The Watermills

Sometimes things in life converge in a peculiar way. For the past few weeks I’ve been practicing, or attempting to practice, some  forms of meditation to help alleviate stress and anxiety.  Stress and Anxiety which stem from personal difficulties, but also, I’m quite sure, from the nature of the actual world we live in. A world that puts first and foremost the constant striving for success and achievement, both personal and professional. The constant comparing with people around you, are they happier than you, do they have more money than you, are they in better shape than you. You find it almost impossible to just exist in your own skin without going all over the place and compare, judge and critique. The mind, the modern western mind, is in constant chatter. It always has something to say, and at least for me, most of the things it has to say aren’t really positive or nice. It reminds me of what I can’t do and what Iwas never able to do, no matter how much I tried. It lives almost exclusively in the past or the future, and almost never in the present.

So it was interesting to me, specifically in a time like this when i’m trying to subdue the mind-chatter by meditation (and mostly not succeeding for now, but at least I think I understand the concept), that I happened to watch Akira Kurosawas’s Dreams. Now, I hope I don’t need to mention that, but Kurosawa is one of the greatest filmmakers that ever lived and Dreams is one beautiful, mesmerizing film. It is made up of eight stories that represent, well, dreams. But those are not the dreams of The Sopranos for example (which if you ask me are more “realistic” portrayal of how actual dreams unfold) but a more subdued version, more like surreal short stories. The main theme of the film, as I see it, is of celebrating life and nature and it has a major criticism against science and technology as harbingers of pollution and misery. Of course, it is not technology itself but what Man does with it, which means this is ultimately a film about the spirit of man and its capability to create and destroy at the same time.

But the film is so visually breathtaking, and so slow and deliberate in its presentation (this is most certainly NOT a Hollywood action film), that,  if you’re in the right mindset for it- and after three weeks of partial-meditation I sure was – you may be rewarded by something which is akin to a meditative state. This film is magical.

It was exactly what I needed to see right now since it complemented perfectly my state of mind or rather the state of mind I was trying to achieve. There is something at the same time soothing and frightening in it. For some of the segments are truly beautiful and serene (Crows, The Peach Orchard) but some are grim and scary (The Blizzard, Mt. Fuji  in Red). In the end, I was especially struck by the final segment, titled Village Of The Watermills. It takes place in one of the most beautiful locales I have ever seen. I find it hard to believe a place like this can actually exist. It looks like paradise and not in the commercial, cliched way -  an island with white sands and palm trees – but actual paradise, the real one, up in heaven. It consists of a conversation with an old man followed by a rather joyous funeral procession filled with song and dance and I almost cried with the beauty of it all, and wished I could visit it.

The Village of the Watermills seems like a manifestation of what your own self should ideally feel like when you’re in a meditative state: Serene, peaceful, with nothing of the outside world barging in on you. A place which exists only for itself and which represents your inner being, after all the clutter and noise and bullshit of the modern world is swept aside.

At the end it’s just us and nature, from which we came and to which we return, and if we try and remember that, remember what the important things are, we may be in peace.

I think most of us deserve it.

Make ‘em laugh

Getting ready for my screening at WILDsound Film Festival in Toronto, I started to think how nerve-wrecking it is to do a comedy compared to all other film genres.
With comedy, the rules are simple. If the audience don’t laugh, you’re screwed.
If you do a drama, a horror film, an action-adventure, you usually never know if your film worked until the credits start to roll. Then, either people clap, or boo, or couldn’t care less. You may know if it worked by talking to the audience, by looking at their faces or listening to their conversations when they’re leaving the theater, but comedy is the only genre where you absolutely know if your film worked WHILE it is shown.

But does a comedy HAVE to make you laugh to be considered successful?

Well… Yes.

