Rambling My Way Back to Reality

We wrapped on Thursday night -- one day late. I worked 12-15 hour days all week. The experience was exhilarating, exasperating, energizing, frustrating, satisfying and terrifying. If you've ever been in production, you know what I mean. I have too much to blog about.

It's Saturday now, and I'm just returning to my regular schedule (with two months of post-production thrown on top). I'm a pretty typical personality type for a writer. You can leave me alone with my books and notebooks and I won't need much else. I O.D. on human contact pretty quickly. I need a fair amount of daily ritual and a great deal of autonomy to be happy. The drive to get that back was deep and visceral.

Returning to your daily life gives you a great perspective on yourself. I'm thinking a lot about what I hold dear. I've structured how I live my life (and made significant sacrifices) in order to have a few hours free per day to write, read, and think. I'm 40, and it is all worth it. I'm also seeing that as I approach my writing again, I keep jumping up to do dishes or check email. I've let my attention get untrained. I'll need to deal with that in the coming weeks.

I also have thoughts about my own projects. I'm shying away from a script that's been causing me problems for ages. I'm gravitating to a comedy. I'm feeling lazy and behind with all of it.

I have to keep telling myself that actually moving something I wrote out of my head and into the real world is not lazy and does not put me behind. It's the opposite, I guess. But it's not writing, and so there's a nagging feeling that it just doesn't count.

But of course it does, and the experience of the last week will make me a better writer. I said that we'd run a day over our planned shoot schedule. This was largely due to the DP (cameraman) and the gaffer constantly adjusting and reqdjusting lights and camera settings. They'd try out new ideas. We'd be ready to shoot, and they, like unherdable cats, would be off checking whether we could kill that shadow by hanging two 300's off a polecat. Then endless swapping of gels and diffusions. And then deciding to go back to the original set up and adding a bounce card. And so on. It took hours to light each scene, even when we'd decided beforehand what to do. Somehow the plans were never good enough.

I was perplexed at first, and then frustrated and then angry. And then it dawned on me. I had a moment where I saw the light -- quite literally. I could 'see' how the gaffer saw the light. It was a substance for him -- something tangible somehow, and elusive, full of wonder and a strange, unpredictable energy. Light is to him what words are to me. And the gaffer was doing what I'd done with the script -- rewriting it over and over again. Looking at every possible angle. Trying things, quite open to the possibility that they probably won't work, but realizing that the only way to get to the answer is to try it out. I'd changed every scene in that script numerous times. He was doing the same thing.

He was telling the story. He was telling my story. And he was doing it with light. My impatience became patience. My exhaustion became exhilaration. And missing a few days of writing wasn't so bad after all.

A Script is a Working Document

So many books about screenwriting are about storytelling that it's easy to forget that a screenplay is also a set of instructions for a very complex operation -- the shooting of a film. I've always believed that learning about how other filmmakers look at a script is a tremendous nuts and bolts discipline. Many, if not most, new screenwriters have little or no experience with production, and so are writing a bit blind. Not infrequently they fill that void by writing a novel.

I've been working on a short film for the last several months. It's a surreal film set in a hyper-real location designed by San Francisco installation artist Megan Wilson. We had a site visit yesterday during which the cinematographer saw the set for the first time. To my mind, the set is more or less a cinematographer's wet dream: Gorgeous floral patterns mounted inches off the wall throughout the apartment, tiny details that tell a story wherever you look, a sense of the surreal meshing neatly with a very real, homey apartment. It's comfy and claustrophobic. It's unique and familiar. It's hard to take a bad shot in there: color and patterns and careful composition wherever you look.

The cinematographer had trouble with the script. "This part here, this is normal, right? But this next scene is supposed to be... weird?" Now I wrote the script with the director, and we knew the location and most of the people we'd be working with, so we didn't really worry about "selling" the idea. We knew exactly what we wanted to do.

The cinematographer went on and on about diffusion screens and 35 mm adapters and how the relationship between light needed and depth of field was completely counter-intuitive on his fancy new HD camera. I will admit that at first I glazed over a bit. And in the back of my head, I was thinking that this guy's job was relatively simple. He has to shoot a woman getting dressed, talking on the telephone, walking down the hall. One actress. Beautiful color-saturated set. It's shooting fish in a barrel. But then I started to listen.

He was trying to work out the story. He was talking about diffusion screens and F-stops because this was his way of getting a handle on the story. This is his creative process. He thinks in terms of color palettes. He thinks in terms of natural color vs. non-natural color. He understands how a long shot contrasts with a tight shot. And as he works out how and whether to gel a light, use a practical, use a dolly or a jib, he's figuring his way into the story. He's realizing the potential of the story. He's finding more. He's thinking of similar movies and camera work. The script is becoming a movie at that moment, in his head.

Many writers dislike screenwriting because you don't have a finished project when you're done. A script is just the first step. A successful script inspires that next step. I can't begin to tell this cinematographer to do his job. And I don't have to. I just have to inspire him.

On this script, I didn't really do enough. I had a mind meld with the director, and we felt like we knew what was going on. We'd break it down later, in the shooting script. So we punted. By the end of the site visit we had the cinematographer fully aboard. But you don't usually get a chance to coax, convince, and explain. I'm rewriting the script this weekend. It's gonna be dead clear by the time I'm done. And I'll know more about it too.

Strange Culture at the SF Int'l..

Strange Culture played the San Francisco International Film Festival last night. It was great fun! Writers lead quiet lives of lonely desperation. Screenwriters at least get to go out and get comped a movie ticket and a cocktail every once in a while.

Fun aside, there's nothing like a film festival to really bring home what you're trying to do. There's an audience, and they're gonna laugh or not laugh at your jokes. When you meet them, you get to remember just how special and powerful writing can be.

There's the film crew... and you remember how you're just one cog in the wheel. You talk to the sound operator, or the post production supervisor, the actors, the director. Everyone is linked by the fact that they've ALL been working in their own field to tell the same story. You remember how screenwriting is more about getting all those people working toward a single goal, and not about a clever line of dialogue.

In this case, I remembered how many shifts, changes, and warping screw ups this film went through. It's a narrative/documentary hybrid (some would say mongrel). It was conceived as such. Then they ran out of money and time, and tried to piece together a narrative. That didn't work. Then they got some more money and time. Then the facts of the case changed. Then it got cut and recut numerous times, both for artistic and legal reasons. What you see is the product of a lot of people working very hard. It could have failed at any number of points.

Writers, myself included, place huge value in their words. It's natural. As a new screenwriter, I never understood what a script has to stand up against in the production process. I'd worry about a line here or there, or fight to the death to defend a paragraph of backstory that means nothing to the people who'll use the script to make a film.

Going to film festivals reminds me of how strong your base idea has to be, and how simply and carefully you have to communicate it.