November 4, 2023

This is a longer one that started in Variety Coffee Shop on Nassau Street. For a coffee shop on the cusp of the financial district, the music in here is always phenomenal. Yves Tumor last time, now The Cure. I promise I’m not just flexing my taste in music, this comes back later.

I feel like one of the challenges of the past year has been parsing out what advice to listen to and what to reject, which is an extension of the creative process anyway — lots of opinions, inputs, suggestions-to-judgements, mostly with good intentions, many even generous or vulnerable, and I try not to lose sight of this when I’m presented with something I need to (gently) reject, because as malleable as I try to be, I have to trust that I know best at the end of the day — and it’s impossible for this to be the case 100% of the time, far from it, but I have to *trust* that it is or else we are rudderless; a ship without a captain.

Patience is preached so much in filmmaking, because the resources of this collaborative, expensive, commercialized art form perceived through the most capitalist of lenses is out of reach for so many of us for so long, if not forever. But I think in the context of movies, it can be a dangerous word — of course, “patience” is important, necessary, frankly inevitable, but preaching patience can also mean “wait”, even if this isn’t an intentional or malicious encoding of the word.

“You have a terrific script or idea, and you want to make sure you are doing justice and due diligence to your vision and your collaborators, take the proper time to hone your vision, find the right people, raise the money you need to do this properly…”

“…wait for permission. If you work outside of the symbiotic systems that make up the film industry, your film isn’t going to be welcomed with open arms to any of the gatekeepers that could get your film to the audience that you so want. Labs, film funds, agencies and sales agents, they are all intertwined, why go around them? They *could* help you…” 

The slide from encouragement to discouragement is seamless, and this is all constructed from things told to me almost verbatim — mostly with a warm vocal inflection from someone who I do believe wants me and my collaborators to succeed.

I don’t know if the two paragraphs are all that different. There is truth and noise in both and like anything else I have to parse the truth out of the noise, if there is even something to parse. I don’t know. As I get older, the more I become convinced that filmmaking is an exercise in listening. Not just learning who to listen to, what to listen to, but how to listen.

This started as an entry on “patience”, and we’ve moved to the art of listening, but I think they’re intertwined. Listening not just to people, but to cues from yourself, from the world around you. “Patience” can only take you so far, as there will always be someone in your ear telling you “not now”, even if it’s enshrouded in warmer, more positive language with the best of intentions.

A brief detour (again, I promise it all comes full circle): a month ago I attended this year’s New York Film Festival and had one of the most invigorating filmgoing stretches of my life. New films by Alice Rohrwacher, Bertrand Bonello, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, and Andrew Haigh intoxicated me with their boldness and audacity; reminding me why I am trying to live the life that I am. Most of the time, even reading these names stirs an excitement in me, a little flutter in my chest that many would equate with arousal.

Not right now, though. It happens sometimes, though I’ve learned not to worry about it (there’s an impotence joke in here somewhere). There was a time when thinking about the filmmakers who inspire me and not feeling that “arousal” made me nervous, like I was losing my passion, or more likely my head just wasn’t in the game. When I was in-between our two legs of shooting on A Muse — a physically and emotionally taxing production that left me yanking a few gray hairs out of my stubble at age 22 — I managed to track down the email address of one of those inspirations, the filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin, and after a cry for guidance thinly veiled as fan mail, we talked about this and he spoke about how film and film history — nourishing as it is during writing — “starts to be useless” as shooting approaches. I don’t have permission to share, but I don’t think he’d mind: “I have to fall in love with the reality I will film one day: locations, and actors.” Scouting, shortlisting, costumes, conversations. You fall in love with the process, with YOUR film.

This image from Desplechin’s film Kings & Queen was my desktop background throughout production on A Muse — I remember what a lifeline it was for inspiration and the fuel to go out and create whenever I opened my computer, and I remember the fear when it was no longer that.

Looking back at this photo of Adrian’s smile on the set of A Muse, I can tell that lack of titillation from the history of cinema is a yearning to be in THAT place of working, of falling in love with the process. Maybe I’m just impatient. But more than ever I’m less convinced of that word’s definition.

All I know is that I want to make the best film possible, out of ambition and love for this medium I’ve made my life, but also out of a feeling of responsibility to my collaborators, my actors, my cinematographer. This is often where patience is urged, but within that responsibility is *another* responsibility — the responsibility to make it happen, to not wait for permission. Are patience and urgency two sides of the same coin? It seems to me like one is useless without the other.

I have to go to work, but back to the music: my ear is caught by Chapterhouse, and then Sonic Youth’s 2006 song “Incinerate”.  (Again, stay with me here, the other entries won’t be this long.)

My route to Sonic Youth, like most music, was through film. This was my first encounter with their 21st century catalog, because Claire Denis directed the video. I remember watching this video, probably 15 or 16 years old, on a desktop computer in my parents’ basement. I was spending all of my time at Northwest Film Forum, a Seattle film center, and the smell of their peanut-oil-popcorn was caked to the inside of my nostrils (and probably the outside of my clothes). When I think about that time in my life, what is the first sensation that comes to mind?

Impatience.

(Maybe “urgency” is a kinder word. Or restlessness.)

From Jean Renoir: “My father said of Mozart, whom he worshipped, “He wrote music because he could not prevent himself,” to which he added, “It was like wanting to pee.” It’s like my bladder was about to explode, 24/7. And I still carry some of that feeling with me today. Had I been even more “patient”, I don’t know what would be different about my life or career — maybe my films would be richer, deeper, more widely seen or distributed, or maybe they wouldn’t have been made at all. But in the world I live in today, they exist, and they wouldn’t exist without that urgency.

I went home and watched the video for Incinerate for the first time in years, and I couldn’t believe the compositional similarities to scenes from All I’ve Been Wanting, despite the differences in aesthetic and approach:

I don’t know where this entry ends. I’m listening to the song and thinking about the different meanings the same piece of art can take on throughout our lives, as we change and it exists frozen in time. The lyrics take on a different meaning today, though I know that I’m twisting their meaning to resonate with everything at the forefront of my mind. Most of the time that is unconscious, today, it’s extremely conscious. Maybe it’s the same thing with the stills from the video and from our film — after all, they are close-ups of musicians performing. But I’m choosing to see the parallel today.

“The firefighters hose me down / I don’t care, I’ll burn out anyhow…”

The perils of impatience, I guess.

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