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We were editing a film last week when aliens took over the
brain of my cinematographer, Lynn Cornfoot. She started to lean toward being
the director and forgot that I wanted the footage of my film to be messy – not
professionally perfect the way they taught her to do in the film department.
But as the director I developed the concept and I wrote the script, which puts
me in control. If I want the film to be messy, it will be crazy messy. My vision
will govern the final product. That’s what it means to direct.
Tomorrow I will begin writing a book about writing and
directing my current indie film “The Disease Detective Looks at Sarcoidosis.” I
intend this memoir to be both a comment on the digital age and an exploration
of how art helps me sort out the world.
Filmmaking, especially the independent kind, puts people on
an even playing field. Because we’re all dealing with the same tools – scripts,
cameras, lighting, sound, friends-as-actors, music – the hipsters and the
grandmothers get along. Even men and women can work together on these projects
if they can overcome the men-traveling-in-van-must-talk-about-sex-and-farting
barrier. Women just want to get the job done. We don’t care about personal
behavior in hotels, and we enjoy bawdy conversations in the van.
Last year I attended the Long Beach Indie Film and Music
festival in Long Beach, California. They’ve shown my films for the past three
years. I love this festival, because it highlights diversity in every way. At
the first awards ceremony I attended (where “Queen of the Road” won the award
for the best TV pilot), I sat next to a woman my age who had entered the
student category because she was attending a film program at one of the
universities in Long Beach. My excellent table also included a German filmmaker,
a gynecologist who specialized in film music, and a career actor from Los
Angeles.
At Long Beach I met 20-something director Martin Barshai who
had two films entered at the festival. I saw them both and they were
excellent. “Light on Her Feet,” the story
of a ballet dancer, is poignant and worth watching. Martin and I discussed
music problems. He had scored one of his films with popular music and later had
to re-score it. I explained to him that I always begin with local, original
music. Finding music is the second step in making any indie film – after coming
up with the concept.
Martin and I hit it off. Our meeting will be a highlight of
my memoir.
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