No excuses

November 27, 2011 //
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Werner Herzog has been in the business of encouraging young filmmakers since famously eating his shoes in a bet to inspire Errol Morris to make his first film in the 70s. In a recent interview on The Business, Herzog offered some more advice to filmmakers.

Herzog declares that, because of the digital tools available today, there are no excuses for aspiring filmmakers to not make features.

Today it is fairly easy to make a feature film for, say, $10,000…earn the money, don’t wait for financiers. Don’t waste your life to promote your project.

Herzog says that he’d rather see filmmakers working for half a year to earn the money to make their films working as “a bouncer in a sex club” or as a “guard at an insane asylum.” He says there are fringe benefits to working day jobs beyond just scraping together money to self-finance films.

When I was in the fiction writing program at Columbia College, we were encouraged to write about our day jobs…the more menial and tedious, the better. Jobs were seen as the source of material for fiction. It’s the drama of everyday life that inspires us as storytellers. Maybe that’s why sophomore efforts by writers and filmmakers are often somewhat tepid: once they retreat to lives on the comfortable side of success, perhaps they lose touch with the source material that first inspired them.

The same is true for film: your menial job can keep “your finger on the pulse” of the origins of story. Herzog echoes this, adding the pragmatism of self-financing to the notion that having experience in everyday life can be more interesting that being isolated in academia or caught playing the financing game in LA. Of the latter, Herzog says:

[chasing financing is] a waste of time; it’s loss of life, not only waste of life. When you’re into filmmaking, you have to have your finger on the pulse of real life, of real, raw, essential life. So do that: work for half a year and then you can make the film.

And as for the technological advantages of making films in the digital age, Herzog says:

The instruments, the cameras are inexpensive and high-caliber. You can edit at home on your own laptop. So just go out and do it. There’s no excuse anymore, today there is no excuse.

Herzog is famous for making his own rules in filmmaking, and his biggest successes seem counter-intuitive, from Grizzly Man to Encounters at the End of the World, both unique and atypical documentaries. He drifts from nonfiction to narrative film, always changing genres, making his films on his own terms. It’s refreshing to see that he’s passionate about encouraging others to do the same.

 

Cooking for a sense of place

November 12, 2011 //
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Our cousin Eric recently graced us with a visit on his way to Okinawa for his first deployment as a Marine attorney. When someone visits you, it’s both an honor and a gift, and it leaves the host with a certain measure of responsibility. As this was Eric’s first visit to the Pacific Northwest, and his last stop on the way to overseas duty, that responsibility was, if anything, more acute.

Sisters mountains in Oregon

Preparing a meal is perhaps the quickest and most effective way to give someone a sense of place. Eric showed up at the Greyhound station on a redeye bus, so I sent him to the Coast for the day. He’d already offered to buy steaks, but I upped the ante by sending him to a favorite seafood shop on the bayfront in Newport. He returned with fresh halibut, scallops and crab meat in a bag of crushed ice, plus a bottle of pinot noir from a local vineyard. We added asparagus, scallions and fish sticks for Bailey and the result was quite nice.

Seafood meal

We then headed to the Cascades for a couple days of hiking and fishing the Deschutes. We didn’t land any trout large enough to grill on the fire, but we were fortunate enough to pass a stand in Sisters selling salmon jerky and fresh blue chanterelle mushrooms, which I’d never tried before. We cooked them in oil on a camp stove and ate them with of Painted Hills beef tenderloin filets next to the cerulean blue of the Metolius River burbling and hidden in the darkness just beyond the propane lantern light. The chanterelles were, if anything, cleaner and more earthy in taste than their pale cousins, and they glistened black in the camp light. We drank Black Butte Porter in the shadow of the actual Black Butte, reminding me of why Oregon is perhaps the best place in the world for beer.

Eric and Bailey fishing on the Deschutes

Eric is an avid traveller, eater and Anthony Bourdain fan, the sort of fellow to snap photos of what he eats, wherever he happens to be in the world. When someone visit’s it fine (and easy) to take him to your favorite restaurant, but I think that cooking something local is even more effective. And when your guest snaps a photo of what you prepared together, then you know you’ve had at least some measure of success.

And if Eric decides to return to sample some more of Oregon’s offerings, we’ll know we’ve made a lasting impression.

Making Vino

October 2, 2011 //
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While we’ve been busy making Vino Veritas, a documentary about the wine biz, I also recently made my first Willamette Valley pinot noir in the garage. Here’s a documentation of the process. Tough weather last year, and it shows, but the wine is soft and drinkable, if a bit bright. I hope the acid will settle out and allow it to age nicely.

Wine in Arizona

September 2, 2011 //
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While down in Phoenix for the in-laws 50th wedding anniversary, I took a side trip down to Arizona wine country in and around Sonoita, gathering footage for our wine documentary project. What I found surprised me. The challenges and risks are there, as they are in any emerging wine region, but not like you’d expect. The problem is too much water at the wrong time, not too little. It’s winter freezes and spring frosts, not the baking desert heat. Here’s a summary clip of the trip.

Writing in strange places

August 2, 2011 //
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Patricia Ann McNair holds some measure of responsibility for the fact that I still write stuff. I’m not sure that she deserves praise or derision for this dubious honor. But in all truth, she’s the sort of selfless writer who can be a mentor, friend and teacher, all the while passionately pursuing her own craft.

Her book Temple of Air is coming out this fall.

She was also recently kind enough to include me in her blog series, Views from the Keyboard.

NYT editor wants to ban books: a satire

July 17, 2011 //
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Bill Keller, an editor at the NYT, shared this satirical post about the ongoing change in the “medieval” business model of the publishing industry. I recently tried my own hand at a similar satirical piece about why the dying of the paper books is a good thing.

I don’t think either of us truly think that books are going away. I see too many kids absorbed deeply in books for that to even be a remote possibility. But we are going through changes.  A couple quotes that stood out from Keller’s piece.

When people say they love writing, they usually mean they love having written.

Writing is terrifically hard work. For me it’s like exercise – terribly painful when your doing it, but afterwards it gives you a healthy glow of accomplishment and allows you to not have to suck wind after running to catch the bus.

Another quote talks about the importance of life experience. This resonates with me, because as I cross the big four-oh with limited publishing success, I suppose the one thing going in my favor is the accumulation of additional years of life experience. For example, as I write this, I’m contorting my body in such a way as to fend off the most excruciating back pain of my life stemming from a day spent in the rather low impact activity of painting the house:

…there is no better qualification for writing about life in all its complexity than having lived it.

The whole article is worth a read. I think Keller and I would agree that books aren’t going anywhere. People may slow down on the consumption side, but writers are going to keep writing regardless.  And a few of the books will turn out to be pretty good, too.

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