Resentment: The Spark

Where did my first feature come from anyway?

Trish, owner of the bar where my film is set, flames an orange peel in a still from Resentment

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I haven’t written anything about my feature film, Resentment, for nearly a year. But now I’m back, with exciting news. Resentment has secured distribution (the formal announcement will be forthcoming) and should be streamable by the end of the summer. When that time comes, I hope my readers here will watch the film—and, if you like it, encourage others to do so! In the meantime, if you want to keep up with the countdown to our release, you can follow us on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok and on X.

You can also watch this space, where I’m going to be doing something different. Ever since I made the film, I’ve been asked to tell the story of how the film came to be. I’ve been reluctant to do that for a variety of reasons, one important one being that, until the film was truly done, the story of the film itself wasn’t finished—and until it was out there for people to see, I would be telling the story of something that my readers couldn’t engage with directly.

But now that we have a distributor and a release date, and my readers will soon have a chance to see the film, I think the time has come to tell the story of how the film came to be. So that’s what I’m going to do here. This week, I’m going to talk about the film’s backstory: where did Resentment come from, anyway?

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I’ve told the origin story of Resentment multiple times, from the pitch deck we put together when we were raising money to make the film to the Q&A sessions after festival screenings. It’s referenced at the start of the director’s statement on the film’s website. About a decade ago, I paid a call on an old friend, to whom I proceeded to lay out a variety of complaints about my life—dissatisfactions with my writing, with the state of my marriage, with my physical self, you name it. It was not, I’ll confess, the most edifying spectacle I was making, and my friend took it upon himself to tell me so, in no uncertain terms. Over the course of the next few hours, he raked me over the coals, pointing out to me all the ways in which I was responsible for my own unhappiness, not to mention that of others, reminding me of my various transgressions and in so many words calling me a coward for not taking action to change, and be better.

Honestly, it was a pretty awful experience. I went home, climbed into bed, and cried myself to sleep. The next morning, when I related the story of the previous evening’s events to my wife, she asked me why I kept visiting him when every time I came home more miserable than when I left. It was a genuinely good question, and the only good answer, it seemed to me, was that I thought he was telling me things I needed to hear, both substantively and tonally. It must be that I concurred with his indictment, that I believed I should be convicted, and that I accepted the feeling of self-loathing thereby engendered as a just punishment for my sins.

The following morning, I got an email from my friend suggesting that I write up our conversation as a one-act play. At first I was outraged at his hauteur, but I soon calmed down and acknowledged that, actually, just as with many of the charges he leveled against me the night before, he was right. And then I thought: but it wouldn’t be a particularly good play. There’s no development, no story. A one-sided harangue wouldn’t be particularly fun to watch, and who was the second character in the story, the one doing the haranguing? Who was he, and what was his stake in the interaction?

At the time, I was gearing up to direct my second short film, Public Speaking, anxious about everything I didn’t know how I would do. I was also thinking in the back of my mind about how that short might be expanded into either a feature or a series if it did well. Besides that I had a different feature script that I was puzzling through the outline of, and another feature script that I was revising in the hopes that I might direct it, and I had various bits of expository writing in the works as well. I didn’t need yet another project rattling around in my head asking to be written. I put that late night conversation on the shelf for the time being.

Fast forward through a couple of years. I made the short, it had a successful festival run, and I was eager to capitalize on that success while it was still in memory. On the other hand, the production company that had brought me in as an executive producer on several of their films had a disastrous experience with their latest project. It seemed to be the end of their business, and of my time on the producing side of things, which had always been a digression. It appeared to be time for me to make a feature, and if it was I would have to do it without them. So I began sending the script out to various other producers I knew, and at the same time I hired a casting director to make our first offers, hoping to land someone exciting and financeable. Whether a key cast attachment came first or a reputable producer did, either way the production would be on its way.

Neither came at all; the film never got off the ground. In retrospect, I decided, it was just too big a jump to go from directing two shorts to trying to make a feature film of a seven-figure scale. I needed a project that was much smaller, more contained, something I could make cheaply enough that I wouldn’t need a financeable cast, and that I could potentially raise the money for myself. That’s when I took that conversation with my old friend off the shelf.

