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 How to imagine information that has been withdrawn, conversations stifled, photographs blocked, or words censored?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 […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 15, 2008I 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]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 15, 2008I 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]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 15, 2008You 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 […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 14, 2008What 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 […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 14, 2008Ten 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 […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 14, 2008I 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 […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 14, 2008A large part of my film, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, was shot in the extraordinary region of southern Sudan. Its first language is Dinka, its second language Arabic. Casual greetings are unfortunately my limits in both these languages, and this was both the challenge and the beauty of trying to film an observational documentary. My cameraman and I were often running on instinct, interpreting the body language of people we were filming. We’ve both filmed overseas and have gained some familiarity with European and Pacific Island languages. But Dinka in particular has no similarity to anything I’d […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 14, 2008Penis size was definitely an issue on Baghead. In fact, we could have used a LOT more than 10 percent extra, but we would have been glad to have as much as we could get. Now please don’t think we’re superficial. We generally don’t concern ourselves with such things. We’ve traditionally viewed ourselves as nice, sweet brothers who lean toward more personal, relationship-oriented films like The Puffy Chair. Maybe we were even better off making these sensitive films with the limited equipment God gave us, you know? But Baghead turned out to be one demanding, feisty little bugger. And we […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 14, 2008You 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 […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 14, 2008