I Can See Your House From Here - Archives
vol 2 number 50
You can watch all the making-of featurettes in the world, and listen to all the director's commentary tracks on your DVDs, and I can guarantee you that you still have no idea how much work goes into making a film. Until you've broken down, given up your sanity, and risked the ire and wrath of everyone around you, you'll never know the anxiety, the potential heartache, the stress of turning your paper dream into celluloid reality.
Of course, you can't appreciate how rewarding it is, either, so it's a fair trade.
I've been writing my own screenplays for a few years now, and a fan of movies for even longer. Last year, at the 2001 Sidewalk Film Festival, I decided that it was time to make the jump from writer to director; after all, all these other people could do it, so why not me?
There were issues of money and experience, but as I learned, networking can solve both of these problems. I have friends that act, make music, shoot films - thankfully, it turns out that I know people that can do everything necessary for making a movie. They were all willing to pitch in, and before I knew it, I had actors, cinematographers, make-up artists, and even an apartment to commandeer for one weekend. All of this, and the only money I had to spend was for a plane ticket from Baltimore for the lead actor. Between the lot of them, too, any questions I had about the proper way of doing things were answered with the voice of experience.
After coordinating everyone's schedules, making a shot list with the cinematographer, and tweaking the script for the billionth time, the weekend of filming GOODNIGHT, MOON finally arrived. This, as you might guess, is where the sanity really starts to leak away in copious amounts. No matter how much you plan (and my planning for this approached obsessive-compulsive), no matter what steps you take to ensure that everything is in its right place, something will fall apart. This will lead to other things falling apart, and if you're lucky, you'll discover that you haven't built a tower of dominoes.
When a six-hour shooting day turns into ten, people get cranky (especially the poor sod that offered to let you move all of his furniture into one room so you could make his apartment look impoverished). Lighting rarely works the way you think it should, creaky floorboards threaten to ruin the audio, and keeping the microphone out of the shot is harder than it sounds. As the weekend ticks on, it's harder and harder to forget that you're working on a deadline, since your lead actor is in from out-of-town and the rest of your cast and crew is severely underpaid (landlords don't accept beer and McDonald's, last time I checked).
We all survived the experience, sanity and cholesterol levels mostly intact. Fortunately, most of the folks were through; unfortunately, that weekend was one of the smaller parts of the process. Here's another area where lack of experience set me up: thinking that once the shooting is done, the movie's ninety percent of the way there. Forty percent is more like it, in actuality. There was still editing left, as well as cleaning up the audio, scoring the scenes, adding sound effects, re-editing, shooting establishing sequences… Most of these things were a lot less stressful, as time constraints were lessened; the only deadline that loomed was that of this year's Sidewalk Film Festival. Nonetheless, when you've been under the impression that you were mostly done when you weren't, it can be a little disappointing to watch the weeks turn into months.
In the end, though, it's all worth it. There's a great pleasure in seeing the story that lived in your head for fourteen years in full thirty-frames-per-second glory. Taking the time and putting in the extra effort to make sure that the creaky floorboards are excised and that the breaking glass sounds like a breaking glass pay off. Even before I've heard a single comment from someone who is seeing it without any knowledge of what's coming, I'm happy.
I'm not entirely sure that Hollywood filmmakers deserve as much slack, since they've got studio bank accounts behind them most of the way, but the smaller filmmakers have earned applause just for making it across the minefield that is filming an indie movie. Keep all this in mind next time you're watching a low-budget flick: these people scraped together all the money they could, worked extra-hard and sacrificed things we'll never know about, not for millions of dollars or a percentage of the box office receipts, but because that was they only way they knew to tell you a story that they felt strongly about.
Give them a hand for their determination, at least.