I’m the first one to admit that my film, Hype, is not a laugh-a-minute-riot, nor is it a slapstick comedy or a comedy of errors. Instead, it relies on a certain punchline to deliver the laugh.
Whenever I watch it with a group of people I always get very anxious at the end, because i know that if people don’t laugh now, the film didn’t work for them.
So tonight, watching Hype with the (hopefully) largest audience I ever had for it, I feel excited but mostly anxious. You sit there and you know that if people won’t laugh, your film is a misfire, a dud, a waste of space. A comedy is meant to make people laugh through satire, irony, black humor, slapstick. Like every good film, it needs to say something about life and the world we live in, about the characters, and it needs to do so in a way that makes you laugh. Maybe not all the way, but I believe a good comedy has to have at least one big laugh proportional to its length.

Woody Allen made some great comedies. Some of them were funnier than others. Bananas and Love and Death were ribald and crazy. Radio Days and Mighty Aphrodite were much more subtle. All of those films made you laugh at one point or another. But while Allen’s first films are considered his funniest, his later comedies are considered to be more deep, more rounded and profound. They are more about something, while his early spoofs are more like 90 minute sketches.

But they are all comedies, and they all work in their own way. I love comedies such as Take The Money And Run and Airplane because I love nonsense humor, but I also admire comedies that are more mature. There’s a lot of leeway inside the genre confines, but the rule always stays the same:

Your audience needs to laugh. And laugh for the right reasons, too.

A comedy can sometime tickle your funny bone without causing you to burst uproariously with laughter. There are countless examples of that. But as I’ve said, it’s not enough. If you strive for a comedy, you need those laugh-out-loud moments. Because what comedy filmmaker would want to sit at a screening of his film and have everyone chuckle inside for 90 minutes, or 20 minutes, or 5 minutes?

No, when we do a comedy, we want to make ‘em laugh.

And we will sit in the dark and hold our breath until then…

All the Hype

Well, I have an excuse. I didn’t write in the Blog since last November. I was busy.

Busy making a short film.

Hype, that’s the title, was a real energy drainer. It was hard work. It took 11 months to complete. I’m sure I broke some records as far as short films are concerned. Principal shooting began in September 2007 and went on until December. We only had 5 days of shooting, but they were spread over three months. Scheduling problems. Don’t ask. Weather problems. You can guess. Then came the post-production which stretched over 6 months, after I ended up, unexpectedly, as the editor and color-correction guy, and had to learn complex programs from scratch.

Oh, and I managed to have a couple of anxiety attacks in the process too. Fun!

But heck, it was all worth it. It was all worth it.

I had a great cast and crew I thank them from the bottom of my heart.

So I present to you, Hype. A short film about love, movies, love in the movies, love outside the movies, and small dogs.

Enjoy.

Here comes the rain again

The Hype production is hitting some snags again. The weather is the main problem now. Despite my best efforts to finish shooting all the exterior scenes by the end of September, scheduling problems have pushed the dates into October, and it’s been raining here in one form or another for almost everyday now. Mostly it’s light rain, but still, it makes you miss all those nice, warm, sunny or partly-sunny days which seem to have only been two weeks ago. Wait! They were two weeks ago!
Also, the temperature is much colder. From around 20-25 degrees Celsius in September, we’re down to 10-15 degrees.
Dates for the shoot have originally been pushed by one week because of the rain, and the forecast promises some more rain at the new dates scheduled. If I push it further, into November, most likely it will get worse, not better.

There is an option of transferring at least one of the scenes, which is a scene where our heroine gets a wedding proposal, into an interior location. But again, because that would mean finding a suitable venue for such a scene, i.e, a nice restaurant, for example, it makes it harder, not easier. It’s very hard to get a permission to shoot in a place of business when you have no money to offer them. Especially in places of business where people eat. One idea was to shoot this scene on a high roof (instead of High Park), but it’s still an exterior scene, and everyone will be much colder standing 50 feet or more above the ground.

And anyway, I feel I need to open the film a bit. I have too many scenes in enclosed places where characters sit next to each other and talk. It’s boring visually. Ever since the script- writing stage, This scene was devised as a romantic walk OUTSIDE. It was devised like that for a reason, and that reason hasn’t changed.

