CANNES FILM FESTIVAL
This year’s festival was a great form of professional development for me, not because of the red-carpet premieres or the fragmented meetings with over-caffienated producers, but rather because of a conversation I had with a fellow Binger alumni, Indian writer/director Urmi Juvekar.
Since meeting her about a year ago in the Writers Lab she’s become my fairy-godmother of sorts, someone I can confide in about my project’s status and my fears and she in return shares her wisdom and her own tribulations.
Immediately upon seeing me at a Binger party she read my mind, saw my obvious frustration with Cannes & my meetings so far. Instead of pulling me close and telling me it would all be alright she slapped me silly – figuratively of course. While the cocktail party raged on, we found a corner on the balcony and she began to light a fire under my ass:
She gave me exact strategies for moving my project forward without a producer and explained that my top priority now is to act less as a writer and more as a director of my story – to get out into the real world, into the locations and streets of where I want to shoot and begin preparing for the next stage.
Through acquiring visual material, initiating scouts and conversations with local collaborators the project could start to build its own ‘gravity’, become something tangible and less of an idea on the page and begin to slowly pull in what it needs to grow, to stay alive.
Hearing that advice was a great tonic, it made me feel less frantic about the future, and made me appreciate all the things I can do on my own.
Recently, I took her advice and began initiating a series of research trips. I’ll be going back to Beirut & Northern Iraq in September for more visual material as I put together a look-book for my film.
Towards the end of our conversation, we discussed our careers and philosophies of work and she said something great, that she “can’t afford to make art.” She explained that her reality, as a working writer and director, is that she has bills to pay, and she can’t wait for inspiration to hit or permission from others to get work done. She can’t be driven by the sole aspiration of making a ‘masterpiece’.
This idea struck a chord with me, as if she articulated a philosophy for working I had been considering as I plan my career. How is one able to grow and develop as a feature-length director if you’re only making a film every 3-5 years? How quickly could you improve if you were making a film every 1-2 years?
If we approach this profession like a job, like a craftsman, and less as an artistic, inspiration-driven endeavor we would produce more. And would the side-effect of this larger body of work be more art, more ‘masterpieces’?
My own recent experiment with regards to art and productivity in the form of 100 Poems/100 Days demonstrated to me my capacity for work is substantially higher than I give myself credit for – and that the more I worked and created, the more confidant I became with expressing an idea through a medium.
I don’t think it’s an exclusive choice between quantity versus quality but if I had to choose between being a prolific filmmaker, that makes a ‘passable’ film every 1-2 years (with hopefully the occasional ‘home run’) versus the filmmaker that makes a ‘masterpiece’ every 5 years I think I would rather be the prolific ‘craftsman’ .
But that kind of production turnaround requires one to be less dependent on complex financing packages and the permission of several partners that can take years to put together and inevitably affects the film’s content.
She was advocating more financial independence, less bottlenecks to the process and ultimately more hard work.
Again, the idea she was proposing wasn’t a theory, or something she read about in a magazine, but rather her reality; she was actually putting it into practice and evaluating her projects by how quickly and independently she could complete them and get them into cinemas.
This urgency of minimizing the turnaround from inception to production echoed something I heard the Iranian director Rafi Pitts discuss two years ago during a Berlinale Talent Campus panel discussion. With regards to his then recent film The Hunter, he mentioned how critical it is for him to produce his scripts as quickly as possible. If too much time passes from when he conceived a story to when he’s actually on set shooting it, he might no longer be interested in the story, he may have actually outgrown his original interest in the film. So he works quickly to get himself and crew on set, before he loses that initial hunger to make the film.
Overall a great, inspiring talk with a good friend that gives me some strategies for moving forward with my project and career.
Thanks again Urmi for the slap and the fire!
