You always wish you had more of everything: budget, talent, time, emotional courage, personal magnetism, etc., but part of maturing as a filmmaker, for me, means accepting what I have and doing the best I can with it. That doesn’t mean not pushing as hard and as fiercely as possible during every moment of the process — it just means a willingness to fight for the things I have a chance of getting and genuinely letting go of the things I can’t.

In this instance, it would have been nice to have 10 percent more willingness from the financiers who were teetering on the edge of deciding whether or not to finance this movie, to make the leap and finance it… but they didn’t, so I financed it myself, with my entire life’s savings. But for every penny spent I gained the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a movie with complete creative freedom, and the ability to communicate the story I was telling in a completely personal fashion. Every choice made by my collaborators and myself was based on our creative interpretation of the script, the limits of our budget, and nothing else.

It’s been important for me to realize — this is where I’m at now, creatively, financially, etc., and the movie is an expression of where I’m at now, and it will reflect all of the strengths and weaknesses inherent in that; and I’ve found strength in the knowledge that if one approaches that moment and the work reflecting that moment with honesty and self-awareness and dedication, the feeling of wishing one had more becomes a kind of wistful musing rather than a painfully gnawing frustration.

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Tuesday, Jan. 22, 6:15 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City]