Things I learned at the IFP Filmmaker Conference: Day 3

Sorry it's taken me a while to get to part 3. I've been (you guessed it) busy. Catching up on work, and on my own writing, since returning from this trip.

Anyway, after the heaviness of Day 2 of the conference, with its emphasis on the real world and how we're all being screwed by larger forces, it was good to hear about things that are more fun. Such as …

#5. Alec Baldwin is a real person.

As I walked to Lincoln Center that morning, I passed a poster promoting a series of film screenings at the center, for which the music would be played by a live orchestra. (One of the films in the series, fittingly enough, was 2001: A Space Odyssey.) I lingered at this poster just long enough to notice that the artistic director of the series was Alec Baldwin. “Hmm,” I thought. I continued to walk around the corner toward the entrance … and happened to see the man himself getting out of a car, carrying a duffel bag and looking dog tired.

No, I didn't bother him. I figured he was on his way to work and didn't need to be hassled. And thanks to the wraparound sunglasses I was wearing, I was able to pretend I didn't recognize him. Frankly, I was surprised he was by himself. I didn't think someone that famous would have the luxury of being able to walk around in public unaccompanied.

There's not much point to this story, except I just wanted to say … I saw Alec Baldwin.

#4. Humor is still good.

The first panel of the day was basically an interview with Derek Waters, creator of the short film that became the Comedy Central series Drunk History. The moderator, Brent Hoff, had previously given an award to that film (which had already been on the Internet) instead of one of the “films about Cambodian children with diseases caused by corporations”, a decision that apparently still makes people angry to this day.

If you haven't seen it, the premise of Drunk History is simply that a (genuinely) drunk person tells a story from the history books, intercut with actors solemnly acting out the drunkard's crude account. Waters said he got the idea from noticing that drunk people always want to tell stories. So he thought of something that people would never tell when drunk – in this case history, which is often told seriously and with no passion. His theory was that there are three stages of being drunk:

1. You're my best friend, life is great!
2. Have I ever told you the story I just told you ten times?
3. I'm a terrible person, life is terrible.

(He said that the second and third stages are when you need to be recording.)

He said that a brand new idea made out of something people are familiar with is what tends to be popular. Slightly contrasting this, he also advised the audience to “make stuff you believe in” and said that any time you put your voice out there it's a success, even if only ten people see it.

This panel helped buttress my belief that it's OK to do what you believe in, and that it's OK for indie cinema to be silly.

#3. You should make more material than just the film.

In a panel on building “buzz”, one panelist pointed out that “your audience has an insatiable desire to watch short clips.” Another panelist, Marc Schiller, said that filmmakers should be developing more original content for the web, but that they aren't doing this because they're just trying to get their film finished. (Though he did point out that for documentary filmmakers this is easier, since they already have more footage than they can use in the finished film.) He said that you can't make this stuff at the last minute, when the film is finished – it needs to be part of the process.

This isn't a new idea. Way back in the day, I remember reading somewhere that during the making of Jurassic Park, they filmed extra material for use in a CD-ROM. And I think they shot extra scenes during the making of the Matrix sequels for use in the tie-in video game. But I guess indie filmmakers are still catching up to Hollywood in this area.

This gets us into the area of that familiar buzzword “transmedia”. Instead of just having the film, you can have added material providing additional character development.

#2. Apparently, there are still reasons for an indie filmmaker to shoot on film.

Even as a native of Rochester, and as the child of a father whose 29-year career at Kodak put me through film school, I approached the “Want the Film Look? Shoot Film” panel with skepticism. Although I'm starting to miss the experience of watching actual film in public, I don't miss it much as a filmmaker. To me the rise of digital video cameras is the greatest thing to happen to indie filmmakers since the invention of the Bolex. When you shoot on video, you don't have to check the gate, you don't have to worry about the camera scratching or eating your film, you don't have to hope that the lab doesn't wreck your footage. As a film student, I had to worry about all of these things. Then I got my grubby mitts on a miniDV camera in 1999, and never looked back. And neither did nearly everyone else.

But the panelists had plenty of reasons not to give up on film. One is that it simply has a higher resolution than even the best video cameras. While high-definition is taking the leap from 2K to 4K, film is more like 6K, is still a reliable basis from which to create master copies, and lacks the compression issues that occur with high-definition video.

