Explaining My Absence

I hope it's made your hearts grow fonder

(If only it were this easy . . .)

---

Dear readers, I feel I owe you an explanation for my absence of late. As some of you may recall, about a year ago I directed my first feature film, Resentment, from a script I wrote. I said at the time that I would post about major milestones here after we wrapped on principal photography, and yet I’ve been silent on the subject since that last post. There’s a reason for that: there haven’t really been any milestones to report.

That’s about to change. This week we expect to lock picture, which is to say: we’ll be done editing. The sequence of moving images will be fixed, never again to be reorganized. And that’s the explanation for why I haven’t written anything here for the past several weeks: after a host of delays and reverses that chewed up months of time, my editor and I have been moving at a furious pace to finish the edit and move into the next phase. What we hope will be the last cut of the film is now with our producers, and as soon as we get their blessing we’ll officially lock and hand the film off to the colorist, the sound editor, the composer of the score, the VFX artist (this isn’t the kind of film with a lot of visual effects, but there are a handful of green screens—videos on phones and that kind of thing), and all the other people who play vital roles in post-production.

My editor, who is also my post-production supervisor (and that title frankly understates his role in this phase of the process), has been an absolutely invaluable partner for the past few months. He’s not only made the film vastly better than I thought it could be, but has taught me so much about filmmaking that will serve me well in the future if (as I hope) I get to do this again. And it’s been great fun working with him as well. A lot of editing is problem-solving, which is inherently fun, but it’s much more fun when solving the problem has an immediate emotional payoff through its effect on a specific moment of film.

Editing is like a cross between writing and collage. You’re telling a story, putting it together beat by beat, just like when writing a script. But you can only use pieces of footage that you already have. On the other hand, you can manipulate that footage in any way you like—and you can feel the impact of your changes immediately, and much more clearly than when editing a piece of writing. You can take a reaction shot from a different part of the film and put it in a context that completely changes the meaning of the reaction, or snip out a line of dialogue and completely change the meaning of the subsequent line. Even adding or removing a breath can have a profound impact on a moment, to say nothing of the impact of underscoring.

Resentment is a peculiar film in being very play-like. It’s very contained, and very dialogue-driven. It’s also very linear in its structure. There were few opportunities, therefore, to make the kinds of big-picture changes that are typical in film editing: removing entire scenes, subplots or characters, altering the order in which a story is told, changing the tone or even the genre of the entire film. So a great deal of work went into building the first proper cut, and after that the bulk of our work together hasn’t been big-picture story-tweaking but rather fine-cutting of the sort that I was talking about in the previous paragraph: making tiny tweak after tiny tweak to make the film’s exceptionally long scenes get stronger and stronger. We really pushed that process to the limit, I think, and to great effect.

The whole experience has been an eye-opener for me. I mentioned in my last post that the shoot was hard, and it was, despite the extraordinary talent and efforts of everyone involved. That’s partly because this is a very low-budget film, which meant an incredibly truncated shooting schedule. Partly as well, it’s because of things that went wrong, and a whole host of things went wrong, as they always do in film. But partly it’s because of what I didn’t yet know about making a film in the first place, or what I had forgotten and had to re-learn—or, and I think this was a big part of it, what I thought might not apply because of the peculiarities of this film.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean. I mentioned the script’s play-like nature and lengthy scenes. Because of that, I wanted to allow the actors’ performances to flow from moment to moment, to build naturally, if not over the whole arc of a scene then over a significant portion thereof. That meant longer takes. One of my big inspirations in writing the script was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf—which I saw again, recently, at a screening to promote Philip Gefter’s new book, Cocktails with George and Martha, which I highly recommend—and Mike Nichols was similarly concerned to nurture that kind of performance for his film. But Nichols’s cast had weeks to rehearse, and he took months to shoot the film. On a low-budget film with almost no time for rehearsal, though, that approach meant taking a lot of risk of discrepancies in action, which will mean continuity errors if you try to cut different takes together.

That’s just one example. To pick another, I studied Twelve Angry Men as an example of an incredibly successful and highly-contained film to get a sense of how it had been shot-listed, and came up with a bunch of ideas to steal from it. But they mostly proved unactionable given that we didn’t have the luxury of an elaborate dolly rig built around the entire set, which let Sidney Lumet’s cinematographer Boris Kaufman put his camera anywhere he liked, and move it smoothly from there to anywhere else. And, again, we didn’t have anything like their rehearsal time or their shooting schedule. We built a shot list that I think worked well with what we could afford, and my cinematographer worked miracles on a shoestring, but a shoestring isn’t a dolly.

Nonetheless, as anyone who knows movies can tell you, time and money are poorly correlated with artistic achievement: there are plenty of little films that are astonishing in their beauty and daring, and plenty of big-budget monstrosities that are crashing bores. Nichols and Lumet each did something highly unusual with their debut feature films, breaking a bunch of rules in the process—and they exceeded everyone’s wildest expectations, including their own. Me? Well, I’m not Mike Nichols or Sidney Lumet. I really had no idea what I was biting off. So I’m grateful that my editor has made me look like a better director than I truly am.

I hope to be posting more happy news later in the summer: about further milestones in post-production, about submitting to festivals and, eventually (though not for months yet) hopefully about getting into some of those festivals. In the meantime, here is list of highly-contained films (besides Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and 12 Angry Men) that I watched to try to learn how to command a big canvas while working mostly or entirely in a single location:

The Big Feast (La Grande Bouffe)
Blue Jay
The Breakfast Club
The Exterminating Angel
The Lighthouse
Locke
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Mass
Moon
My Dinner With Andre
The One I Love
One Night in Miami
Rear Window
Reservoir Dogs
Room
Rope
Shiva Baby
Swimming To Cambodia
Talk Radio
Tape
Vanya on 42nd Street
Wait Until Dark
The Whale
What Happened Was . . .

I could surely have made the list twice as long. I hope one day someone puts Resentment on a list they’ve made to get ready to make a similarly-contained film of their own.