doppleganger

About that last post. That wasn't really me. I guess having related my blueballs to the world, the line between the personal and the professional has been drawn here. Whaddya gonna do?

They also may have hijacked my blackberry today. Maybe I prodded them a little. But I deserved it given my reprehensible behavior this week at one point.

I am sort of at a loss for words since getting back. Recovery is always needed and I haven't really spent some time decompressing. Work needed to get done earlier in the week, and then I've been going out a lot since I got back. I missed NY badly while I was away, and on the cab ride to my apartment from the airport every block that brought me closer to my neighborhood made me long for my own bed and walls. The same kind of longing you have for someone you miss, centered right in the middle of you. Since getting back I've had some really beautiful experiences in this city like I've never had before, and part of it is this city as a backdrop for it. Whenever I move to a new place I have to process it first before I can think of shooting there, what kind of stories I'd like to tell there. New York this week became a place I was starting to understand past its exterior and trappings, and understand as the type of hallucinatory place that dreams take place in front of. I really do love this city.

I'll write something real tomorrow. Apologies for not writing more. And blogger has picture functionality working again so I can give my little comic con spiel way too late.

One final thought: in my defense, I tried to prevent said person from drinking bad milk. I really did. But they wouldn't listen.

not killed by the shoot, only sunburned. comic con on the other hand...

So what happened to day three? It became the toughest shoot date of my life. I'm still physically recovering. I got a redeye back and half an hour into our flight we hit really awful turbulence, some of the most violent I've ever felt. I get a kick out of turbulence. I was starting to nod off, lids heavy, head rolling about. Very unusual for me; I have slept on planes a handful of times in my entire life - I was sort of obsessed with them as a kid and my father at the time flew light aircraft so some of my earliest memories are of hanging up in the sky. This year alone I've flown enough to get two free flights. I was so out of it that I switched into the otherworld hiding behind my eyelids where the real started to spill over and I dreamt the plane was going down. I recall thinking in my dream that I didn't really care; I was annoyed with the plane crashing cause it was waking me up and all I wanted to do was sleep. So there's a story behind the last shoot day, which I'll tell soon.

I've been trying to upload some pictures from the shoot and comic con but something's wrong with blogger this a.m. I'm off to the Mill; it's a post production facility started by Ridley and Tony Scott. Today we take our film negative rolls now that they've been processed and transfer them to tape for our editor. They call that telecine, or TK. It'll be my first time looking at what we shot. Again, it's Christmas morning. Only better; sometimes worse. I can't understand why people dislike this part of the filmmaking process. You shoot, and have to wait to see it. You have no idea until it happens. It's like knowing you're coming home to someone waiting for you. You can't wait for it to happen, but every moment that takes longer makes you all the more excited.

Will write more soon...

getting the timing of a paper airplane and fake car headlights and someone walking by to work out

Day two wrap. We got the last shot of the day off at just shy of 11:30pm. We left the hotel lobby at 9am. Day one was a little breather, a milk run. Shooting performance is pretty second nature to me now. I learned a lot from that - how to assess and frame a shot immediately while it's happening before you as the reactions and motions are never the same no matter how well you know the song or a band's repertoire of moves they can bust out.

Day two was the hardest shoot I've ever executed. For a few reasons. First of all, the fact that the entire piece hinges on a little in camera visual trick I came up with that was supposed to supplant the very low budget I had to work with. I thought I could do something conceptually and visually interesting (the picture i posted below is a big hint) without cg or the need to build an elaborate set, like Stable Song entailed.

Unfortunately, in practice it was a logistical and mnemonic nightmare. I've never had to stop and think so much while setting up a shot - only because I had to fill in my head the second half of each shot. And tomorrow will be especially strange as we're going to shoot everything over again.

I have the hiccups right now as I'm eating my room service dinner. Whenever I get the hiccups I get afraid I'm going to be the next person to end up in the Guinness book of World Records to have had hiccups for 70 years running or so. Sadly, this is not scary enough to get rid of my hiccups.

