3. What is The Path Forward?
February 5th, 2024
The night before the first day of shooting any movie, I always send out a motivational letter to the cast and crew to try and psych everyone up and start the first day on a high note. Usually, everyone is quite busy and a little frazzled and the letter mostly falls on distracted ears, so I've accepted it's mostly for me — to psych myself up and remind me why we're doing this against all the noise.
Going through past “diaries” — mostly stray notes and journal entries untethered to anything in particular — there's a lot of me either drafting these letters or what is basically dreaming about writing them: because in a situation where that letter is being written, it means we're shooting — tomorrow. The movie is happening, and I'm reminding myself that it's here, it's real, and [blank] is why we're doing it. It's projecting an uncertain moment that hasn't come yet, but the letter also facilitates a reminder of “why”, and maybe that's more essential now, when we're trying to build a movie from the ground up out of nothing, than the night before when we're all very aware how real it all is because everyone is drowning in work.
The letters are too personal to share in a public forum; either because I'm saying something vulnerable about myself or my relationship to my collaborators or the material, or because I would be mortified at the sentimentality to something I said 5+ years ago removed from context. Still, revisiting them, even with the occasional wince, is helpful. I’m still wrapping my head around the oxymoron of “temporary permanence” of being away from NYC or any of my collaborators that is my life right now; in the same moment grateful for the time and space to work but also feeling a bit crushed under the sometimes too generous amount of time and space that results in a feeling of perpetually kicking tires without going anywhere. But seeing the “we’re shooting a movie tomorrow” email drafts, as I try to find the right balance of being uplifting without preachiness, reminds me that we’ve done it before, and we can do it again.
In an attempt to conjure some of that same “let’s go!” energy, I think about films or filmmakers that have been inspirational as of late, but sometimes going back to that same well can start to feel stale. I try to take a step back and just think about anything that is exciting, right now, hands to keyboard:
Sam Fuller's The Naked Kiss, Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch, the recurring subjective point-of-view shot of Sandra Hüller looking at her son in Anatomy of a Fall, Nan Goldin, Glenn Branca, Yves Tumor, black-and-white photos of the soon-to-be-closed-for-two-years (formerly East) German movie palace Kino International in Berlin, the lyrics of Frankie Goes To Hollywood's The Power of Love making their way into the dialogue in All Of Us Strangers, Arthur Russell, ANOHNI, the multi-authored Lightning Over Water (Ed Lachman's photography in particular), the late production designer Christopher Hobbs, Isabelle Huppert and Lili Monori in Márta Mészáros’ The Heiresses, Cimino by Charles Elton…
The list is getting too long. I'll become overwhelmed if I'm a conduit for too many things all at once. Maybe giving up caffeine was a mistake because now I'm relying on the power of art (?) to be my primary stimulant (bananas or nuts aren't a replacement; anyone who tells you that has never given up caffeine before).
But in combing through this list and looking at pictures, as well as listening to music/sounds, I found these three images — from Edvard Munch, The Heiresses, and Nan Goldin's photograph Self-Portrait on Top of Brian Kissing, NYC—that all lead into one another, almost seamlessly. There's a link. My first entry was finding unexpected links in my work after hearing Sonic Youth in a NYC Financial District coffee shop; now, a few months later, I'm grasping for some kind of inspiration or jolt and thinking of random, disparate pieces of art to feel something, and the links are appearing again. Maybe the links aren't so random — there is *something* within free association that connects all the above that extends beyond inspiration or the warmth they generate in me.
There's a story in these three decontextualized images, in this sequence — or in the reverse, too.
I titled this entry “What is the path forward?” after having started the morning catching up on emails and preparing myself for a day of continuing to unpack how the movie gets financed, which is very targeted, specific, and numbing research that sometimes just becomes googling “how to finance movie” once I've become a little too numb. But this entry, naturally, became about something else — a different path; this sort of this rah-rah we're about to shoot a movie letter, but to myself, right now.
But it’s not a call to action or a rousing, grand speech; rather, it’s a reminder of what inspires me — and my need or necessity to try and draw a line through what interests, inspires, scares, insert-eight-other-verbs’ me — which is, at the end of the day, Transmission is. It’s also what A Muse is, and there’s a discussion to be had that it’s what any movie or piece of art is. Money is material and I may never be in control of what does and doesn’t get made, but the world will continue to exist, and art will continue to exist in response to the world, and I’ll always have some kind of vessel or means, even if it’s just this, of trying to draw that line.
Maybe that is the — rather, a — path forward, for now: that line…or, that line?
I don’t know, but I have to get back to work.
Siri, google “how to finance movie”.