The thing is, the problems I identified initially—that it was too static to be a story, and that I didn’t have a good window into my friend’s stakes in the conversation—were still fatal if not rectified. So I made changes. The two men couldn’t just be old friends; there had to be something current between them that would give one a personal reason to want to tear the other down. Well, my friend was also a writer, and I, after pursing a totally different career, was now working fields that he had ploughed for years. What if my two characters were similarly both filmmakers, and the novice of the two had hired the veteran to edit his first film? That would be reason enough for resentment to rear its head. Similarly, the character in “my” place in the conversation couldn’t be sitting there and taking abuse just for general psychological reasons. The reason needed to be concrete, and needed to involve a third character placed between the two men.

Soon I had a structure for the piece: not a traditional filmic three-act structure with a long second act and a reversal in the middle, but more a more play-like three-act structure with acts of equal size, each act effecting a reversal of the previous one. There would be three characters, with a classical unity of time and place, and while each act would be tonally different they would each have the structure that whoever was the “aggressor” in the previous act would be the “defender” in the next. And I had a setting: a bar, which would “lubricate” the conversations between the three central characters.

This way of describing how I write sounds far more consciously directed than it actually is. I do a decent amount of planning before I start writing, but it isn’t terribly systematic. I may take inspiration from real events, in my life or in other people’s, may be thinking about my feelings for particular people I care about when I set out to write, but I don’t just write those events, or those people. What I actually do is take long walks talking to myself about my characters, trying to feel my way into them—which, unfortunately, tends to turn them into versions of me, even if they start out as someone else—and also imagining scenes, actions that seem to me to crystalize a moment in some important way. I’ll fixate on an object and decide: oh, that thing is important to this story, I need to follow it. Whenever a key moment happens I’ll ask myself, where is that object now? Who has it, what are they doing with it? The symbolism of the object in the world of the story I’m telling usually isn’t obvious to me from the start; rather, the symbolism accrues to the object over time, and makes clear to me what my story was about from the beginning.

Even the structure is something that I don’t consciously design so much as intuit, like feeling what phrase should come next in a melody or what color to use in that corner of a painting. I say intuit because I’m not being theoretical about it—I’m groping about for what feels right, and when it does feel right, then I ask myself: why? The answer involves analyzing, theorizing, and the understanding that I get thereby helps me shape the space around whatever I intuitively saw was right. The same is true of themes. When other people show me their work, character, structure and theme are the three things I focus on most consistently, and I talk as if these are the starting places for writing. But they aren’t always that for me. For me, theme is more like a large object I can’t see. I may not have planned to navigate around it, but there it is, exerting its gravitational pull on the characters I’ve set in motion, bending them into orbit around it, thereby describing the structure of the story I am compelled to tell.

In any event, that’s how Resentment came to be. I knew the three bodies I was going to set in motion before I started writing. I knew where the action was going to take place. I knew the general A-B, B-C, C-A three-act structure, and I knew the arc of the first act in general terms, because I had lived a version of it, though I was going to bring in elements but superficial and deep that were not there in the real conversation that inspired it. And I had the occasional flash of something that I could hear or see from later on in the story. But that’s about it.

I began writing in the middle of 2019. By the end of the year I had a draft of the first two acts done, but I still didn’t know how my story ended. So in January I took a month-long retreat to Stratford, Ontario in the off season. The Stratford Festival was not even in rehearsals yet, the town mostly empty and shrouded in snow; my long walks took me along the frozen Avon River and around the Avondale Cemetery. I mostly walked and read during the day, did my writing in the evenings. By the end of the month, I had finished a complete draft of the script, and even outlined another script, one I wouldn’t actually write for several years. I returned to Brooklyn eager to get feedback on the script and make whatever changes were necessary, already fantasizing about how quickly I might get back in the director’s chair.

Could I possibly even be shooting by the end of 2020? That would be ridiculously fast. But a man can dream, can’t he?

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