The panelists also approved of film because of the discipline it imposed. For them, the short time limit of a film reel and the unwieldiness of film equipment requires crews to be more organized and efficient.

I personally can do without the unwieldiness of film equipment – I'd rather be able to shoot quickly, and spend more time working with the actors rather than being muzzled by technical restrictions. But I can't argue with the fact that film looks better, and has remained a stable standard even as video renders one format after another obsolete.

One more point that did surprise me – the panelists said that the “video village” separating from the directors from the actors was actually slowing the process down. The ability to instantly review your footage has apparently interfered with the filmmaking process, allowing everyone to look at the last take rather than allowing the DP to maintain autonomy.

I've personally never been on a set with that kind of setup. But about a year ago, I did see a documentary about the making of David Cronenberg's recent film Cosmopolis, and was kind of shocked to see my hero Cronenberg entombing himself in a video suite in a completely different room from the actors, rather than being on the actual set when the cameras rolled. He appeared to be entirely happy with that working method, but where's the fun in that?

#1. The making of the story can be the story.

“There's an audience not just for your product, but for how you make your product,” said moderator Ward Emling on a panel about local film offices. In the earlier “buzz” panel, the documentary Our Nixon – made of old home movies from the Nixon administration – was cited as an example of how the creation of the film can be the story that interests people. The narrative of you creating the film, with you as the central actor – that has the power to gain free exposure and get audiences to identify with the film's journey.

I wouldn't have thought that that kind of auteurism was still in fashion at all. But as Marc Schiller put it, “you can only say 'go see my movie' so many times.” You have to get the audience to identify with something, and if they haven't seen the film yet, then I guess it makes sense that the filmmaker him/herself has to be the warm-up act.

While Day 3 gave me a lot to think about, Day 4 would turn out to be the real crash course.

To be continued …

A journey through maturity

It's been an eventful month. I guess it sort of started at the end of May, when filmmaker/fundraiser Tom Malloy spoke at the monthly Rochester Movie Maker's meeting. Malloy identified 7 common mistakes that filmmakers make, which I'll share with you here:

1. Not firing a pissed-off crewmember. Especially if he's the DP (director of photography), who sets the tone of the shoot.

2. Being too cheap on food. You should have a great craft service table, not just pizza. A Hollywood shoot pays people a meal penalty when they don't get lunch. (I would add to this an unwritten rule I learned somewhere, probably in film school: if you're not paying people then you definitely have to feed them.)

3. Making decisions too quickly, without thinking them through. He seemed to be talking specifically about deciding who to have on your crew. When hiring someone, you should get references.

4. Not focusing enough on the actors and their performances. You can fix technical mistakes in post, but not acting mistakes. Sound is more important than picture.

5. Giving control to someone who can shut you off in a heartbeat.

6. Not buying swag. He said that T-shirts, hats, etc. are good things to give your team, especially if they're not being paid well. (In the interest of balance, I should say that I've heard other people say the opposite, that it's money wasted promoting the film to people who already know about it.)

7. Not having a vision or taking charge. You don't have to be a dictator or asshole, but you need to know where you're going. You need to have a vision so that people will believe in you and respect you.

Some of these things I've already learned, either through experience or from being told by someone else, but it's still advice worth hearing.

He then ended with an anecdote which basically had the following moral: You need to have the fire and the willingness to not listen to people who discourage you.

That's a good lesson too, and one which I personally have found harder to follow with age. As you get older, and farther away from the world of high school and college, you can end up being less and less in touch with other people who share your goals and priorities, making it more of a challenge to keep the flame alive.

I've been thinking a lot about these things because I recently reached a landmark birthday, one that makes you take stock of your life. As it happened, the 1982 classic Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was playing at the George Eastman House around the same time, which seemed fitting since that's a movie where Kirk finds himself having a birthday and thinking about getting older. So I decided to invite some friends to have a birthday dinner with me and then go see it.

I haven't watched much old-school Star Trek in a while, so seeing this movie on the big screen again made me realize something. If you were a nerdy kid in the 80s who was into books and creativity, and alienated from the world of sports, then Star Trek was practically your only exposure to grown-up virtues like teamwork, leadership, courage, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. Most other sci-fi tends to be about nonconformists heroically bucking the system altogether, either by escaping it or by overthrowing it. And while that can be a good message when you're an adolescent trying to find your identity and escape peer pressure, it doesn't always apply so well to the working world of adulthood, where you are much more interdependent on other people.

