Details

Progress on The Nothings and some bar mitzvah movie I’m now writing about is still proceeding at some lugubrious pace. The good part is, I think I’ve locked in the first act of The Nothings. And by this, I mean the events portrayed to help viewers identify with the characters, and the events to get the characters to the next part of the movie seem pretty solid. I don’t think I’m going to be changing them in any way (although I could be totally wrong), but now I’ve opened myself up to an entirely new arena with entering the second act, because some of it has to do with subject matter I’m not familiar with.

It’s like when you think you’ve completed a crucial part of a video game, only to open a previously locked door that you thought was a closet or something, and find out it’s actually an entirely new level. The scope of the game just astonishes you, and the high you got from thinking you had completed something evaporates in the midst of being overwhelmed with the thought of this new landscape you have to travail after working so hard to conquer the previous terrain.

The thing is, I don’t know why I’m not enjoying the process. I feel like I used to enjoy this process a lot more when I did this for fun. A spaceship in a cave? Who cares how it got there or how the spaceship works? Do we need to know? Who cares if a beacon couldn’t really broadcast to the surface of Earth from 50,000 miles underneath? Realism be damned! Just put the spaceship in the cave and give the kids an adventure and it’ll be fun!

Now it’s like, tackling the details. And I can appreciate details, but I feel like for your story to really be impactful, you have to take care of every detail. And I am not the most methodical person.

Have I said this before? Filmmaking is gritty. There’s all this adulation and fame surrounding people who get paid tons of money to create, and that vortex can make what they do seem like this divine stream of inspiration that pours out of them into some tangible channel that we can all enjoy. This praise and attention put toward these people can make what they do seem effortless and easy if you’re on the outside looking in. It’s like, “look! They wrote words on this page! They put a ball in a basket! They’re acting! And they’re getting all this attention! What they do seems really effortless and simple, especially in light of all the attention they get, so how hard can doing this be? Maybe I should try it!”

Nope. That’s your first mistake. I mean, it’s not a mistake to try acting or sports or anything really, but these activities done at the highest level are rarely effortless. Often the action that looks so natural under the lights is the product of thousands of hours of training and error and learning and effort, and sometimes people don’t have the circumstances around them that allows them to get even that far. I’m starting to think learning from your mistakes is a luxury. This is coming from someone who used to never want to make a mistake at all, because it was considered a sign of weakness in effort and/or character by authority figures in my life at the time.

Anyway, back to filmmaking being gritty. When I first started filmmaking, what appealed to me about it was that spark of creation that was more connected to impulse, the purity of being able to open some software or pick up a camera, and with a little imagination, you’d have a screenplay or a movie. But when you start getting into the professionalism aspect, a lot of planning and prep work is involved in the creation process that I didn’t anticipate. Maybe creation in the moment is spontaneous, and feels great, but getting there is often the product of sweat and concentration and … ugh. There’s creation, and work is pretty much everything else.

I feel like I’m consistently frustrated. I imagine people like Aaron Sorkin and Eric Roth and Todd Haynes (Safe blew my mind the other night) being total naturals at this, and everything coming to them with uncanny insight and perception that separates them as the creatives that have the innate quality needed to make it to the highest levels of the industry. A part of me is like, if I really were meant to make it and can succeed in film, would this be so hard?

Anyway, I wrote seventy-one pages of notes before this supposed first draft of The Nothings got locked. They include several outline changes; inspiration for a 3-5 page scene in the first act that didn’t work with my screenwriting group and got cut, which was the right decision; pages of backstory on the main characters’ parents that I will very likely need in order to authentically write the scenes with them interacting with each other; along with countless questions: what’s the typical procedure for rehearsing in a band? Would a club ever let 16 year olds play? Detention would be a good obstacle for these characters’ goals, so when would they have detention in a way that best serves the story? Right after they get in trouble? Four days after? Why do the parents feel the way they do about this thing your main character wants? Is there a girl involved?

And on and on and on. I’m a frustrated creative at the minute. And what I keep thinking is that I should be enjoying this process, or it’s a sign I shouldn’t be doing this professionally. But maybe that expectation is flawed. I feel like — there’s expectations, and then there’s you, me, it, existence as separate from the ideas we try to impose upon it but aren’t what it is, though we can pretend like we know about it because it’s an object of fascination being so standalone and unique from all preconceived notions; and because of that it fascinates us, so again we want to pretend like we know about it, while at the same time try to put it in our box of preconceived ideas to help us feel better about not being able to truly comprehend the unknowable, the immutable, the mysteriousness, the uniqueness of this matter in front of us. All you can do is go with it, really, and see where it takes you.

Filmmaker: Quyen Tran (Director of Photography)
Short Film: My Mother Dreams the Satan’s Disciples in New York
Watch: John Wells — Television Academy Interview