Dear friends,
Of the many aspects of filmmaking at which I do not excel, the q&a is worth a dishonorable mention. I don’t mind doing it, but the audience rarely benefits, and sometimes outright suffers. This probably stems from a combination of my general incompetence and my reluctance to plan remarks ahead of time. And so, I ramble. I wish I could apologize to all the audience members I’ve rambled to over the years, by now approaching the tens of thousands of unfortunate souls, but I’m equally bad at managing a mailing list, so I shout my so sorries to the sea—and to you lot. Let us not suggest that I haven’t occasionally eked out a good q&a, but statistically speaking I’m a puddle of long stringy sentences. (Is that what this newsletter is, too? A good reminder to unsubscribe, a feature regrettably unavailable to q&a attendees, who must walk out in full view of the hapless filmmaker rather than discreetly clicking goodbye. Theaters should install trap doors and dissatisfied viewers could just drop away without a trace!)
At our recent q&a in New York, my friend and executive producer Robyn Metcalfe spoke with great eloquence about the origins of our film, Shelf Life. It was such a moment of poise, I wished I’d been filming it. It made me proud to be a part of our little team, even as I eventually grabbed the mic and gave a good old-fashioned ramble.
Anyway, one of the core ideas she talked about was what it’s like to get older and be told to do less. As if life at some point becomes a carefully orchestrated descent into doing nothing at all. Robyn smartly rebels against such mainstream medical malarky and every year seems to plan more and more adventures. It’s an inspiring energy to be around.
It got me thinking about my own adventures. The short lull after a film premiere offers me an opportunity to look around at the projects I’m engaged in and wonder if I’m doing too much or too little. It is of course impossible to imagine just right. It’s usually easy to spot too much. But how one defines what’s enough is unusually slippery.
What I do know is that I do not seek balance. I would never begrudge others seeking or finding balance, but there’s little evidence that I seek this. I acknowledge this not with resignation, but with a certain gusto. Perhaps being unbalanced provides a portal into madness, serendipity, or bursts of odd insight. Or perhaps what I mean by unbalance is that I seek to feel slightly dazed by life. My pulse may race along, but I do not truck with the even keel of boredom. Even my metaphors are unbalanced!
Point is this: maybe thrice a year somebody asks me how I can sustain this work and continue making films given my lack of a trust fund or profits from blockbuster movies. It’s a reasonable question, and I get it from all sides: from the fellow exhausted filmmaker who’s about to throw in the towel and wonders if I know a trick; from my mother’s sister’s husband’s brother, in Florida for a birthday party, as I’m trying to look at some turtles my Aunt has nurtured but he wants to know how it is that I make money, not make a living mind you, but make money, as if money comes from thin air, the beguiling magic of capitalism being the creation of wealth seemingly from nowhere, but in reality from places we’ve gotten good at simultaneously exploiting and ignoring, people unheralded or abused, hidden workers in the food system, hidden miners in the coal mines, landscapes duly pillaged, that sort of thing, inner monologue college Marxist stuff, but I look up from the turtles and mumble something about PBS, educational revenues, grant writing, and he gets the picture that I’m a rambler and not a capitalist, leaving me alone with the turtle; or from my 8-year-old son, who shoots hoops in our dirt driveway and asks, from not a great height, about the salaries in the NBA.
I don’t mind their puzzlement about the filmmaker life; I’m puzzled too. What’s the recipe here?
One ingredient for me is surely whatever advantage society has bestowed upon anyone white and male in America, which at this point of course is more of an unconscious (if pervasive) bias than a policy of film grant makers, at least in the documentary world; many funders are rightly working to make sure that more than just old white guys get to make films. We’ll talk about this more later; you’re familiar with the contours unless you’ve been sleeping under a glacial erratic. For now, let’s acknowledge there’s a wind somewhere at my back, and I get to tumble on.
Another reason for my ongoing existence as a filmmaker is that I take a lot on. Partly this is just math: if I’m working on a film that doesn’t pay my bills, I need to get another job or work on another film. Since at this point I’m borderline unemployable at normal workplaces given my monochromatic resumé and chronic imbalance, I tend to just make more films.
It’s also a game of probabilities: one film might have a better shot of securing funding than another, so you move both forward and see what happens. In an ideal scenario, the one that gets funding can sort of keep the lights on for its unfunded brethren, at least for a while. In this way, too, I end up working on some films that are slightly more mainstream (although still, to be sure, esoteric and undesirable) and some films where I’m taking more of a risk.
That’s the other part of the reason I take a lot of films on. It’s thrilling to feel challenged. Right now we’re in the distribution phase of The Arc of Oblivion (2023) and now Shelf Life (2024) too, while Observer is at the tail end of production and entering the full swing of editing. The Rocks That I Got is entering production but still seeking funding, and a new collaboration with Robyn, this one untitled, has its second big shoot in a few weeks on a fogbound island near here. I won’t tell you my other ideas because you will steal them and make millions and give coherent q&as! But working on all these projects at the same time makes me feel alive, and makes each year feel full. Time slows a bit.
I’ve occasionally advised on other projects, and I’d like to get better at this. It’s a joy to help others achieve their filmmaking goals. I love seeing the quirky decisions other directors make, and I love the camaraderie of knowing we’re all struggling along together. It’s hard to argue with the value of hearing from more people about how they see the world. (Maybe I’m remembering with rose-colored glasses, or my memory is colored by glasses of rosé, but in its earlier days Netflix seemed like a mainstream home for a smorgasbord of different independent films. It doesn’t feel like that now. Which is okay; I’m not convinced that filmmaking’s noblest future lies in mass distribution to people’s home televisions. We’ll find other ways to support the scrappy voices out there, and other ways to share these stories with people in active, engaging showings.)
I’m rambling again, what was the question? I think it was about how to take on the right amount of projects, or how to make a living as a filmmaker. We would need a thousand newsletters to get through these topics, and by the printing of the thousandth, the rules would have changed, and we’d have to start all over again. By now, anyway, you’ve probably slipped through the trapdoor and are hopefully out looking at turtles somewhere. That’s a better use of your time than wondering how some guy in Maine makes a few films. After all, I could never give you the real answer to how to sustain this work. All my heartfelt rambling conceals the truth that I really have no idea, and am wondering still.
I enjoy your newsletters very much. I only have been following you for a month or two. I read every newsletter!