That same weekend, the Visual Studies Workshop had a big sale, which included tons and tons of books on art and philosophy and so on, for dirt cheap. I picked up a fair bit of esoteric and psychedelic reading material, to refuel the creative side of my brain.

When I was in college, the 60s generation still cast a long shadow. There was still a lot of emphasis on being innovative and irreverent, and marching to your own drummer. While that generation had become sour and snobby and censorious by the time I was growing up, I still respected their original emphasis on optimism and creative freedom. And I used to think that sci-fi, as a genre, was part of that, because that was the genre where you could make your own rules and create your own world.

As my generation has come of age and taken over the culture, I've sensed a growing emphasis on hostility and cynicism. It's as if people can't think of any way to make themselves feel important except by resenting and criticizing anyone who's actually made something of themselves. The idea that the role of creative people is to be a punching bag for less creative people doesn't sit well with me. My generation's attitude seems to be that life is just one long struggle to climb back into the womb. The few tentpole movies that aren't just nostalgic reboots of an existing franchise tend to be about the world being destroyed. There's a sense that the past is more comforting than the future.

But if you can manage to escape from people who have that mindset, and look at what the next generation are up to, there seems to be much more friendliness and sociability and willingness to make connections. I know that musician Amanda Palmer had a gig not that long ago where she let fans sign her naked body. I find it hard to fathom having that kind of trust in strangers. I'm much more used to having to have my guard up.

Rightly or wrongly, I guess I learned a different life lesson, from my peers and from the generation before us. I learned that you can expect other people to try to stomp you down, and that you will survive only if you stick to your guns and don't worry about what other people think. But I'm feeling like that lesson has outlived its usefulness.

A lot of the experiences and influences I've had in recent years have led me down the path of satire, of wanting to tell stories that protest and point out what's wrong. But with the modern wealth of entertainment options, people are much more likely to filter out anything that doesn't speak to their existing tastes or values.

People want to be entertained, and that's not a dirty word. But being an artist isn't a dirty word either.

That's the twin challenge I'm facing when trying to write these damn novels. I'm trying to get back to the wildness and freedom and craziness that meant so much to me when I first became a writer and a filmmaker. At the same time, I'm also trying to brush up on my understanding of what a story needs in order to truly click with an audience. Is there enough action? Is there enough humor? Is there enough character? Does it have that deeper level that makes something truly loved, not just briefly fashionable?

There are times when it barely seems worth the struggle, and then there are times when unexpected rewards occur. This past month, to my great surprise, I won a Most Distinguished Member Award from the Buffalo Movie-Video Makers group for my work as writer-director-producer of Saberfrog and co-producer of another feature, Bury My Heart With Tonawanda. The latter film, from writer-producer Adrian Esposito, has a heartwarming message of growth and acceptance and forgiveness, which has moved audiences to tears at screening after packed screening, most recently at the Memorial Art Gallery this past Thursday.

One of my past influences, cult filmmaker David Cronenberg, once said that he makes films in order to find out why he made them. Cronenberg is one of the less heartwarming filmmakers I can think of, but he makes a good point. Art is a journey, which takes the artists – and the people they invite to join them – to unexpected destinations.

So that's the trick – to stay open to new emotions and experiences as much as possible, even when other people seem more skeptical. It may get harder as you get older, but it is worth the effort.

Happy Cronenbirthday

Today is film director David Cronenberg's 69th birthday. Cronenberg's work was a big influence on me as a film student, and an even greater influence on Saberfrog.

I saw two of his films – The Dead Zone and The Fly – on TV as a kid, but I didn't know who he was yet. To me those films were just a Stephen King movie and a remake of a 1950s movie, respectively. But a bizarre promo clip of his William S. Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch caught my attention on MTV, and so I later watched the making-of documentary “Naked Making Lunch” (made as an episode of the UK arts series The South Bank Show) on Bravo.

Well, I say “watched”, but in those days if you didn't subscribe to a pay channel (which Bravo then was) then you could still hear the sound but the picture was scrambled. But since Bravo was still an arts channel back then, there was a lot of content that was worth listening to (and getting the occasional garbled glimpse of).

So I sat, fascinated, absorbing this distorted version of “Naked Making Lunch”, intrigued by the philosophical musings of Cronenberg, Burroughs and their collaborators. I was a big sci-fi nerd back then, but was also (like many alienated, artsy teens) fascinated by alternative and “subversive” ideas and intellectual concepts, and Cronenberg seemed to combine both of those interests.

