Dear friends,
The window unit air conditioners we put in our upstairs bedrooms for the summer hot spells have not fallen out of their windows just yet; I pump my fist. Visitors from out of town now come for outdoor dinner parties and sea air. There are fireflies and night bug sounds. Kids sweaty from running, tumbling. Strawberries from roadside stands. Lightning.
Small victories - like the air conditioners not falling from the windows onto dinner guests below - are worth celebrating in the Wicked Delicate Filmmaking Life, partly because failure and rejection are always close at hand. Failure and rejection of course are not precisely the same thing. For example, the other day I failed to remember that I’d put my laptop, my 5-year-old’s favorite book, and the first two chapters of a friend’s draft novel on the hood of my ‘75 Dodge just before the skies poured forth with really quite a lot of rainwater. Only the unpublished novel survived! I would be rejected from The Society for the Preservation of Laptops & Children’s Literature.
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I shall confess that rejection hasn’t gotten all that much easier for me over the years. Obviously it’s because I still haven’t developed a hard enough shell, or built up enough confidence in myself, but it’s preferable not to dwell on those shortcomings. Since there’s rejection at all stages of the filmmaking process, the trick is to push through and make sure you don’t sink:
You spend weeks wrestling your harebrained ideas and images into a proposal for funding, wait anxiously for more weeks, and then get turned down for a grant: zilch, zero, there’s no silver medal. You must not sink.
Months pass. You do not sink. You’ve scraped together some funding and entered production, the filming phase. When you ask an important person (whatever that is) for a few hours of their time for an interview, but they reply that their diary is full for the rest of the year, you must acknowledge that it’s lovely to say diary for calendar, you seem to have asked a scion of the erstwhile British Empire, which doesn’t so much soften the blow as distract you for a moment, you never finished reading your Edward Gibbon, where’s the 3rd volume, in the barn? – but anyway you must not sink.
More months go by. You do not sink. You’ve edited the film all the way to the rough cut stage, in time for the very last deadline to submit to a Swiss film festival you’ve always dreamed of attending, and you send the film off to the faceless reviewers who of course have faces, and names, you can sometimes look them up, but it’s better not to imagine them as real humans, because they reject you again, and in impeccable English to boot, and you comfort yourself by assuming that they didn’t actually watch the film, they were busy, there was rosé, or raclette, too many films, they just picked their friends’ films, or the famous people, no that’s not quite it, they threw darts, European darts. You must not sink!
More moons come and go. The word sink at this stage is starting to gnaw at you, because of course you’ve been using it as a verb but it’s very good as a noun too: the opposite of a source is a sink. You have found a source, a faucet of energy to keep going, some sort of well of hope, and at your film festival premiere (you did it!) there are great hurrahs, and people say “you did it!” and you’re pretty sure that’s their way of saying they didn’t like the film, but to hell with them, and to hell with the film industry awaiting you with even more rejections, this time from distributors who “pass” on the film, as if they’re on a diet and won’t pluck a proffered bun at your dinner party. You sink a bit. It’s okay. You’ve been afloat, adrift, not drowning but waving, for what feels like years.
No one should weep for filmmakers; I don’t walk around with the expectation that society needs documentary films, the way it needs culverts and breakfast sandwiches. But nonetheless, film after film, I get it into my head that the world - or really, some corner of the world - might be a bit more lovely and enchanting if I were able to share a film with people. I don’t mean because it’s my film. I mean because there are all sorts of people in these films, including some of my films, whose ideas I admire, and I want them to be heard. In other words, if only I could get those people over there to listen to this person over here, then maybe some beautiful things would follow.
This suggests that filmmaking can perform a kind of diplomacy, and I think that’s true. I want our films to be occasions of gathering. I’ve grown less enamored with making films to argue a point, expose a problem, or convince an audience, and more enchanted with the idea that films can expand our understanding of each other and open conversations. That sounds like grant writing gobbledygook but doggone it again, I mean it. People make films for all sorts of reasons, and thank heavens they do, but what I want my films to do these days is akin to inviting someone to a strange and surprising outdoor dinner party: come on over, you are welcome here, enjoy this food, how about a small chuckle now and again, here’s an idea you might not have thought much about, hear from someone new, look at that firefly — leave in something of a daze. (Don’t let the air conditioners fall on your head.)
Needless to say this ethos doesn’t always translate well into a film proposal pitch deck. After all, the industry knows what people want, and there’s money to be made giving people what they want: dating shows, sweeping nature programs, true crime, celebrity stuff, you know the drill. This is the path of fewer rejections.
With a sigh, and then a fist, I’ll keep the rejections and stay on my wilder path, as long as I can keep from sinking. (I guess you can’t really sink on a path, so my metaphors have failed yet again; I would be rejected from the Society of Competent Writers.) But you get the idea. It’s worth it somehow.
After all, maybe rejection feels uncomfortable because it feels like being out of sync with the world, and isn’t the job of the artist to be slightly, or more-than-slightly, determinedly out of sync with the world? If we lose that, if we decide we cannot stomach rejection, we’re not artists, we’re content creators for the hurdy-gurdy of capitalism. Nothing immoral about that per se, but it doesn’t make for my kind of dinner party.
Ha well yes, I meant that facetiously. I should have clarified that (we) the people are complex, but the film industry doesn't necessarily treat them (us!) as such.
Your subtitle could have been my headline for high school. I quibble with but one sentiment in what is otherwise another uncanny sharing of my own hymnal — “the industry knows what people want.” My entire rationale for being is that they do not. They stoke demand for the lowest common denominator because they are lazy and selfish. “To hell with them, and to hell with the film industry awaiting you with even more rejections.” Let that be the toast over our next Negroni.