Well, I’ve tried to take a break from these summaries on my experience at Binger to allow it all to settle a bit before I try to conclude this journey. But I’ve realized that it might be years before I truly appreciate the effect the Directors Lab has had on my project and career. I won’t make you wait that long, instead let me try to summarize what I know to be true now, and append it later on if necessary:
First, I have to wholeheartedly recommend this opportunity if you have five months to devote solely to your project, away from your home and everyday life. Having a steady stream of advisors take a look at where you’re at as a director and help push you along into foreign territory is a very unique experience that leaves its mark.
Probably the best way to appreciate my growth at the Binger is to say a bit about where I left off at my previous directors lab. Sundance was an opportunity to start exploring the language of my film through actual practice with a cast and crew. There were specific moments of the script where I felt ‘blind’ – both visually and emotionally as to what was happening in the moment between characters.
These areas were the scenes we chose to shoot. Working with a cinematographer and a number of advisers I started to flesh out these images. Because I had dedicated actors working with me for three weeks, I got to know them and hear their feedback on the script and the characters they played. They encouraged me to look deeper into each of the major characters, flesh out their backstories and motivations and to go beyond the convenience of a predetermined plot I had chosen for them to play out. To reach for ‘the truth’ of what they would actually do if they were real people and not merely characters in my film.
This work was critical. I left with a strong degree of confidence in myself and in the possibility I would one day make this difficult film. That summer fueled the next set of script revisions and I choose to attend the Binger Writers lab as a kind of haven to do these changes in.
Six months later, I had completed two rewrites. But despite having a more polished script, I felt by the end of that lab something fundamental was still missing. Something, or someone, had been left behind in the story’s development. And I had doubts I could I actually find this, whatever it was, by more rewriting.
I entered the Binger Directors Lab immediately afterwards, burnt out and on a kind of writer’s plateau. While I was able to come up with elaborate goals for myself in my application, the reality was I had no real idea what I wanted out of the lab. I just had this gnawing feeling that something was very wrong, and that maybe Amsterdam was the place to deal with it.
I knew I needed to take a break from being a writer and a wordsmith. I needed to be a director again, like at Sundance. I needed to see if collaborating with others, plus relying on emotions and images, could highlight what was wrong.
If you’ve followed my experience these past few months then you know I’ve centered most of my work around one character, Stefan, who I discovered early on could potentially be the heart of my story. All the scenes I choose to rehearse and/or shoot involved him, in an attempt to find out more about his nature. To identify his needs and motivations, and the emotional baggage he carries.
I’m thankful I took the time to shape my lab notes and feelings into these blog posts, rereading them post-lab I find them to be a rich reference for myself if I get lost again in my journey.
And for those few that have followed along, thank you for your patience in reading these long-winded meditations. I hope they’ve benefited you in some way, maybe at the very least encouraged you to pursue a similar kind of journaling with your own creative pursuits. If you do end up blogging like this, in whatever pursuit that is, I hope you’ll email me so that I can follow along.
I’ve been humbled by the dedicated staff at the Binger, by the advisors they so expertly hand-picked and brought to us in Amsterdam. And of course I’m honored to have met such talented fellow filmmakers whose films I’m sure I’ll be seeing very soon.
So . . . I guess what I’m trying to say is if you apply to the Binger and get accepted, and can afford to get away from the ‘real world’ for a little bit, then I recommend you do so by all means.
I would like to try summarize three major lessons I’ve learned before I close this chapter of my life. And maybe you can refer to these musings if you one day find yourself in such a long scriptwriting workshop environment:
1.
It is easy to ‘over-dissect’ a film project. In order to talk about a script, its strengths and weaknesses, we need to strip it down to its most elemental pieces. We talk about a character, a scene, a line of dialogue, etc., each of these being very fragile threads when treated separately.
We give feedback on these elements of a script couched in our preconceptions and tastes of what is right and what is wrong, and assume that our gut reaction to someone else’s work must be right.
But in order to give useful feedback, we must first appreciate the intended metric by which the story and its maker are asking us judge it by.
For a wild example to prove my point, we can’t compare Toy Story to Hunger. Even though they both are very strong films, they offer very different emotional journeys and are distant relatives of one another. The metric that tells me Toy Story is a masterpiece will probably tell me Hunger is garbage and vice versa.
