Anatomy of Failure (Patreon)

Despite my efforts to do so, I was unable to put together any sort of film during my trip to Colorado. I would like to document the reasons, not as an excuse but as a thorough an explanation as I can manage, things to avoid in the future, and maybe a bit of masochism.

1) My Plans Were Bullshit

I storyboarded out a whole film, had locations in my head, knew what shots I could get, did everything possible to pre-produce the film, and none of it mattered when it came to actual execution.

For one, I had never been to Denver or anywhere in Colorado, so I was relying on my friend & partner Addison to guide me everywhere, and the locations themselves were a lesson in how filmmaking itself is 10% art, 90% logistics: Addison's roommates were messy and had stuffed their apartment with loads of videogame peripherals in cardboard boxes and left around clothes and food and all sorts of things that it would take days to sort through, making impossible the 'minimalist' aesthetic I had intended to shoot. Being there for only five days, I could not spend that time totally cleaning up the place, but I had still hoped to get some footage outdoors and see what could be done.

But the outdoors segments proved to me that nature is never a 'flat canvas' you can paint on with the camera: the mountain we went to, while beautiful and majestic, was filled with people like us, hikers, and there was no effective way to make them not intrude on our shots, there was simply too many of them.

Being just two people, Addison and myself, we lacked the industrial capacity to arrange and contort locations to suit our visual priorities. This really impressed upon me that most directors are able to marshal in their crews a mini-army that can takeover a place and transform it to suit their needs -- obvious, right? But naively, I had thought that the world would easily conform to my expectations, and didn't ask basic questions like 'How do I stop this scenery/person from intruding on my shots?', and I had tried to act that such a question wouldn't matter, we could just go ahead guerilla style -- with photos, you can afford to do that, you can get snippets, but film is a continuous act that requires repeated takes, patience, and that means control. I had no ability to exert the smallest bit of control, and even if I had, I did not do the proper preparations to make the most of that control.

2) Poetics Only Matter Within Limitations

I look at Terrence Malick's Weightless Trilogy -- To The Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song To Song -- and I think, wow, he's just out there grabbing semi-documentary footage, spontaneously, pulling it together into one genius collage, and when my plans failed for a 'rigorous' storyboarded film, my mind then went to the idea of just shooting a bunch of stuff like I did for my previous two works and seeing what comes of it.

But I realized in my heart that there wasn't much there to do, and it would just be me and Addison going to bookshops and restaurants, tourist stuff, friends hanging out, it would reflect my vacation and thus a superficial appraisal of the environment, not something I wanted to do, you can find that sort of thing all over YouTube and elsewhere.

And there is the bare fact that Malick as a director takes advantage of things that I will never have access to: his later movies, despite their contested status, are still seen because they have plenty of movie stars, and Malick spent years and years and years shooting buckets of footage with them, so much footage that he could afford to 'shape it in the edit' -- so whatever he came out with, it would still have Ben Affleck or Ryan Gosling in it, and fans of those actors would see the film, it would carry with it a weight of personality.

Malick can afford to shoot without a structure, because his structure is the personality of his stars -- other directors can afford to shoot without stars, because they have a tight formal structure and know what story they're telling. Without access to either, I immediately ran up against a wall, and didn't want to waste time trying to invent a new plan that I wasn't even sure of -- to be honest, it didn't feel right, I felt the wrongness in the air, as if none of this was meant to be right now, that I shouldn't force it, and that what I should do instead is make the most of just being able to spend time with my friend, so I did that instead of shooting my film. I thought about poetry -- no matter what form is used, there is a form, even if it is hard to see, and art is defined by the constraints it places upon itself. Without knowing what those constraints are, or even that they're there, doing art becomes very difficult.

More than hating my own sense of failure is my embarrassment on leading you guys on in a sense, giving you some expectations of this or that, when clearly I had very little ability to do anything -- for that, I apologize to you all, and I will dedicate myself even further to writing so that you don't feel cheated by this time I've spent hyping up something that was never to be.

Regarding future prospects, I would still like to make films -- in what capacity, I don't know. All I have to work with is my friends, my own creativity, and the space that can be afforded on a zero dollar budget, which isn't nothing. And now that I know how important logistics are, I will be asking a lot more questions about future places I want to shoot in -- instead of the mountains with hikers, maybe a forest preserve on a weekday afternoon, you know? It is relatively easy to make plans, but to know what is inside those plans is tougher, to actually fill in the gaps with the camera is easy when you're able to create those gaps knowingly instead of accidentally.

Right now, I feel like I should focus on writing scripts, both for myself and for my director friend Tom, and to write with the knowledge of what I've learned from this failure -- it isn't the end of anything, I won't stop trying, I will work smarter on my projects going forward. Something I've realized over the years is that it's important to learn from failing as much as succeeding, perhaps even more so -- the type of film I want to make has to change in response to my material circumstances.

I think about a director like Ozu, whose geometric exactitude was only possible inside the studio recreations of the traditional Japanese home, an environment where Ozu could control and measure everything he did and thus work within his own means in a relatively efficient manner. I don't have a studio, and I want to make films in nature, so I need to loosen up my scripts and become more in-tune with when and where they could take place, to not be so bound by location and to build something that perhaps exists in surplus of its context instead of relying on it -- my capacity to organize these projects must equal my intentions in creating them. That is the lesson I hope to learn from this failure.