Rain will cause a lot of problems, beginning with the threat to equipment and ending with the fact that people will feel wet and icky. There are certain things we can do to cope with that. The camera can be covered and protected (but not the microphone, sadly), A PA can cover the actors with an umbrella right outside of frame, and the rain (and even umbrella as a prop) can even factor into the scene to make it even more romantic. Nevertheless, we’ll have severe lighting problems. The ground will be muddy. People will be cold. A thermos with a coffee might help, but we won’t be able to really eat and drink in a comfortable manner like we did when we shot the bar scene. That concerns me.

Yes, it’s a forecast, and forecasts can change. But last week’s forecast was right on the money, and anyway, you take a chance, because you won’t know for sure till the actual day arrives. So you can pray. How about that for practical solutions?!

I’m thinking of going ahead and shoot anyway mainly because I don’t see any other choice. Again, the weather in November might be worse. Another option is to just wait on those scenes till summer. Oh, my. I really wouldn’t like to do that.
The momentum of the shoot has been trashed by a month long delay. You pay a price when you employ people who work for free. You save money (and are able to use it for hard production stuff like rentals), but you lose a certain degree of commitment. This movie couldn’t have been made with a paid-up crew, though. That would’ve added hundreds of dollars to the budget.
There’s a fear. a great fear, people will lose interest in the project because of the delays. I’m starting to feel it now. The e-mail traffic has decreased. That means that people don’t care as much as they did when we first began, and I can’t blame them. I’ve sent out so many false dates I lost track of it myself. Only yesterday I got word from a location owner that the weekend I planned to shoot on and already told everyone about, is a no-go. My level of exasperation is at Defcon 4, reaching Defcon 5.

Not to mention the fucking outdoor-shooting permits I am not able to attain because the film office in Toronto seems to be under the impression that everyone who makes a film in this town has 5 trucks and 17 trailers, and therefore needs a 2 million dollar insurance policy. It’s time to change the rules. The digital age has ushered a new stream of indie filmmakers who shoot their stuff with small crews and almost no budget, whether it be a short of a feature.

Waiting for the weather to clear is tempting, but might cause a reverse effect. Procrastinations are psychologically harmful. I wish I could do a poll among my crew to see what everyone thinks. Is filmmaking a democracy? I suppose not. Is no-budget filmmaking making a democracy? Will people stand in the rain for free? Will I find another video store on time? Will ruthless park rangers throw us in the slammer, or worse, tell us to go away? Will Steven tell his parents he’s gay?

Join us next time!

Leap of Faith

You’ve got to see this movie!

This, the opening line from my short script, Hype, is probably the only thing left in its entirety from the original work, except the title.

Fashioning a screenplay is a patchwork of trial and error. Perhaps more than a book, a script is an ever-changing work, first in rewrites and then in the shooting itself. Even when you locked a final draft, you never shoot the script exactly as it was written, and that is especially true in extreme low-budget productions, as mine is. You have to take into account the conditions on the location itself, and aspire to use its advantages and disadvantages to move the story forward. In low-budget filmmaking, it’s not the location you want, but the location you can get.

During the exciting, frustrating and exhausting maelstrom of pre-production, the filmmaker has a commitment to have the story in front of him in all times, to never forget its essence, its themes, its heart. While occupying myself with finding locations, doing technical research, recruiting people and scheduling them, I always tried to take the time to get back to the script and go through it again, to remind myself of why I’m doing it in the first place. In narrative filmmaking, everything exists to serve the story. And the characters, and consequentially the actors, are the nexus of it all.

While a story at its core is about the truths of the human existence, Filmmaking itself is a contradictory beast. It is ethereal and practical at the same time, belongs to the real world and out of this world at the same time. It is, as is well known, art and business all at once; in order to be successful in this field, one often need to be a shrewed businessman as well as a gifted director/producer/writer.

Taking care of all this practical stuff, all this doing, and trying to remember the story – and it was quite hard sometimes – was, and still is, like trying to be several personalities at the same time.

