Archives for posts with tag: filmmaking

No excuses

November 27, 11 //
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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.

 

Filmmaking is making telephone calls

February 5, 11 //
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I hate the telephone. Absolutely hate it. I’ve always sought ways to avoid it, whether it’s been using email, writing letters or driving dozens or even hundreds of miles to talk to someone in person.

I’m not generally an introvert. I’ve got no qualms about presenting to a large group of people or walking into someone’s house or place of business to interview them. But preparing for a phone call always sets my heart to pounding and raises the hair on the back of my neck. I unequivocally despise it. You’d think I was back in high school and was working up the nerve and trying to control the squelch in my voice before asking Tiffany Meyer out.

Still, even in this age of email, text, Skype, Facebook, etc, you still have to make phone calls. If you’re making a movie, you have to make a lot of phone calls. People talk about needing cameras, talent, the right mics. They tell you you need a plan or a story or a vision. You need money. You need experience or you need to go to film school. But none of that means anything if you don’t pick up the phone to line up talent, call investors, build a crew, ask people to interview, get directions, ask questions.

Filmmaking is picking up the phone. It doesn’t matter if you have a RED camera, Canon 7D, Bolex 8mm, brilliant script, amazing actor or a fascinating documentary subject. It doesn’t matter if you know After Effects or Final Cut. If  you can’t pick up the phone and ask somebody to sit for an interview or help you finish the project in some way, by investing or lending support, then you’re never going to finish something worthwhile.

So the most important part of moving any project forward is the thing that I least like to do: pick up the phone. I don’t even like to call to make restaurant reservations and here I am about to phone a well-respected, award-winning winemaker and ask him to help me with a film project, giving up a couple days of his time, free of charge, doing something that most people hate even more that I hate the telephone: sitting in front of the camera.

Can you tell I’m procrastinating?

Okay, here I go, I’m making the call now.

Screenwriters – make a short film this summer

May 23, 09 //
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Have you sent your scripts off to the Nicholl Fellowships for the year? Are you working on your next feature project? Are you trying to learn how the business works from the outside?

If you answered yes to any of the questions above, you’re probably still in learning mode. Most screenwriting bloggers recommend moving to LA if you’re serious about a career so that you can immerse yourself in the industry and make connections. Some will heed that advice and others won’t, but either way it’s a long, hard road to get a feature script that you’ve written filmed and distributed. The odds are pretty much against you. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try. But it does mean that you should be doing everything you can to learn about filmmaking.

Ultimately, the best way for a writer to learn is to simply write and rewrite scripts. Words and story are your tools, and you have to know how to handle them better than anyone else on a project. But another way to to learn is to make a short film. Like writing, it can be done anywhere. If you do it yourself, it’ll cost you a couple thousand bucks, and it might not turn out very well, but it will provide an education.

I’m working on my first short film now, and it’s an education. I’ve got one feature script in development, and I’ve written several full-length scripts that have fared well, but a short film is another matter altogether. Our project is already up to a cast of 15 plus extras, and a crew of at least 10 (if we can find enough volunteers). You look at a script differently when you’re trying to meet a budget. Or when you have to rewrite to adapt to a location that is different from what you originally envisioned. You learn about things like gaff tape (and what it’s for), camera dollies, cranes, and how catering, snacks and coffee are at least as important as what camera you use.

This isn’t something you can do on your own as a screenwriter. But if you’re outside LA, you’d be surprised how easy it is to get the interest of volunteers. You’ll need experienced partners. And it’ll take months of your free time. But you’ll learn a few things about filmmaking and you’ll be able to talk intelligently about the myriad of issues that producers have to deal with, from working with a budget to casting to managing a large crew. And when you’re asked to rewrite to address any of these issues, you’ll do so with complete understanding and empathy.

I’ll blog this summer about the progress of our little project. Of course we’re entering with the typical hubristic notion of showing in film festivals, winning all sorts of awards and sending it off to Sundance. But even if it sucks, I’ve already learned a bunch about filmmaking that I didn’t know after years of writing and revising.