Kiss Me Like a Stranger

That's the title of Gene Wilder's Autobiography...not a request.

Cyndil bought it for me for my birthday. She's good at finding things I want that I don't even know exist (which is a real talent). I've been reading it this weekend. It's hard to put down. I'm almost done with it.

I've been reading a lot of "making of" books lately, "the Making of Star Wars," "the Making of Fantastic Mr. Fox," the Making of Where the Wild Things Are."

I'm not the kind of filmmaker that gets off on director's commentaries and special features. I mean I find those things interesting, but I don't use them as my filmmaking bible. Probably for the single fact that I know everyone does things differently and you can't really have a filmmaking bible. That's essentially why I don't believe in film school.

But I have for whatever reason been really infatuated with these books I've been reading (which, by the way, is a pretty out of the ordinary thing for me to do). I think the reason I'm enjoying them so much is because they're really breaking down the glitz and glamour of it all, which is something I pride myself in being somewhat immune to anyway. But it's hearing how these projects are developed that makes it all seem so easy and possible. Knowing that something like Star Wars just as easily might not have ever been made is really interesting. Knowing that George Lucas wasn't really all that much more credible than someone like me when he did it is even more empowering.

But Gene Wilder's book is by far the best one yet because it focuses on his entire life and he focuses on his normal life experiences as much as his major film experiences and summarizes them in really succinct ways. For instance, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" gets about a paragraph in this book. But it's a very good paragraph about how he would only do the role if he could make his entrance the way he does in the film (starting out like a cripple leaning on his cane and ending with a summer-salt) because for the rest of the movie it would make people not trust him...which was perfect for the character.

But the most poignant nugget of information for me right now was a quote from Mel Brooks when they were editing "Young Frankenstein." But I have to set the quote up. Scratch that...rather than paraphrasing the context to set up the quote, I'll just post the whole 3 paragraph section here (I just attempted to type up a set up and realized I was butchering the nice little narrative Gene Wilder had in the book):

"...After seeing a film put together for the first time, a director usually wants to vomit (you may be thinking "ixnay on the omitvay," but I assure you it's true) because it doesn't have any of the rhythms the director had in mind while filming.

When I arrived in Los Angeles, I got a hotel room and an office at 20th Century-Fox and then joined Mel each day in the editing room to look at whatever John Howard had put together. When we saw the ascension scene----where I rise with the Creature on an elevated platform and cry, "LIFE, DO YOU HEAR ME? GIVE MY CREATURE LIFE!," my heart sank. I thought this was going to be one of the highlights of the film, and instead it was a boring blob. I put my head down. Mel didn't vomit. Instead, he got up and started banging his head against the wall. He hit it three times, hard. Then turned his face to the rest of us and said, "Let's not get excited! You have just witnessed a 14-minute disaster. In one week you're going to see a 12-minute fairly rotten scene. In two weeks you're going to see a 10-minute fairly good scene. And in three weeks, you are going to see an 8-minute masterpiece."

That's a cute speech, I thought, but you're kidding yourself, or just trying to make us feel better. How much can you change without reshooting? I saw the scene. I don't believe in miracles.

The next three weeks were my second lesson in directing: thousands of little pieces of film can be arranged in thousands of different ways. Almost three weeks to the day after Mel's speech, the lights went out in the screening room, and I witnessed an 8-minute miracle."

So yeah, that made me feel better about some of the things I haven't figured out yet in editing. There have been a few things where I think to myself, I wish I had shot that differently, but I'm forgetting two things when I say that. The first is that at least I shot it period. A lot of people don't even get that far...and the second is that I don't even have my first cut done, so by Mel Brooks' philosophy I should have a good four drafts after which I should have something pretty good (I'm too modest to claim "masterpiece").

But I also feel terribly guilty because I don't get to work on this movie like my job. So it's not getting nearly the attention it deserves right now. It's like this thing I get to when I can, and that makes me feel like I'm letting myself down. Don't forget this is what you want to do for the rest of your life, Evan.

5 Minutes at a Time

It's Monday. I got through the weekend without doing any editing and it made me really want to edit today. So that's when I realized I have about 4 hours every night after work when I can edit, so I think I'll start doing more of that. Then I won't feel as pressured to fit it into my weekend.

But yeah, I just cut another 5 minutes of the movie. I'm going in a completely arbitrary order. I started with the beginning, then went straight to the end, then to about 2/3 of the way through the movie. And today a random scene about 1/3 of the way through the movie. Altogether I've probably got a rough cut of 45 minutes of the movie or so, but all spread out...which sounds like it's close to half, but I don't think it is. This movie might be longer than I though...or maybe I just can't gauge how much is left.

But I guess if I am halfway, that's reason for celebrating a little bit....of course it's halfway through a rough assembly of the footage. There's no color correction or sound effects or music or anything. So each of those are basically another pass through of the whole thing. So there are lots of halfway points to go through.