At my core, I think abstractly. I’m not good at practical, fact-based stuff like mathematical quizzes or crossword puzzles. They frustrate me and bore me after a time. I like to daydream, to imagine, to think about possibilities, to see connections, to find beauty in whatever I can, to imagine people doing strange, funny stuff in places they shouldn’t be doing it, to picture different lives in different worlds, to wonder what would’ve happened if–

That is the writer side of me, more than anything. But the director and the producer cannot afford to be this way. They exist in the real world, in the here and now. They must be practical and active. They cannot daydream. They must do stuff. They must act. If they sit and think all day, nothing will happen. They cannot afford themselves the luxury of pure artistic flights of fancy. The producer is the one that wills a movie into being. The director creates the visual storytelling out of the written word, aided by his skill-specific crew, in the only art form to incorporate all other art forms, which is what makes it so fucking awesome.

Hype goes into production soon, leaving behind its ethereal existence on the page and making its way to the practical, technical, money-dependent universe we all inhabit.

And that’s the greatest leap of faith in the world.

Enjoy the silence

Yesterday I saw Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Wow, what a movie.

The first time I saw it was years ago, when I was a kid. Yesterday was the second time, and amazingly, it all seemed fresh and familiar at the same time, no doubt thanks to the countless Sci Fi films I’ve seen since that have all been influenced in one way or another by this one-shot wonder.

Elaborate sets, thousands of extras, and fantastic special effects(!) that look impressive to this very day. When you watch it, a constant thought runs through your head:

This was done in 1927!!!

Metropolis seems so familiar because it influenced an entire genre. The industrial nightmare a big city has turned into. Workers in the depths, toiling. Nameless cogs in the nameless machine they themselves operate. They are just one more big machine in a city that has traded its soul for the temptations of technology.

The Boss’s son falls in love with a commoner and descends from the skyscraper where he lives (like a god) to the belly of the earth, and when he witnesses the exploitation and nightmarish existence there, he decides to do something about it, along with his charismatic beloved

But then, wouldn’t you know, his beloved is kidnapped by a mad scientist (yes, a mad scientist) who wishes to graft her face upon a Machine Man he has built in a sad attempt to revive his long lost love (echoes of Frankenstein here). His objective: To destroy Metropolis by destroying the machines which operate it. Hate breeds indiscriminate destruction. Sounds familiar?

There are so many powerful themes here which resonate to this very day: Man and Machine and our dangerous dependency on them, losing one’s humanity because of grief, love conquers all, the abyss that lies between the rich and the poor and volatility of it all. And all this is done without any spoken words, just inter-titles and the actors faces. When you look at Brigitte Helm’s face you don’t really need to hear anything. It’s there, in front of you, every emotion, every nuance, in all its glory.

There is something truly magical about silent cinema. It is so stylish, so unrealistic, it is a pure movie. Alfred Hitchcock, who began his illustrious career in silents, really didn’t like dialogue and in every picture he made tried to tell the story as visually as possible.

And who can blame him? Cinema is visual. There are so many films these days with endless yammering. Not everyone writes dialogue like Tarantino or David Mamet. I myself have a secret desire to do a silent film, or at least a film without dialogue, to feel what it’s like to make pure cinema. How rich. This is coming from a guy who’s just preparing to film a script with tons of dialogue.

At the end, I think it’s about the material. The story I want to tell with my current production can’t be told without dialogue. Its essence rests on the spoken word. When you are both the writer and the director, you find yourself in an odd position: For a writer, writing dialogue is the most enjoyable part of the job. You hear your characters speak. Up until now they were just thoughts, ideas, but the minute they open their mouths, they become people. But when you put on the director’s hat, you look at the script and think: “What’s with all that talking??” for a director, shooting two people talking is mostly boring stuff. You put the camera on one side, and then on the other side, and you do a two-shot, and that’s it. Sure, there are exceptions, but mostly, when you’re a director, you want to tell the story visually. There are dialogue scenes that are great not because what is being said but because what is not  being said. Seeing the actors think and react with their eyes and body language is much more interesting then hearing them talk.

