Lessons

{Below is a mish-mash of thoughts that I've had on my computer as a would-be post for two darn weeks.  It hasn't made it up as a real post yet, because I'm just not sure it actually says what I meant to say about this quote & issue.  I did that thing I said I wouldn't do: I started to try to "write" something and consequently didn't post it.  Rrrrghh.  Also, it was the 1-yr anniversary of my dad's death, so I didn't feel like doing anything creative; and then I went out of town for several days, so I wasn't editing or posting.  So now it's been a long time since my last post.  So Honey Badger's just going to POST THIS and you can make of it what you will -- even if that makes me "cavalier."}

This is an excerpt from an interview with the Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica in the book Moviemakers' Master Class (two of Kusturica's films have won the Palm d'Or at Cannes, although of course most Americans will never see his work because we're too busy with crap like Furious War Toys III and It Must Be True Love Because We Don't Have Anything In Common But We're Both So Damn Sexy XVII (Full confession! *I* am an American, and *I* have never seen Kusturica's films).

I would not have expressed my own position in quite the way he does -- I think we do not completely agree on the finer points (I am more pro-collaboration, I think) -- but he definitely is pointing at something here that has been made very clear to me over the last ten years, dealing with Seeing and Believing (and teaching, for that matter):  the director’s level of integrity (which is to say, “wholeness”) will directly affect the integrity (which is to say “quality”) of the picture.  To become a good director, therefore, one must work on building up one’s own level of integrity.  Fittingly, and sort of coincidentally, this is one way of describing what Seeing and Believing is, itself, about. 

For me, the "doubts and divergent opinions" that Kusturica mentions were (and are) certainly real - the world is full of what I like to call “naysayers” (thanks to Shawn Colvin).  Anyone who wants to accomplish anything that's off someone else's beaten path has to put up with those someone elses' attitudes -- be they lack of interest, surprise, skepticism, ridicule, or outright objection.  I’m willing to believe that few people consciously want to prevent others from doing things, but even so, a person has to be willing to fend off all kinds of negativity in order to get anything actually DONE in life besides the dishes.

It was with this conscious thought, or something similar, that I began my preparations to shoot Seeing and Believing, then known to me only by the main characters' first-name initials:  "MLBAS."  I was just finishing up my Master's degree, the pursuit of which had been a fitfully wretched, identity-torturing trial by misery which "shook me and my confidence in a great many things," and I was determined to do something to restore my sense of self in the universe over that summer, before I had to buckle-down and get a job.  I was in a beaten-down, "all my eggs are going into this basket right now even if it kills me" sort of state of mind when I wrote what became the shooting script too quickly.  Fortunately, I had been working with these characters for ten years or so, off and on, and I had already done a lot of thinking about the themes, so the screenplay isn't as bad as it might have been, given how fried I was.  That mind-set, though, never quite left me, through the shoot.  I had a kind of desperate need to get this film shot, one way or seventeen others plus duct tape.  An imperfect script was not going to stop me.  Naysayers were not; my own state of wreckage was not.  Nothing, I told myself, was going to stop me: it was time for the years of thinking about making movies to end.

And thus, thanks to the generous contributions of some amazing friends, I went forward.  Greg (the DP) and I couldn't find a trained sound recordist who was available and willing to work for free.  This would not stop me!  There was a rainstorm the day we held auditions and we didn't get three women that I was confident about.  I would just take a role myself!  Etc.  I was a Myers-Briggs "P" doing my damnedest to embrace the "J" lifestyle:  confront a problem, choose a path, move to the next problem; confront a problem, choose a path, move to the next problem; meticulous painstaking (my preferred modus operandi) would not be allowed to turn into indecisiveness (my usual stumbling block) and stop me!  Lead, follow, or get out of the fricking way!!

However... 

What I thought of at the time as an unfoilable determination was not, apparently, taken for such by all who surrounded me and had to work with me.  Nor, in fact, did it always result in the best choices, as can't surprise anyone, really.  In fact, Greg told me late in the shoot that I seemed to him, at least, to be "cavalier" about it all, which almost knocked me, windless, to the floor.  My "all naysayers will talk to the hand" single-mindedness felt as far from "cavalier" as I could imagine -- all my eggs are in this basket! -- but my approach was seen as an overall lack of carefulness, a lack of taking care.  I thought I was saying, "Let's not get waylaid by fretting over inevitable imperfections and threaten our getting to the finish line at all," but I guess he heard, "I don't care."  Wow.  But what about all those takes I put everyone through?   