I also slept two hours the night before, ultimately after posting. I even went and walked around downtown San Diego; an eerie place. Very JG Ballardian - shiny new condos butting up with bougie hotels and resturants and pawn shops and bail bonds release services. Absolutely dead after 2am. I felt like the only person in the world, wandering, head filled with a bunch of silly obsessive routines of how this shot will match this shot. So after two hours of sleep and some awful, awful nightmares (not film related at all, and at least not the ones that wake me up, but i did wake up in a cold sweat) I ended up shooting from 9am to 11pm with one meal break and strangest of all, I only pissed twice today. This isn't because I'm obsessed but because for me that's just not normal.

Needless to say I'm exhausted... But at the end of the day there was some fun involved. As the sun set we raced around La Jolla and Highway One in a four car convoy, literally chasing the sun to the edge of a cliff. I climbed a fence like a ten year old to bust into a backyard to get a stick which we badly needed. I had Elle jump rope, and did at one point obsess over the timing of fake car headlights and a paper airplane and someone's walk. And best of all, what with my hyperattenuated focus on directing as the sun vanished, I didn't notice what was going on when Jimmy yelled "Aaron, watch this" and jumped off the cliff. My heart imploded. And then he popped up again from the ledge right beneath it. Not funny, but hilarious and actually at the time sort of needed. The resulting shot looks like Jimmy committed suicide at the end of our shoot. I can't wait to send it to the team at Subpop with a note saying "i'm so sorry but today on our shoot something terrible happened".

I talked to someone who went night swimming in a lake and wanted me to come visit them and I haven't seen them for awhile. It's so hard to be tempted when you're in the middle of this, to remind yourself there's life past this and it is good.

Sleepy time. And when I got home... You know, I'm not going to edit that. I actually wrote home instead of hotel... There was a package waiting for me on the bed, a gift from someone sent to me in the hotel. It's ridiculous. They just sent me something that I cannot even find words to express it's value to me, and now I have to get it home while travelling on an airplane. Since it is not fair to leave it like that; they sent me something they made - something that they didn't necessarily make for me, but my response to it is centered on the uncanny randomness that governs that sometimes separate people can share an idea or feeling that they find hard to explain to anyone. I cannot remember the last time someone sent me something they made, and made sure to get it to me when I'm far away. So when you see me in the airport a week from now, arms cradling two packages - film cans in one arm, a bundled up package in the other, wearing a suit made entirely of Nerf, eyes blood red from exhuastion... This explains why.

For everyone though, try not to have nightmares tonight. Let us sleep the sleep of sleep deprived filmmakers. My crew and I will sleep like we're lying on the ocean floor tonight.

day one in the can

It's 2:30 am. I've got to be up in a few hours. Tomorrow's going to be brutal, the longest shoot I've ever scheduled. Morning til night. We've got to keep focus and stay fed and not lose morale and get everything we intend. Today we shot band performance footage and Jimmy alone in his house. I tried to keep it as natural as possible. We barely adjusted any lights and didn't set any of our own. There's something about capturing the utterly real on film stock that I find beautiful.

The funny thing about my pre shoot nerves is that as soon as we start shooting they dissipate. The hard thing now isn't not being able to sleep from worrying; it's not being able to sleep because I'm too excited.

I'm enjoying writing here, but I'm still unclear about drawing a line between the personal and my work. Because my work is so personal. Everything I've made has a hidden joke or reference, and beyond that I invest myself within it all. Stable Song was directly lifted from nightmares I had as a child and probably about missing my parents who worked very hard for me to have a decent life at much sacrifice to themselves. The Decemberists video is an inside joke from start to finish; I could draw you a map of the ways everyone in it is connected. There are minor details that will end up in this piece that my subconscious suggested but I know why they're there. The funny thing though is that if it is essentially about missing someone, I came here to San Diego with feelings about how I'd missed people in the past and intimations I have about how I'll miss people in the future - as I'm in a state of transience and for many reasons like the nature of my work and personal history I feel I shouldn't be close to anyone. But I miss some people right now, which is totally unexpected and confusing but ultimately feels like the most comforting thing I know.

i swallowed a bag of butterflies

I'm sitting in my hotel room listening to the song over and over again. We start shooting tonight at 7pm, getting some performance footage of the band in their rehearsal space. Let's see if I can get this play count in iTunes past 300.

