Is it possible to be blocked even after you successfully complete your film? If you asked me at the start of this series, “Letters from Blocked Filmmakers,” I would have answered no. You could be frustrated, disappointed or even angry, perhaps, but the realization of an artistic goal should have transmuted that feeling of blockage into something else… Or, at least, that was the rationale behind this column. With “Letters from Blocked Filmmakers,” I wanted to create a space on this site for those whose films aren’t getting made but whose voices are still very much worth hearing. I also […]

In the debut piece in this column, Letters from Blocked Filmmakers, Drew Whitmire described a relentless perfectionism that led to him continually begin and begin again what was meant to be his debut feature — a 14-year process that resulted in only 15 minutes of footage. In today’s installment, Gregory Austin McConnell describes a related behavior: a continual re-envisioning of his feature as he ages and his own life circumstances change. Characters, storylines and tone all mutate as McConnell’s teenage dreams give way to adult realities — realities that bring not only creative change but also family responsibilities that make […]

“Isn’t there some form of torture that involves death via a thousand small cuts?” The first sentence — indeed, the entirety of this latest edition of Letters from Blocked Filmmakers — is a heartbreaker. This week’s column makes me alternately want to shake its writer, Zoje Stage, and say, “C’mon, don’t give up,” and applaud the reasoned “I’m moving on” vibe that may lead her to a happier creative place. Intended as her directorial debut, Zoje Stage’s The Machine Who Loved is a screenplay written to be realized on a low-budget, and over the course of six years it has […]

Get together for drinks with a group of people who work in film, and soon the memories will flow. And they are usually linked to films these people have worked on. Film titles become markers of memory. It was on that film that this electrician met his future wife. On this one a P.A. adopted her dog. The sound guy was going through a divorce on this other one. The films may have faded from our collective memory, but the days on those sets are still ripe for the people who were involved. In reading this letter from Michael Lew, […]

Although the title of this column may make you think of “writer’s block,” filmmakers can be blocked by external forces as well as internal ones. In last week’s post, Drew Whitmire wrote about the internal factors — a relentless perfectionism and self-questioning — that have prevented him from finishing his first film. In today’s post, Jessica Vale writes about a series of events that brought her to Liberia to shoot footage about a medical mission there, a trip that led her to then embark on a larger feature documentary. But a number of factors stopped that feature in its tracks […]

Independent films get made, often miraculously, and we cover those films here at Filmmaker. But what about all those other projects that never, despite the best of intentions, make it through production, much less hit theaters? In this new series, “Letters from Blocked Filmmakers,” we’ll be hearing from directors who have struggled for years to realize their films only to come up short. Is the system to blame? Bad luck? Themselves? I’ll let the filmmakers answer these questions in their own words. I’m happy to be opening this series with this letter from Drew Whitmire, who has been attempting to […]

Independent films get made, and we cover them here at Filmmaker. But what about all the films that don’t get made? They have their own stories, and their stories can be as useful to other filmmakers as those of films that do actually hit the screen. After a brief Twitter poll, I’ve decided to invite several filmmakers who have been struggling, so far unsuccessfully, to make their films to discuss those projects here on the site. I’ll be interested in the films, the length of the development process, the avenues tried, and the possible reasons for the projects’ failure to […]