TICKET INFO for THIS MOVIE I CO-WROTE IS SCREENING AT MANN’S CHINESE in LA on JUNE 2nd.

So here is the trailer for The Exquisite Corpse Project a film I co-wrote with my friends from Olde English.  The premise is pretty straight forward: Ben Popik, the director picked 5 writers and had all of them write 1/5th of a feature.  But the catch was that after the first writer (me!) wrote the first 15 pages and the next writer could only see that last 5 pages, and so on and so forth.

The results are interesting and at times really inspired, but what I think makes it a beautiful piece of work is the interweaving doc about the process.  It really gets to the core of what it’s like to make something and collaborate, which first and foremost is what film is.  I’m currently finishing my first feature (How to Follow Strangers) as a writer/director and at times it feels like all you get are lumps.  Trying to balance egos and expectations, make something true and honest while still engaging the audience can be a brutal process.  And if you don’t step back every now and again to remember at the beginning, there was a childlike wonderment and desire to play with people who inspire you, it may not make sense why you keep taking it in the butt.

Unless you like taking it up the butt, in which case, more power to you.

Check it out! lesfilmfestival.com

A few choice excerpts from his New York Times Obit:

In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness, John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, became the first lone oarsman in recorded history to traverse any ocean.

In 1972, he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook, sharing a boat, became the first people to row across the Pacific, a yearlong ordeal during which their craft was thought lost.

For all its bravura, Mr. Fairfax’s seafaring almost pales beside his earlier ventures. Footloose and handsome, he was a flesh-and-blood character out of Graham Greene, with more than a dash of Hemingway and Ian Fleming shaken in.

At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.

Seriously!?

*What?  Friends was voluntarily shut down?!  That’s crazy!

Really love how simple it is and how beautifully it’s shot.  I think it’s great how confident and boldly the ideas are presented, without trying to be overly cutty or really broad to hold attention.  I was re-watching the film California Split which is one of my favorites and Altman does something similar.  He’s not afraid to let the audience come to him, and that I think is a mark of a very talented filmmaker.

This series doesn’t skirt away from letting a premise be just one joke, or trying to hard to milk an idea.  It’s really interesting that though there are a lot of things you can compare it too, it already feels like his voice is really strong.  As I am in the middle of the edit for How to Follow Strangers I am constantly attempting to pare down ideas to their simplest point but it’s much harder than I often give it credit.  I’m excited to see where Morgan goes next.

I’M GONNA GET SO MANY TATTOOS NOW!

I wanna go gay for Azealia Banks.

© Helene Giansily

I saw a woman walking down the street who had on cut off jean shorts, a white t-shirt with paint stains, and a backpack when I was on my way to the office.  She was very relaxed, drinking an iced coffee, sauntering on her way to what I later found out was work.  She was an artist assistant, which inevitably meant she was interested in working as an artist in her own right, but hadn’t figured out how to do it full time yet.  Or maybe if she wanted to do it at all.

I like these cross road moments for people.  I used to PA on tv commercials, music videos, films, as I was figuring out how to do my own work.  I just wrapped my first feature, and I partially wish I would have done it much sooner and a part of me knows that was not possible.  It took me years after graduating film school to develop the confidence and skill to feel comfortable committing to the idea of making my own work.  And in hindsight I think that’s exactly what it takes.  Not talent, or a mindblowing idea.  Just commitment to following your ideas through, knowing that you may not be as good as you want to be, but allowing yourself the opportunity to be great.  Granting yourself permission to both fail, and more realistically, succeed.  Because to me, failure is only not trying, whereas success is trying and getting better each time.  But in order to do that you have to try.

I read a lot of interviews with creators of work I like.  A lot of interviews.  It’s the adult version of sucking my thumb or rocking myself to sleep.  When I get anxious, it’s nice to know that other people before me were anxious too.  That Werner Herzog told Lotte Eisner he didn’t think he should make films again.  Or that Miranda July got sophomore jitters.  It makes the process feel a little more human.

For me, when I was directing the film, most of the time, I felt very comfortable.  Extremely comfortable in fact, in a way that I didn’t anticipate.  When things got bad, I felt ok dealing with the fall out, enjoyed the problem solving, was excited to know the answers to a great many of the questions that were presented to me.  It felt exciting!  And made me feel alive and like a grown person!  But then there were the off days, where I would wonder how I got put in charge of all of this stuff.   I remember one day in particular where I had to clear the set of all cast and crew, minus the lead who was in the shot, in order to quietly compose the next shot because I was so rattled.  I’ve never done that before, and hopefully never will again, but it’s nice to know that after looking at all the footage, which to me feels very certain, that there are moments I had to go through, searching, just like all the other creators before me, to get to that point of understanding.

It’s not surprising to me that most directors make their first feature in the early thirties.  It’s a combination of time where you have a gentle amount of hubris mixed with the ability to get things done.  Some people do it much earlier, and of course we all applaud and secretly hate those people, unless those people are us, who of course are blessed.

I learned a lot of things about myself making this feature.  Namely:

1) I really like making features!  More than I like doing, say, anything else.  I didn’t mind the lack of sleep, or the pace.  I really loved being able to get better every day.  The irony is that by the third to last day I feel like I really got it, but by then we were almost done.  But it just made me want to do another one immediately, so there’s that.

2) Making a movie is a lot like camp, and in this case, the director is the camp counsellor.  I’ve often heard it said that movies are like war, but in my experience, people don’t die, or if they do, that is a bad set, and not in the slightest the goal of making a movie.  I like the camp analogy better, because in a few short weeks, you feel like these are your bestfriendsever! And you have inside jokes.  And you get delirious with the same people.  But you learn to trust each other.  And as the director, or camp counsellor, you have to lead people, but only enough for them to play with each other.  And sometimes your campers will scrap knees or need a bit of extra attention, and you may feel woefully unequipped until you realize half of making people feel better is just being there, showing up and caring.  There’s a shitty Seinfeld joke about first aid originally being the first people to show up, and to a certain extint, that’s true.  (It’s funny ’cause it’s true!).  I should also say, the best other  job I ever had was as a camp counsellor, so that helps.

3) I don’t really have a part three.  Wait.  No that’s not true.  The other thing I learned about myself, which maybe I already knew is that I function really well during intense moments.  When things seem their craziest, I get a little calmer.  We lost a major location that we had a permit for as we were offloading the van.  But I took a deep breath and we found scrambled to find another location.  And then there was a fire!  And my first response to the fire was to rush over and put it out, and go right back to shooting.  I feel like I’m a better person when I direct which invariably means I want to direct all the time.

4) I learned to trust the people around me.  When I didn’t know what I was doing, or got too hungry or tired to function, my crew really had my back.  I just had to ask.  On the last day of shooting, on our last shot at 2 in the morning, I hit a wall, and quietly said: “I need help”  ”Help with what?” was the response.  ”I don’t know I said, I just need help.”  Someone shoved some food in my face, and then when our generator went out, and I had clearly looked like I wanted to call it a day, our cast and crew was freezing, everyone stopped and said, if you need this shot, we are here for you, we can do it!

How amazing is that?

In short I just wanted to write a note to myself, to remind me that when it feels bad, when the creative part of my brain feels overwhelmed by the logistics, that it’s really worth it to push through, because the process of becoming, though filled with growing pains, is maybe one of the, if not the most rewarding thing that’s ever happened to me.