It has taken me years to process the relationship between these two disparate perspectives on the same set of choices.  I now see the truth that he was looking at in a way that I simply could not at the time, given my rather panicky, myopic state.  The thing is, we were both right, and had we communicated better, we might have bonded into a super-strong creative alloy and been able to prevent a little of the painful hair-pulling that I’m doing right now as I try to edit the footage that we came away with, working as we did.  But we didn’t, and ultimately, the failure between us was mine – not just for the specific “what I did and didn’t do” sorts of reasons, but also simply because I was the Director.  

I was the Director, but I was no author.  I wanted to be – I had some moments there – but my inner world was so chaotic, so scattered, that I only sporadically knew my own mind even as I charged ahead.  It’s true that I’m given to thinking about things, so certainly I did some of that, and I had some visual intentions and thematic justifications for those, blah, blah blah – but I didn’t think it all the way through:  I scratched the surface, and then I did scratch again, but then I stopped.  That’s why I call it a “level” of integrity:  I was not without it, but it was not complete.  And when I did know my mind, I often did not have enough inner calm to figure out how to assert myself through the resistance (the “doubts and divergent opinions”) that I inevitably met (and by “resistance” I don't necessarily mean outrightly contentious people, which I rarely encountered – we all got along pretty well, for the most part).  I would try to get over or around the resistance, try to make it go away, but when the tactics I was easy with failed me, I didn’t trust myself (or others) enough to _stop_ things and look for a new way in to what *I* wanted.  When genuinely challenged, I rarely felt whole enough to say “no” – I was too frightened of getting derailed entirely.  I relinquished my position as leader and gave in to the path of least resistance – which meant that I sacrificed the integrity, the wholeness and therefore quality of the picture.  An author keeps the whole, whole.  I let S & B stay a kind of gestalt of itself, a suggestion.  Sometimes, this makes me mourn its lost potential, but other times I know that such a feeling about it was inevitable, given its place as my first, and the imperfections make up a big part of what motivates me to try again, as they should.

In the quote above, Kusturica says that it's important for a would-be filmmaker "to learn to become an author...."  His (or the translator's?) use of the phrase "learn to become" beautifully allows for the reality of the pace of the process; it conveys how much work and attention it truly takes -- how much time, how many (many) so-called mistakes one has to make before one has learned this.  You don't just "learn" to do it, you learn to "become" it; i.e., you begin ignorant of even the growth process that is before you.  In other words: author-ness is not simply about innate "talent" or "vision" -- whether you "have it" or not -- nor even is it about the concrete acts involved in directing; it is not just the doing.  You are simply not an author already when you start directing; you must figure out how to grow into one: how to piece that identity together.

The ability to guide all the various "tools"/people that help you craft your cinematic tale is a set of skills that needs to be acquired and honed, utilized and honed again.  It took me years to watch the footage of Seeing and Believing and forgive myself for all the "missteps" I saw and heard -- even the ones ostensibly made by other people, if not these especially, because they all show how ignorant I was of things I didn't know I was ignorant of.  But I've come to appreciate each misstep as supplying me with a well-needed and genuinely invaluable lesson.  Those missteps make up my path, my private class.   

Kusturica's (or his translator's) use of the word "impose" is unfortunate, but it does, if too severely, get at the crux of the issue:  it all comes back to you and your success or failure as a cinematic author.  As a director, you have two essential tasks once you're in production (1) to get other people to understand what you want – what you “see” – what you’re doing there – and (2) to give them what they need to be co-creators with you of whatever that vision you have is.  It's not really about "imposing;" it's about leading.  But if you don’t go into the whirlwind endeavor already congealed, if you will, it is very hard, if not impossible, I suspect, to find your wholeness in the maelstrom of filming.  And if you're not whole, it's next to impossible to lead in one unified, coherent - let alone brilliant - direction, because pieces of you are all over the place.