It’s Friday afternoon, and I’m driving up to Glendora, CA to prep for a low-budget music video shoot. I’m the Director of Photography. I met the director, Ryan, on another short film, bout six months back, that a Long Beach professor was bankrolling. The movie was horrible, but at least I made some contacts. Indie filmmaking takes a lot of rationalization when you eventually realize that you’re spending 10 to 18 hour days, not to mention hundreds to thousands of dollars, making a movie that people will scoff at and never care about.
Rationalizations include:
1. Experience!
2. Meeting people!
3. Free (though generally crappy) food!
4. The magic of filmmaking!
I actually don’t really state #4 with much sarcasm. Sometimes, even though I’m on my seventh hour of shooting in some crowded kid’s house, running about three hours of sleep and four Red Bulls, my body screaming and creaking, and I scarcely have the mental stamina to fill a coloring book, let alone artistically light a scene for a mind-numbingly energetic director, the fact that I’m creating reality as I see fit washes the hurt from my brainand I get my fourth wind (second and third were used to get out of bed) and start shaking and moving about the set with the incredible pretense that I actually know what I’m doing.
My film production prof said something like: filmmaking is pretty much performing the nearly impossible all of the time. Everyone who works on a movie is helping to lie to the audience. The writer is lying, telling you that people actually talk like this. The director is lying, telling you that people might actually feel this way in front of a camera. The soundtrack is basically forcefeeding emotions down your throat. All these lies flashing in front of you, and you’re supposed to enjoy it, not ridicule it into oblivion. Nearly impossible.
I think I like a lot of things in my life that way: nearly impossible. Friendships, relationships, workload… kind of sucks for the people around me. Of course I fail all the time, and I try to chalk it up as experience, which I get mostly in the form of emotional or financial trauma. But when I get in my stride, and my life is propelled just a little bit above everyone else’s constant hunt for sex-food-money-shelter, and sometimes people ask how I’m “good at everything”, and I laugh it off, but I really know that the reason is that I’m just not afraid of failure anymore. I swallow it too much.
I’m happy right now. I think High School Charlie would like College Charlie.