Metropolis is a great example for the triumph of the image. This won’t work today. This movie is a time capsule in a way. A movie like this today would be considered a parody or an intersting experiment, but won’t stand on its own. We moved on, of course. Technology has turned cinema into a digital playground where anything is possible.

So why are there so few films that look and feel as impressive a Metropolis? Why do so few filmmakers utilize technology to tell a story instead of using a story to celebrate the Machine? Let us not forget Metropolis’ main theme and sage advise to us all: “There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator”.

Or else, we are all just cogs.

Ebb and Tide

When I first started this Weblog, I did it because I felt there were things I wanted to say: About life, about the world, and maybe a little about myself. I saw all those other Weblogs that began to spring like mushrooms and was a little envious. Me, who always wrote in one form or another, don’t have a blog, while 10 year old infants share their thoughts with the world. So, despite my dilslike of “joining herds”, I established my own little public notebook.

Lately my posting rate has dropped down considerably. This is the ebb and tide of writing. I experience it with my screenplays all the time. Enthusiasm, followed by a lack of enthusiasm. An idea comes up, then tossed aside. A piece starts to get written, only to be neglected.

I am not  a hard-working writer. In other words, I’m lazy. In order to write, I need a strong motive. Will power usually isn’t enough. It is no coincedence that most of my scripts are short ones. It is no coincedence that I’ve never written a book. I lack the follow-through. I find it very difficult to handle stories on a large canvas, because they require patient, methodical planning, and quite frankly, I’m not too good at that. Especially the “patient” part.

One of the reasons I didn’t write a lot here recentley is because I tried to devote what little writing energy I had to writing actual stories, screenplays, and it worked to some degree.

One of these screenplays, a little story called “Hype”, I’m actually trying to produce as a short film. I’ve already been all over town to find locations, and there is still a lot of work to be done. Getting people, getting actors, getting equipment. The way to do it, at least for me, is try to do it step by step, because I just can’t think about everything at once, because then I’ll just go hide somewhere and whimper.

So that’s it basically, that’s how it goes, take it as you may. This Weblog can again become my favorite writing pad – where I post something new three times a week, but it can also stay dormant for long periods of time. It is what it is and it mirrors my writing life and my moods.

I mean, I know I’m not a 10 year old, but hey, sometimes I sure feel like one. 

Mother Tongue

I will be the first to admit that this blog isn’t perfect English wise. It has grammar problems, not to mention the odd typo here and there. I try to do the best I can, but there’s just no way I can write as fluently and as error-free as a native English speaking person.

When it comes to writing screenplays, it turns into a real problem. How am I to even begin sending my stuff out if it’s not written with perfect grammar? I have a short script, only 30 pages long. Whenever I re-read it, I find new things to fix with regard to grammar, spelling and punctuation. It’s endless. And if you thought that the Word spellchecker catches everything, think again.

I am well aware of the fact that my script may have a great story, wonderful characters, immaculate pacing, and brilliant dialogue, but the second the script reader catches a grammatical error, or worse than that, a spelling error, it just ruins everything, and the script has a pretty good chance of being thrown into the NO pile.
Bad grammar says you’re lazy. Bad spelling says you’re not thinking very highly of your own work. Those kinds of things will destroy every chance to get a script read. And sometimes it only takes one error to do that.

It’s pretty scary, and I really don’t know what to do about it. Because even if 15 re-writes doesn’t help…
And every single time, the same question arises: Why am I so adament of writing in English?

Well, I have written screenplays in Hebrew. Actually, my current screenplays started as Hebrew ones. I don’t really have a completely original English script yet. I write in English for the same reason ABBA sang in English. I want to reach a wider audience. I already mentioned the reasons for writing this blog in English, although since the blog has become much more personal in nature than I originally planned, I may revert to Hebrew one of these days. But I like to write Genre stories, and Israeli cinema isn’t really genre based, so I found it very hard to write screenplays for that market. I was always drawn to American Cinema and its genres.