This is going to be an odd little film. It keeps surprising me. Looking at the footage with sort of a cleaner perspective now, I think I need to trust my gut more on set. Because the things I didn't put much thought into all seem to look really good and the things I possibly over-thought aren't as strong as they could be. I need to trust myself and not worry so much that I haven't thought of everything or don't know what I'm doing...because I think I actually do.

I'm really eager to see what the overall effect of this film is. The sequence I cut today is a series
scenes when the two main characters start doing research and tests for building the rocket. The flow is really interesting. Because I use a lot of long shots and wide shots, it's like each scene is a little painting that something happens in. And it just goes from painting to painting. I don't mean that in the sense that every shot is just really beautiful or anything. But I guess it's that you're more aware with my compositions that you're looking at these little windows with things going on in them. Usually these kinds of shots are for epic things, but it's kind of fun to have them for fairly insignificant and mundane things. And I'm really interested to see how in the end the story works being told this way. Not that everything is a wide shot...it's just there are a lot of them. And few close-ups in general. It's very non-traditional. I sometimes wonder if that was a mistake....

...because I've never just made a normal movie. In the sense that people have certain expectations for movies and I've never proven myself by delivering those expectations because I guess I feel to a degree that since I'm aware of those expectations and am tired of them I have the freedom and desire to go beyond them...which sounds good and fun, except it means I'm always experimenting, which in turn means I risk making something digestible to normal audiences by messing with the rules they know. My hope is that at least with this project that the language will still be familiar enough for people to follow it.

My biggest fear is that people will find it boring. We'll see.

The Long and Winding Road

So it's been almost a month now since my last entry. Sorry 'bout that.

But there really is very very little to report. Post-production for this project involved less people than any other period. At max there are three of us. Me, Ben (for the music), and Hunter (for the trailer), but the other two are still a ways off from contributing because I still don't even have half the movie cut.

But since last time, I have started a job. I'm working at the film center doing graphic design work, so that's nice. It gives me money, and somewhere to go, and expands my design portfolio, but it also gives me space from the project (no pun intended). So I come to it wanting to work on it. Like this past weekend, I cut the hot tub scene which is the first thing I've cut in about three weeks. But I was really craving working on it for the first time since I finished production.

In the past I've always worked vigorously to finish editing a project almost immediately after shooting it. The longest turn around was probably for "Making Of," which I think I had cut within two weeks of wrapping and had music and sound mixing and everything done within a month of wrapping. I had more of a deadline for that project too though. I went into editing this project knowing I had 8 months to work on it so I think I'm just naturally procrastinating a little. But it was also such an overwhelming effort to get the film shot that I think I really needed to take a break and get it out of my system and come back with a fresh point of view. I didn't really get that right after shooting. I kind of forced myself to jump into editing. But I think now I'm starting to get the pacing right and am finding myself wanting to go back to certain scenes and see them cut together. My interest is come back after being completely burned out on it.

I've also been finding myself unable to stop thinking about what's next. Some part of me (I suppose the writer) feels like I've finished GOS. Like it's done and I'm ready to move on, even though it clearly isn't done. So my mind has been wandering into some very exciting territory for my next film(s). Let's just say I'm going much bigger...to the extent that it would only work as a studio project. And I'm even considering it as a trilogy. We're talking epic blockbuster stuff...basically the movie I've always wanted to make. The kind that has all of your ridiculous impulses in it. It's quite a departure from this quiet personal little film I'm finishing right now too.

I'm still really excited to see how GOS ends up though. You know, it's not perfect. And I suppose that's part of where my hesitation to edit it comes from. I know some scenes aren't what they could be, and I don't want to assure myself by seeing them finished. On the other hand I'm excited about a long editing period too because I have time to refine things to the best of my ability. So ideally, I'll be squeezing every last bit of potential out of what we shot. There's just still a lot of work to do. I feel like with this project more than any other because I want to do it right, post-production is just like production in terms of stuff to do, except I'm walking around literally doing everything (except music). It's not just assembling the footage...I'm really going to have to EDIT this film. Put all the right little touches in. It's exciting and scary because while I consider myself an experienced editor, this is really in a lot of ways my first real editing experience...and I have to live up to my own standards which are far higher than anyone else's.

On a personal side note, it's also really weird to be working a full time job for the first time in my life. I'm used to weird schedules and inconsistency and being my own boss and not making money. Always living on the outside of the real world in this weird space that most people don't really ever experience. Now I'm a part of this world that in some way I've been attempting to enter through the most difficult path I could imagine. I've come in a different door that now seems almost too easy. I don't have the same view I've been aiming for, but it is weird to actually be in the same building as everyone else now. I'm in the real world. Which I guess can be good and bad.

For now though, I'm really happy. I've got a job I like and I'm good at, I'm making money and art, and I'm also in the process of finishing my first feature film in my free time. I really couldn't ask for much more at this point in my life.

For everyone that's waiting for significant updates about GOS though. You're just going to have to sit tight. It's still going to be a while. The best you can hope for is a full trailer this summer.