much to tell yet. I'm looking forward to working with the actors, and I hope that I can communicate to them what I'm looking for. Then I hope they help me and then I hope that what I want comes out on screen.
So wish me luck.

Eat My Shorts

I saw the live action Academy Award nominees for Best Short.
The winner, playwright Martin McDonagh's Six Shooter, is way better than the rest and deserves to win. It is superbly written, a pitch black comedy with extraordinary dialogue and acting. I can't get it out of my head. I won't attempt to try to explain it to you, except to say that it starts out with an extremely dramatic moment and continues escalating until one doesn't think it's possible to do so anymore. The premise is almost ludicrous. Four strangers meet on a train; they've all had a very recent death in the family. From there all hell breaks loose, thanks to a funny psycopath who chooses to engage his fellow travelers in conversation.
This short is a master class in condensed dramatic writing. Every person who wants to direct or write a short should consider watching this one homework. Maybe it's unfair for the other nominees to have to compete against a major living playwright (and boy, does it make a difference). Still, it's his first film.
The other shorts kind of pale by comparison, so it's a good thing that Six Shooter is screened last. The first one, Our Time is Up, is a frivolous, mildly amusing short from the U.S., about a bored shrink who is suddenly told he only has 6 months to live and, as expected, starts telling off his patients. It's conventional and predictable, and nobody in it is a real human being.
The Last Farm, hailing from a Scandinavian country (I couldn't tell which and there were no end credits) is about an old guy who lives in a remote farm with his old wife, who's just died. He buries her and himself in a little plot next to the house. The piece is beautifully shot, but I didn't buy it. Death is the worst cliche in the movies and the worst lie. In real life, dead people start leaking and stinking after like five minutes, about twelve if you live in cold weather. They do not retain the beatific composure they show you in the movies. Their faces become distorted, unrecognizable, all their expression is sucked out of them. It is an ugly affair. And so, the fact that this old guy lays down to sleep next to his very dead wife, who's been dead for at least a day, seems to me bogus. It's a powerful short, morbid and humorless, and the second best of the lot, but I didn't like it.
Cash Back, from England, is a very amusing, if rambling story about a slightly smarmy art student who works the late shift at a supermarket. It is quite funny, but tonally all over the place, veering between philosophical musings about art and beauty and sheer slapstick (I was much entertained by the slapstick, less thrilled with the musings). The short has an advertisingy feel to it, relying on Matrix-like fx, the sort that are routinely abused in car commercials. Also, this artist kid expostulates about the beauty of women yet all the naked women they show are leggy models in poses that remind you more of Axe ads than of the concept of female beauty in art (you know, unshaved armpits, tubbiness). They are too perfect, too thin, too tall, too creamy. Ergo: bogus.
Ausreisser, from Germany, is a whimsical story about a child that appears at a guy's doorstep, a sort of annunciation. It's well done, but I don't like sugary whimsy.
So then Six Shooter, the most outrageous, over the top of the shorts, seems the most human to me. And it's all in the writing. Sharp, complex, funny, vicious, real.