Crack! Slam! Ka-Pow! The hits are coming in 'fast and furious'. A director with no vision? What kind of schlock are you? Blind?
Well, sure. If I had vision I could see the rent is due, utilities are coming up, tax season is looming, the country's fate over the next four years is shaping up, and yet all I can think about it how to pull off my next movie. Seems willfully blind to me - entering the exotic, welcomed by me world between reality and fantasy that allows one to create. A chosen, delusional world embraced.
And which will make a damn good movie by the way.
Quick paced and edgy, clever dialog that sounds and feels real off the tongue. A cast no one has heard of yet are so strong they'll chew the story up, and are always willing to go that extra mile take after take. As the director, and one that probably won't get paid until somewhere on the far side of a 'near future', that's the paycheck and pat on the back that lets me go the extra 10 miles [10 : 1] seems like a good ratio of effort to me [director : actor\crew] - and that translates to visible energy on the screen which translates to palpable energy in the audience - even if it's only an audience of one - which it will be through its long gestation period. Movies are not born overnight...
An unconventional story with unconventional characters... hard to call any of them heroes... but I think it will be pretty easy to call them human. Easy to love and easy to hate. The best of us and the worst... yet its a movie so I'll make them a little better and a little worse than what we could ever admit in ourselves.
A fast pace -- a twisted tale. I feel it. I can feel the emotions, the pain from dreams each character failed to realize, and the excitement that wells up in them as the story presents its opportunities. Their hurt and disappointment when the plot twists it all back on itself. I know intimately the heartaches that shaped their lives; the joys and pleasures they reached and struggled for. I can feel their hopes for a future without pain, without struggle. And their resignation that as story master, I alone have the power to keep that resolution close enough they can taste it, chew on it, even swallow, only to make them regurgitate on command and give up their prize to the greater good of my tale.
I can feel the cold in the shadows and the meager warmth from dim pools of light. Warm blood running down the side of frozen cheeks, the sting of sweat in the eyes, and the lack of oxygen in labored breaths. How leather shoes worn on one side from an old football injury rub into one's feet as he runs the sprint of his life on hard alley pavement. How blood warms the pavement as he lays on the cold, oily street. The agonies from the tortures, pain from the broken fingers, the flesh rent as bullets savage muscle and bone alike, the humiliation and degradation of the rape, the swell of pride in a moment of sacrifice, the resignation of fate.
The locations themselves are raw and angry, screaming their pain onto my canvas. I can smell the dirt and the mold and the urine wafting with the miasma of sweet/bitter rot. I hear the wind and the traffic, and the birds just out of sight of camera but intruding gently into my shot. Is that a leaf blower in the middle of the city from some bastard who is ruining my sound with the auditory proof of his lack of responsiblity in that he not push his own garbage onto others?
Filmed with the urgency of lessons learned shooting Blood Ties in alien cities on foreign lands with the demonstrable threat of the authorities in our faces, the lack of time on our side, and unavailable resources to stand against either.
Hang on --- the phone's ringing. A now broken phone by the way. More bills. Great. Let me write that down... at least I've learned that unopened offers of '0% now pay the rest of your life starting tomorrow' credit cards make great scratch pads.
In my apartment, they are covered with ideas, thoughts and glimmers of thoughts. Links to that other world.
Yep, I can almost see it.
Kely McClung
http://www.bloodtiesmovie.com
http://www.festivalwinners.com
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