6. Is Every Movie About Fear?
September 10th, 2024
More emails to go out. More reachouts, pitching not just your movie but yourself and your own story, and when you've couched your sense of personhood within your work, it's like you're pitching your own self-worth as well. I'm working on it NOT feeling like this, but it’s a process.
A few weeks ago, during a meeting, one of our new collaborators brought up the Nick Cave sequence in Wings of Desire (not prompted by me, if you can believe it!). Historically I have a tendency to resist using my very favorite films as specific reference points or the type of influence I’d wear on your sleeve. Some of this is not wanting to wear *anything* referential on my sleeve; to let the work first and foremost be its own thing or object or ecosystem, but I think it’s even more not wanting to hurt or denigrate the things I love, or to protect my own relationship with them. Will my relationship with the things I consider holy in my life when I try to “use” them; to holster or harness them for something I’m making that I may look back with the wincing of seeing an old yearbook photo when I’m older, wiser?
It’s kind of silly when you say it like that. Partially for the own implications of ego; which isn’t as binary as “large” or “small” or “fragile”; it can be (and is) all of these things at once, and all three are on display in this anecdote. A fear of a lack of confidence; a fear of inevitable change or lack of pride — things I don’t have right now, but the fear they might come, and how those feelings will then permeate the films that made me (and subsequently) made my own film. But a larger ego always lurks beneath self-deprecation.
On my first feature, at a time where I would have been quietly afraid to pull from a movie “in my blood” like Wings of Desire, I made a lot of choices motivated by fear. I had dropped out of college, for a multitude of reasons but making this film was not an insignificant piece of that — what if this was a mistake? How could I make it less likely to be a mistake? I was still a novice, but all of the sudden I found myself shooting coverage for the sake of coverage, just to cover my bases. None of those scenes worked because there wasn’t an idea behind the approach beyond fear. Fear of failure, fear of making both large-scale “life” mistakes as well day-to-day mistakes when making your film. Looking back, nearly all of my decision-making was driven by fear; not by creativity or excitement or an urgency to tell or show or depict or be a part of a conversation larger than myself. At the same time, my sense of ego was the most inflated it's ever been; I saw myself as a top prospect who would inevitably crush a homer in my first major league at-bat.
From my camera roll on the “set” of my first movie in Sarajevo, 2015 — even the landscape feels like looking at a yearbook photo; awakening feelings of embarrassment and remembering only what I didn’t know and who I wasn’t. The voice as an artist I’d yet to discover. Yet, if it wasn’t for making this film when I was 20, I wouldn’t have arrived at some of those very important conclusions that have dictated the path I’m on now. Just like Wings of Desire, The Life of Flowers is part of me. And we will revisit this very same landscape in Transmission, through eyes that are both new and the same as before.
Maybe this is one of those pop psychology things where one could find a means of defining everything in the world through fear, in the same way that everything could come back to love or every story or narrative arc in the history of storytelling could be reduced to trying to find some kind of happiness — you can look for and subsequently find some kind of truth in that doctrine, but it’s also kind of a simplistic way to look at storytelling. But what’s notable to me in that, writing this entry, I find fear equally as relatable as love. I’m pretty sure all the anxiety I’ve felt in my life can be traced back to — even if the path resembles a crazy straw — not being able to do what I love. Does acknowledging the fear help dilute its power? Because I think love is a more powerful engine — I don’t want fear to be an engine or a motivator in the process itself.
And I think the key becomes separating the fear from the ideas and the process. Love easily couples the two, because you can find love in the process, but I need to remove fear from the approach, even if it’s an emotional or thematic entry point into the material.
There are a few quotes that come to mind. One lived on a sticky note above my desk for a few years in New York; stemming from a conversation I had with my friend and collaborator Spencer Hamp on our film All I’ve Been Wanting. It was the morning after a difficult scene that I felt I’d flubbed for the same reasons I’ve already written about—contingency. I felt like I’d pulled us away from the tight focus and conceit of the movie which informed the film's formal/visual approach, and I was — afraid — the movie was going to start feeling stagnant, so I varied it up. Immediately after wrapping, I felt like the choices I’d made would dilute and distract as opposed to reinforcing what we were trying to do. Spencer told me that when you’re standing on a ledge, your instinct is to take a step back, when really what you may need to do is take the leap. I don’t know if it was that conversation where he said “lean into the friction”, but gradually, that’s what “take the leap” evolved into overtime.
The other was at a Q&A with the filmmaker Nadav Lapid with his film Ahed’s Knee moderated by Ira Sachs. The film has a reasonably desperate and even bleak outlook towards its subject matter; yet the film is energetic, inventive, “takes no prisoners” (another Spencer-ism). Ira opened the Q&A with an astute observation that I’ll paraphrase — there may not be a lot of joy in the film, but there’s a lot of joy in the filmmaking itself. Joy, love, no fear in the process itself.
The third quote, from John Cassavetes: “I have a need for the characters to really analyze love, discuss it, kill it, destroy it, hurt each other, do all the stuff in that war, in that word-polemic and film-polemic of what life is. And the rest of the stuff doesn’t really interest me. It may interest other people, but I have a one-track mind. That’s all I’m interested in – love. And the lack of it. When it stops. And the pain that’s caused by loss of things that are taken away from us that we really need.”
But fear is the other side of this coin. And I started thinking about how, “if every story is about ___ trying to be happy”, to some degree, could this be true about fear as well? I looked for lists about movies about fear, but everything I found were lists of scary movies — surely lots of overlap, but not exactly what I was looking for. But Wings of Desire is maybe about fear. Fear of not loving or being loved; the fear of an immortal life without meaning. Another movie — and specific image — that immediately came to mind; that I couldn't shake was an image from Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds: a film I saw not long after Wings of Desire, but one that took a little longer to saturate my bloodstream — and saturate it did; to the point where I visited Wajda’s archive in Kraków in 2022. On the surface, there’s a fear of being on the wrong side of history, but the fear runs deeper — that same fear of love and not being loved; a fear of becoming that you seek to destroy. If Wings of Desire is about the fear of what you are not, Ashes and Diamonds is about the fear of what you are.
Zbigniew Cybulski in this frame is the first image that came to mind when I thought about the word “fear” in cinema.
Yet “using” Wings of Desire within the context of Transmission or any other film isn’t necessarily a choice. Like many others, like everything that influences us, that movie is in my blood. It’s a boomerang (a word I keep coming back to) that makes itself more known with each viewing as my life changes and grows around it, but I might as well embrace what is in my DNA and the opportunities that it opens up for this movie. I can lean into it as a reference, or I can choose not to, but that doesn't change that this movie is “in” me, and there's nothing I can do to denigrate it or my relationship with it. Loving yourself means loving the things that are part of you too; it must.
Back to emails. I think there's a bit too much of a walking-on-eggshells feeling in some of these; like I'm afraid of being a nuisance to people who could potentially crack open a door for us. Maybe I need to lead with more love in these cold reachouts; it's one solution to the necessity of constantly putting yourself out there. I think we made a film about this? I made A Muse when I was 22; full of equal parts chutzpah and ignorance that allowed me to fully immerse myself in something I couldn't entirely wrap my head around, and I'm still pulling back layers years later. There's a lot to unpack there, but I'm already trying to tie too many ideas together here. Just like the movies we're trying to make.