One of the solutions to this problem is to write the screenplays for myself. i.e, not be dependent on anyone to buy my screenplays, but make them myself. Yeah, that means directing them. This, of course, takes money and hard work, but that’s for another post. Because as I see it, if I can’t root out all grammatical errors no matter how much I re-write, then perhaps I shouldn’t even go this route. I mean, just think of it. Why should I spend hours and hours in crafting a screenplay, if one error like writing “have” instead of “has” can blemish the whole thing irrevocably? Am I banging my head against the wall here? Am I trying to do the impossible? Pretend I’m a native English speaker when I’m obviously not?
Directors find it fairly easy to work in other languages or in other countries. But how many American screenwriters do you know that came from non-English speaking countries? I don’t know of anyone. No screenwriters, and no authors too. And there’s a good reason for that. You must have a complete control over the language before writing in it. You cannot let yourself produce work that isn’t 100 percent perfect language wise. And I’m beginning to feel that no matter how hard I try, I won’t have that 100 percent.

Fade in

A brief summation of my writing projects:

The Auteur, a feature comedy written in Hebrew, based on the 50 minute graduation project I wrote in screenwriting school, was submitted in July 2006 to the Israeli Film Fund and was rejected. Although the lectors said the script has a neat idea and funny scenes, they also thought that many of the characters are poorly developed or are basically cliches, and that the narrative doesn’t justify a feature length film.

I have yet to find the energy to rewrite this script again (it went through four rewrites already), and basically, I figured that in order to rewrite that script and make it eligible for a re-submission, I’ll need a writing partner. Because frankly, and It makes me quite sad to say that, I’m out of ideas for this one, at least for the time being.

As a side note, a good writing partner is something I’d very much like to find. I don’t particularly like writing alone. It gets very difficult sometimes. But that’s a topic for another post.

My two TV series (also in Hebrew), Trained Professionals and Stage Fright, have been sent to production companies long ago and will probably stay there until hell freezes over. I tried with all my might to market them and get people interested in them, but nothing came out of that. Yep, It’s pretty depressing.

As for English projects, there’s Palace (title is not final), a five minute short scheduled to film in New York City sometimes soon, I hope. Palace was originally submitted in Hebrew for a screenplay contest. It didn’t win, but it caught the eye of an Israeli Acting student living in NYC, and she expressed her interest in filming it. After deliberating the matter for 0.0003 seconds I agreed to let her do that.

Palace stemmed originally from a screenwriting exercise which concerned a character doing something creative. I wrote a short scene about a young boy building a sand castle on the beach, and received a very positive review on it. Later, I decided to turn it into a short. 

The second English script is Room 601, a 30 minute drama also based on a 15 page script submitted at the end of the first semester back in school. There is almost no resemblance between that script and the 35 pages version, except for the fact that the story concerns a business man and a call girl meeting in a hotel room. A secret wish of mine is to direct that one, as I visualized it in a very detailed manner, but hey, I’ll realize it any which way I can, even if it means letting someone else do it.

Here’s a scene  from Room 601:

INT. HOTEL ROOM

Jack puts the bottle in the Mini-Bar. We follow him back to the balcony.

EXT. BALCONY

He enters the balcony and freezes.

Linda is sitting on the ledge, looking down.

Her feet are dangling in the air.

JACK

What are you doing? Get down from there.

LINDA

(Obviously intoxicated)

It’s so beautiful. Look at all those little lights.

He approaches her, carefully.

JACK

Come on, Linda. Give me your hand. You’re drunk.

LINDA

Stop it. I’m fine.

She half turns to him, almost slipping down.

JACK

Linda, for chrissakes! Get down from there!

She looks at him with a sad, almost sorrowful expression. Then she laughs.

LINDA

It’s so nice up here. So peaceful.

(leans down)

Woooo! I’m flying!

JACK

What the hell are you doing?! Do you want to die?!

Beat.

She turns to him again. Her smile fades. All of a sudden she looks sober, and dead serious.

LINDA

(calmly)

Yes.