We were always running out of something: film stock, extras, sani-wipes, dessert at lunch, daylight, bodily strength, common sense, gum. But in the end it was usually enough. So what was lacking? Lately my therapist has been encouraging me to enjoy the creative process more. This one really should have been fun: a) It’s something I’ve wanted to make for many years. b) I got to work with awesome actors. c) The crew is composed of my cool friends. d) We got to shoot in Albuquerque, N.M., which is truly the Paris of the Southwest. So if I could get […]
My father is a businessman. An entrepreneur, really, and he’s spent the majority of his working life consulting other companies — advising them how to improve their bottom line, become more efficient, more profitable. In short, how to produce less “waste” — the unnecessary, the unneeded — in their work worlds. I guess I’ve always been my father’s son, so if I could’ve had 10 percent more of anything during the making of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, it wouldn’t have been 10 percent more of anything, it would’ve been 10 percent less of something. Ten percent less waste: less wasted […]
Visualizing secrecy might seem about as promising as singing in outer space. Film what? From the start, we’ve constantly been on the lookout for 10 percent more things to make visual. How to imagine information that has been withdrawn, conversations stifled, photographs blocked, or words censored? In fact, the very absence of obvious things to film about secrecy became, over the course of making this film, our single greatest preoccupation. Some things ended up working pretty well — we found ways of animating the redaction — and de-redaction, the all-too familiar blacked-out texts. In fact, prodded by all the things […]
I would have liked 10 percent more roads. Without good access there are no good documentaries and there will always be those stories that are lost because it was almost impossible to get to where they lived. [PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 21, 9:15 pm — Holiday Village Cinema III, Park City]
I wish I had more time, more energy, a lot more guts, a few less words, a lifetime more wisdom, clearer hindsight sooner, 10 percent more of Fassbinders’s DNA, 10 percent more of P.T. Anderson’s DNA, and 80 percent less craft service. [PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 20, 6:15 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City]
You can’t always get what you want, especially shooting a movie. I’d have loved 10 percent more of every resource — what director would say no to that? But since we shot entirely on location in and around Barcelona, I discovered unknown 10 percents along the way. I learned the standard shooting day in Spain is 10 percent shorter than what I knew and that six-day weeks are rare. (I also learned some new things about moving fast while looking good from my superb Spanish crew.) I wish I had at least 10 percent more facility with language since nearly […]
What did I wish I had 10 percent more of when making The Wackness? Easy, sleep. As I approached the first day of production on The Wackness, I couldn’t help but feel the overwhelming sense of: “Don’t mess this up.” I had worked so hard on the script and I was really happy with it. My heart and soul were all over every page. So in my dogged determination not to mess up the movie, I decided I could live on two hours of sleep a night. I stayed in the office storyboarding and tweaking dialogue until the sun came […]
Ten percent more conformity. One day back in college, my screenwriter teacher held a meeting with me about my first script. He looked me in the eye and stated that my writing is so good, if I would just follow conventional screenwriting methods on this script, I would be well on my way to a successful career in Hollywood. Well… I didn’t listen. I was young, bullheaded, and determined not to follow the Man. I continued to write raw and loose, exactly as it came out like conceptual art. That particular script had a 35-page scene in the middle of […]
I wish I’d had 10 percent more of an idea of what the fuck I was doing. Though I had a very strong sense of what I wanted the story to be, we kept shooting and shooting because everything seemed interesting. In the end we had more than 300 hours of footage, and turning that into an 80-minute movie with a strong narrative just became this living hell. The story would keep unfolding as time went on and things would happen and at a certain point I just lost the plot and wanted to kill myself. I just wish I […]
If the three directors at Ironbound Films had stumbled upon a genie’s lamp or magic wand or some other wish-giving mechanism during the filming of The Linguists, and somehow that mechanism would only grant 10 percent more of something we currently possessed, then that something would unanimously and unequivocally be 10 percent more toilet paper. When we set out with the stars of our film — linguists David Harrison and Gregory Anderson — to India to document the endangered language Sora, we spent our first week in Bhubaneswar, a fairly developed city on the east coast of India. We stayed […]