I’m going to make a movie. With no money and no experience, I’m going to write and direct a feature film.
I’m about to be a sophomore film major at Emerson College, and I’ve reached a crisis point. For years I firmly believed that filmmaking was my calling—that it was what I was meant to do. Please believe me, I’m not one of those brain-dead film students who enrolls in film because I’ve watched a dozen movies and said, “Hey, I can do that.” I didn’t apply to film school on a whim and I didn’t do it because it looked like fun. In fact, filmmaking is agonizing for me. If you’re reading this I’m going to need you to take a leap of faith and go with me on this—I’m not one of those “film kids.”
I applied to film school because I really, truly, deeply believed that it was my calling. I looked deep inside myself and researched every possible option and came to the ultimate conclusion that I was supposed to make movies. I might be a film school brat, but at least I took the decision seriously.[1]
I’d say that 75% of the Emerson film demographic is air-head trust-fund slackers who thought it would be fun to make movies. Unfortunately, the other 15% is the opposite extreme. They’re the grizzled tech snobs. They’re dedicated to their craft, and they’re going to have jobs in Hollywood laying dolly rigs or flipping fuse boards or whatever. These people don’t have any artistic aspirations—they’d be quite happy PAing Jennifer Anniston comedies for the rest of their lives. And more power to them, I guess.
My problem is, I hate that stuff. I hate gaffing other people’s movies, I hate being a PA, and I could care less about the millions of different kinds of camera lenses and diffusion paper. Every time I work on a major student film set, I walk away knowing that this is NOT what I want to do with my life.
I’m at a kind of crisis point. If this is how movies are made, I’m no longer sure it’s what I want to do. I love the creative ideas that go into making movies; I love acting and directing actors, I love editing, and I love structuring and writing screenplays. But I hate waiting around on a set while somebody fixes a microphone. I hate how slow everything is.
I’ve also never actually enjoyed directing a movie. I’m always scared that we’re running out of time, or the equipment isn’t going to work, or we’re forgetting some crucial element. On big film shoots directors alleviate some of the stress by delegating it amongst assistant directors and DPs and script supervisors. But then everything gets so bloated and slow that I want to shoot myself in the head.
Everything’s so slow in filmmaking. When I get artistic inspiration I want to GO, GO, GO! A musician can just hunker down and record a song. I like visual art because I can just translate my ideas instantly to the paper. Same with writing—you can send the ideas from your head straight to the paper, with nothing in between. Dance is a great art form because you can just dance. But with film there’s so much stuff in the way. You can dance with passion, but you can’t direct with passion. To direct you have to be cool and calculating. Filmmaking is an incredibly level-headed art form, and that’s not me at all.
Here’s my line of thought: filmmaking as I’ve learned it isn’t working for me. But there’s still that part of me that firmly believes this is what I was born to do. Before I give up on filmmaking entirely, I want to see if there’s another way of making movies—a way more in tune with my skill set.
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| Linda Barry's art |
I’m not a “clean” artist. I’ve always been jealous of artists who can draw perfectly straight lines and make everything neat and tidy. (It’s an absolute mystery to me how so many comic book artists can accomplish this.) I think I fall more into the Linda Barry category. Linda Barry’s art isn’t neat or tidy. She colors outside the lines. But she’s able to achieve a certain raw beauty in her smeared ink stains and imperfect drawings. I’d like to think that in my smeary, imprecise drawings I’m able to capture some kind of messy energy.
I think my film aesthetic is similar. I’m never going to be able to photograph something as well as these big-budget technical wizards who spend eight hours adjusting the focus on their Red camera. If I try to compete in that arena I’m doomed to fail. But maybe I can find something to love in my shaky, smudged low-def camera shots.
The punk movement of the 70s was kind of a similar thing. Mainstream 70s music had perfect production values and no soul. Most of the early punk rockers had very little conventional talent, but in their ragged amp feedback they were able to capture something raw and honest that the bigwig producers couldn’t wrap their heads around.
I’m going to try to aim for something similar with film. I can’t compose the most beautiful camera shots, and frankly I don’t have the patience. But I want to make something that’s fast and messy and out of control. I can’t manage too much conventional aesthetic beauty, but maybe I can preserve some of that passionate honesty that gets lost with plodding perfectionism.
I’m going to make a feature film my way.
A feature film is like film school’s number one no-no. And in conventional wisdom, it’s a very bad idea. If you’re going to spend six hours on a single shot of your 35mm masterpiece, you’ll be well into debt and insanity by the time you’re half finished.
But I’m going to do it anyway. I’m going to make it fast and messy. I’m going to go with quantity over quality and hope that something good emerges. I’m going to try and make a movie that’s fast, cheap, and out of control.
This blog will chronicle my efforts to make the best, cheapest film possible. I’ll research no-budget films in a variety of genres and review them based on how well they exploit their fastness and cheapness. My plan is to compile a database of things that no-budget movies can do well, and then put them all into one movie.
I’ll be researching all kinds of movies, but I’m drawing my main inspiration from two radically different filmmakers: John Cassavetes and Robert Rodriguez. These two filmmakers both succeeded in exploiting their apparent disadvantages. John Cassavetes’ films exploit their lack of production values to create a heightened sense of realism. They feel authentic and create total suspension of disbelief. In eliminating artificial production values, Cassavetes films are able to capture an unparalleled degree of honesty and truth.
Robert Rodriguez is kind of a patron saint of the DIY movie crowd—probably to a fault at this point. The story of how he made El Mariachi off of $7,000 he made through experimental drug testing has reached legendary status, thanks in part to his tell-all manifesto Rebel Without a Crew. Personally, I think amateur filmmakers probably take his book too seriously. El Mariachi could only have been made under a very unique set of circumstances and it’s probably not a great model to emulate. (The town police officers donated machine guns to the crew, for instance.) Rodriguez’s “anyone can make a movie” mentality sounds nice in theory but serves more as motivational inspiration than as an actual applicable model.
However, I’m definitely a fan of Rodriguez’s basic thesis. Basically, he argues that Hollywood filmmaking has evolved in a total backwards direction, resulting in film productions that are bloated, obese and slow. They suck up hundreds of millions of dollars and take years to make and end up plodding and uninspired as a result. Even now, when a Rodriguez film can run to around $60 million, he employs a very fast, anti-establishment style. He shoots with a skeleton crew and gets dozens of camera setups a day. His production company apparently shot Predators and El Mariachi on the same soundstage at the same time.
Rodriguez films definitely don’t go for Cassavetes-style realism. Instead Rodriguez opts for a hyper-kinetic comic book energy. By shooting so fast and cheap, his films achieve a schizophrenic grindhouse spontaneity that obese Hollywood movies can’t fake. When Hollywood makes a comic book movie, it usually hits an odd chord of self-serious pretention. When Rodriguez makes a comic book movie, it feels like a comic book—cheap, pulpy fun. His new movie is in 4-D—smell-o-vision.
For my feature film, I’m going to try to straddle both genres—the hyper-realism Cassavetes genre and the comic book Rodriguez genre. I’ve always been attracted to cross-genre films and this way I can exploit both sides of no-budget film. My idea is a movie that begins as a Cassavetes-style relationship drama, completely drenched in realism, and then slowly begins to morph into an insane comic book movie. Something that takes you off guard—a meditation on life that transforms into a roller coaster ride.I have a third inspiration, and that’s Scout Tafoya. He just graduated from Emerson this last year and I was lucky enough to find him before he left. Scout is a genius with an encyclopedic knowledge of film history, but more than that he’s probably the most driven film student I’ve ever met. He takes a gleeful pleasure in breaking every single rule of conventional Emerson filmmaking. While Emerson students obsess over getting every detail right on their short films, Scout churns out sloppy feature films like there’s no tomorrow. He willfully ignores any kind of production values and uses crappy cameras that would make a cinematography student die. I love that iconoclastic mentality. This summer he’s shooting a feature film that has me really excited—it’s called The Kill Play and the script is phenomenal.[2]
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| Scout Tafoya's last film- poster by yours truly |
I’m keeping close tabs on Scout’s approach because I really want to know if it turns out. He’s my guinea pig—will his maverick model work? In a sense it doesn’t matter—Scout is so driven that I know he’ll be making movies until the day he dies. Still, it will definitely be interesting to see if he can successfully navigate this unconventional strategy into an actual job.
But back to my movie: in this blog I want to examine every way that no-budget gonzo filmmaking can be a boon rather than a detriment. I’ve already touched on the main advantage: these films have the potential to tap into some raw source of energy. When done right, they can achieve a level of authenticity that polished Hollywood filmmaking can’t touch. Truth is a commodity with no relation to budget, and most Hollywood moguls aren’t very in touch with the real world. When Easy Rider came out, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda were able to show audiences a world that was totally alien to the Hollywood establishment. Audiences sensed this raw authenticity and clung to it while out-of-touch producers exchanged baffled looks. (More on Easy Rider in a later post.)
The no-budget aesthetic is also just a good fit for some movies. Repo Man would have been nowhere near as good with a glossy Hollywood makeover. It thrives in its sloppy production values and blue-collar aesthetic. Likewise The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Clerks, and Stranger Than Paradise. Maybe it’s fitting that Hollywood only tells stories about rich people—when it attempts a blue-collar story like Larry Crowne the results are wincingly out of touch.
From a purely financial standpoint, no-budget films can afford to take more risks than Hollywood films. In fact, it’s to their economic advantage to take risks and appeal to a niche market. No-budget films can’t win if they try to emulate Hollywood films, so the trick is to go the opposite direction—find what Hollywood can’t do, what money can’t buy. No budget films can afford to make enemies. They don’t have to appeal to the widest demographic; they don’t have to pander to the mass-market audience. I have the freedom to make a movie that hates people. And anyway, if I’m making a movie for no budget I don’t have to worry about making money—I can just focus on making the best movie I can make.
Enjoy!
[2] I think the problem with film majors is there’s no quantitative skill involved. If you’re a science major chances are you’re good at science. If you’re a business major, there’s ways to measure your aptitude. Even an art major usually means you can pull off a decent still life. But film is so abstract that there’s no way to filter talent. All you have to do to be a film major is declare it: “I’m a film major.” Partly because of this, film majors get kind of a bad rap. It’s an incredibly risky, do-or-die field, and it’s filled with oblivious trust-fund slackers whose parents told them they could be whoever they wanted to be.
Good luck.
ReplyDeleteJason Reitman's another cool inspiration as well. One of the few people who is in Hollywood but not of it.