When Naked Lunch finally came out on video, I found it “challenging” but also loved its emphasis on the power of writing, and its surreal, metaphorical portrayal of writing as a way of creating realities and reporting on the world as you see it. When I finally read Burroughs' original novel (which was more specifically about sexuality and drug addiction, and not so much about creativity), I didn't like it at all and found it very difficult to get through. Everything I had liked about Naked Lunch was Cronenberg's invention.

But while I was an admirer of a specific film he had made, I didn't become a big fan until 1996. That was the year that some RIT classmates and I drove to Ottawa for an animation film festival. While I had visited Canada on family vacations several times as a kid, I think that trip was when I really felt that I learned something about Canadian culture, and saw how much reverence Canadians seemed to have for their artists.

Leslie Nielsen had by that point been typecast in Hollywood as a comedy buffoon, but on the streets of Ottawa there were endless plastered posters for a dramatic play he was appearing in. Cyberpunk author William Gibson had a new book out at the time, and the local chain bookstore (Indigo or Chapters, I forget which) had a massive display for it, as if he was Stephen King or John Grisham. Coincidentally, Cronenberg's Crash (based on the J.G. Ballard novel, and no relation to the Oscar-winning Sandra Bullock movie) was in Canadian theaters at the time; while its U.S. release had been postponed due to its content, in Canada it was actually getting television ads.

Anyway, while we were there I snapped up a remaindered copy of Cronenberg on Cronenberg, a book-length interview by Chris Rodley, and read it avidly. I might have read half of it before we even got home. I found Cronenberg's artistic philosophy – his thoughts on censorship, on the media, on the role of the artist as a moral explorer – fascinating. As an American, I was also fascinated by his perspective on Canadian culture. At one point in the book (I don't know what page), he points out that American culture would rather move in the wrong direction than stand still, but that Canada would rather stand still. While American liberals tend to stereotype Canada as a haven of artistic freedom, Cronenberg had interesting things to say about the challenges of being a genre filmmaker in a country that has traditionally favored documentaries and dramas.

So I began to seek out his films. I still haven't seen his earliest films (the horror films that made him so infamous), but have now seen everything from The Brood onwards, as well as his earlier Shivers. But the two I enjoyed most were Scanners and Videodrome, for the way they balanced grotesque, disturbing imagery with stimulating intellectual concepts. Many fans still see Cronenberg as a horror director (the term “body horror” was pretty much coined to describe his work), but by the time I discovered him he had a greater reputation as an arty director and so I've always been drawn to the philosophical aspect of his work.

How well that aspect of his work holds up is not for me to say. While I have had the chance to watch “Naked Making Lunch” properly (it's an extra on the Criterion DVD), I haven't watched Naked Lunch itself in many years. I'm kind of reluctant to. I caught the beginning of it on cable several years ago, and was amused by a scene in which Judy Davis, explaining why she's injecting herself with bug poison, says, “It's a very literary high, a Kafka high. You feel like a bug.”

I found that line hilarious in its freshman-English-class pretentiousness. A “Kafka high”? Who talks like that? But I'll bet my younger, pretentious, college-aged self loved that line.

So there's a part of me that finds Cronenberg's intellectual solemnity more amusing than I used to. And I've also learned that some folks in Canada are kind of sick of hearing about Cronenberg (and other alleged national treasures like Atom Egoyan and Margaret Atwood) and are much more mocking of arty work that they find pretentious, humorless and dull.

But I can't mock Cronenberg for producing work that appealed so directly to my alienated, bookwormy younger self. The reality-warping, artistic musings of his Naked Lunch were a big influence on my previous feature, Curse the Darkness. And the combining of psychology, media, and bodily mutation in Scanners and Videodrome – as well as his own philosophizing in Cronenberg on Cronenberg – were all huge influences on Saberfrog, even if my own take on these themes was much more wacky and irreverent.

Cronenberg seems to have more or less left his sci-fi/horror days, becoming a respected director of dramas such as the excellent A History of Violence and the recent Freud/Jung biopic A Dangerous Method. But there's still a possibility that he may return to the genre that made him notorious. To quote one of his own lines – which has become a catchphrase in its own right, with most people not realizing it's from his remake of The Fly – Be afraid. Be very afraid.