This is obvious. Yet somehow I can’t help but feel that we sometimes forget to first identify this metric with films in development. Films that are still embryonic scripts and that can easily be strong-armed by the wrong kind of feedback into the wrong kind of film.
Ultimately, whatever advice you receive, even if there’s a consensus, it is your project, your invention, the beast that only you could have made, and you probably understand it better than anyone else. It is always easier to put your faith in the advice of an articulate, gray-haired adviser, but remember, your primordial advisers – your own heart and mind – are wise as well.
What you are doing is strange, it is risky and no one can guarantee it will work.
A film ultimately works by its ability to generate an emotional response within the audience. That intended response is your metric.
Even though you sometimes can’t justify your choices, and play the game of intellectualizing your preferences, there is always strength in the response that you’ve made a choice simply because ‘it feels right’.
Trying to prove the logic of your cinematic choices merely with words is the same kind of folly as thinking your screenplay’s words carry the same weight as your final film.
There are some things that words can’t say.
Your script is a map of where we are going and how you will take us there. It tells us what we will see and feel, and where will we land. And of course who we will meet along the way.
It is easy for us to nitpick the map you’ve created, to find short-cuts to the paths you’ve drawn out, to suggest that you scratch this line of dialogue out or add that scene. But if someone doesn’t seem to really care about this intended destination, about the emotional response you are trying to engineer, chances are he or she really doesn’t care about your film.
What is their metric? And what is yours?
2.
This brings me to the second lesson: a script is a dead thing. It is a kind of Frankenstein’s monster right before the electricity goes zapping through it. There are so many players that come in and add life to that strange beast: the crew and the cast and their ideas. And even then, it is up to the audience to fill it up with their own emotions and imagination.
Remember that your script and the words you use to describe it are not the same thing as your intended film. This lab has reminded me of all the other layers and tensions that a film is made up of – performances, images, colors, sound, etc.
In the last few months since the Binger has ended I’ve tried to revise my script with my new realizations, but simultaneously created a separate ‘document’, a directors notebook on my computer where I can jot down notes, embed videos, photographs and relevant sound ambiances. It is a scene by scene breakdown of how I plan on interpreting the script and making the ‘word into flesh’.
For example if I hear a useful idea on a DVD director’s commentary, something about rehearsing a specific kind of scene, I’ll steal that for myself, making a note as to where in my own film that idea could be useful. The same goes for production design, sound design and cinematography ideas.
Because of this I’ve become less reliant on the script to ‘say everything’, I’ve reined it back in to just being a blueprint, a map, and not the entire emotional experience that I am planning for the audience.
I’ve also started a tumblr page, where I post a great deal of raw material from others that I feel is somehow connected to the filmic experience I have in mind. This in turn has inspired my writing.
3.
Finally, one must redefine ‘failure’ in such an environment. If you enter a shooting lab with the mindset that you will leave with a promo of what your film will be or proof of how much of an unrecognized genius you actually are, then you will have settled for the easier path and set of choices you’ve probably already explored in your shooting career.
I think its far more useful to use these scenes in a shooting lab as places were you can earnestly fuck-up and plunge into new terrain. Into places where you can ask yourself a question and try to answer it in more than way.
It is after all a ‘lab’, in the mad scientist, Edison making 10,000 mistakes before getting it right sense of the word. The scenes you leave with will most probably be a small artifact of your journey, your exploration into the particular drama you’ve assigned for yourself. They will say little about your strengths or weaknesses, and more about your time in a strange land. A visual document of where you’ve been and where you still need to go as you prepare for your film.
To extend this idea further, if there’s one regret I have it’s not having someone record me while I was shooting my scenes. A funny idea I know, but I think that tape would have been very helpful as a metric of how well or not I communicated with my cast and crew. I think it is precisely this ‘scene’, this drama, of what you do behind the camera and in preparation for a lab scene, that will be most valuable to you.
Remember, if your going to do something new, try something foreign, then I guarantee you will fail. You will look foolish and some of us might even snicker behind your back. But it doesn’t matter, because these opportunities to safely fail and learn rarely present themselves in the real world. Ultimately, in a lab, as in life, the only thing you risk by not failing is your own success.
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SUMMARIES:
In case you’ve missed something and want to take a look back at my journey, here it is:
