5/08/2011

Wrapping Up, Pastoralia

Last week of classes. Almost done with the film I've been working on over the past few months, Toothbrush is Jealous. Which is good, since it's due on Tuesday at 8:30 AM sharp. Because of length and pacing considerations, I ended up cutting about three pages from the original script. (Not such a big deal in the world of feature length scripts, but it means a lot when your (so-called) final draft is initially seven pages.) A lot of film filmmakers don't like having to cut material that they've written and/or filmed; I'm not among them. I take a strange sort of joy in throwing out all unnecessary footage from a film. Maybe that's because it's the closest I can get to doing any sort of meaningful revision.

The annoying thing about making movies is that they're harder to revise. Trimming stuff and post-production magic are options, but they're pretty limited when compared to the kinds of revisions a writer is allowed to make. (You can also shoot additional footage in case of technical disasters/realizing you missed something totally important, but that requires getting everyone back together again to shoot something that you feel like you should have got right the first time around, which is no fun for anyone.) A writer can write a second draft that builds upon and yet bears no resemblance to the first, but in the process of editing a film, you are, to a certain extent, stuck with what you've got.

This is probably among the many reasons as to why I've become so frustrated with directing over the past few months. I feel to a certain extent that directing is getting in the way of my ability to tell stories. On top of that – again, for many reasons that we won't get into here – I just don't feel like directing is My Thing™ as much as writing.

Speaking of writing: I read George Saunders's Pastoralia a few days ago. The man's a very funny, very imaginative writer. He's very Vonnegut-y; he writes in this wonderful off-the-cuff kind of way that makes his stories seem very oral. (No Freudian analysis intended with that prior statement.) It's the kind of work that makes you go this is utterly fantastic I must keep reading and oh God what's the point of writing anymore this guy is so good all at once, like you're on some sort of weird bipolar roller coaster. The creative self-doubt that it may or may not inspire aside, I really dug it.