Here's a Link to the trailer for Gondry's new movie, The Science of Sleep. This trailer is better than most movies I've seen this year. It's hard not to get nervous about what you do when there are geniuses about like that.

I know that a weakness of mine is that I'm pretty arrogant about what I do. I know my strengths as a director, and weaknesses, and I time to time check in with my most trusted crew members and ask them to honestly tell me as objectively as possible what I could be better with. But I am confident about my abilities.

And yet whenever it's time to start one of these off I can't help but get completely nervous. I think it's okay to admit that. There's a great deal of leaping into an abyss that creative work involves. I think the trick, though, is to jump off and worry about what happens on the way down instead of standing there dreading it. My tummy has gone from tingling to full on butterfly southern migration. I try to keep in perspective that through this all there's a range of emotions I'm hoping to shape in front of the camera. That's what I need to focus on right now. Not myself, not my hunger, not how others perceive me.

So before I leap,

here's one last good story I liked... I was having my favorite type of phone call (probably the only kind I really like), the late night, unguarded, sleepy ramble... As a perpetual insomniac I've found the best way to really get to know a person is to talk them after 3am. And we were talking about what we do when we sleep, and the person on the other end of the line told me that they once punched their mom when they were sleeping. They reached out, threw a punch in their sleep, and said "you're a bad bear".

"You're a bad bear" is my favorite phrase right now.

ready, here I go...

going around the moon

So tomorrow we start shooting. First day of three. Every time I sit down to write a treatment I take into consideration the budget and try to work within that. And then I realize by the time we're shooting that every attempt I've made at simplicity is for nothing. It's going to be hard to write here for the next few days but I'll try each evening, as I think a few weeks from now reading what went on in my head at midnight after wrapping might be ridiculous. Here's some photos of my crew.

This is Elle, our production assistant. Elle is right out of college and makes films that I want to see that she'll never show us. Elle may be the funniest, kindly dispositioned person I know who has a copy of both Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Huey Lewis and The News' Sports on cassette tape in her car. She is also deathly afraid of clumps of straws and seaweed.


This is me, photographed by my producer Kyle. This is a pretty good representation of how I've been feeling.


This is Tarin Anderson, the cinematographer I'm always writing about. When I was in film school I hoped to meet people I could have fruitful, challenging collaborations with and somehow we'd come to understand each other on a psychic level. I never met that person until far after film school when I met her. I used to insist on operating camera myself until I met her. I want her to shoot everything I work on.

an idea

this is what this video is about.

faraway, so close (the value of dreams)

Every night I lie awake cutting and splicing shots together in my head. I glance at the clock every few minutes. It starts to reach that hour where it's either too late or too early, too hard to tell. This is how it gets on the days nearby. I remember the first time I dreamt about shooting; sometime days before a film school project I had a dream that we were there, in it, and it was becoming a disaster. A dream disaster, with it's own barely sensible logic. The floor opened up beneath an actress' feet. Water flooded a set. And then I had to wake up and realize I was going to have to go through it all over again. Luckily I have not dreamt about this shoot, yet. And I get my good moments in all this.


Producer Kyle's dog keeps us company and happy.

I grew up without any sort of organized religion. I am thankful for this. I had to plot my own course to make sense of the universe and came up with my own silly faith in people you can trust and the burden of responsibility individuals carry. But as a result I'm sort of vaguely superstituous. I like to think that all of us have a void that we need to fill with something. There's a great passage in Shelley's Frankenstein in which it's said that the good doctor spent his years in university reading the wrong books, passages on alchemy and necromancy when he should've been concentrating on actual medical texts. I always loved that. In elementary school I was bussed once a week to a gifted program and we were given an hour of free study in whatever subject we wished at the city library (where I would end up working in high school, and ultimately have dreams about the dewey decimal system). My friend Dave Lennstrom and I would rush to that section of dewey decimal that contained all the wrong books - books on sponteaneous combustion, poltergeists, UFOs, the paranormal. Yes, I spent my years in a gifted program probably reading Time Life's Mysteries of the Unexplained.

I suppose what I have always yearned for is a sense that the world is weirder than I experience it to be, or at least even more like the experiences that make me feel that there is an essential connectedness to everything. I want wild coincidence that defies odds. I yearn to hear about experiences that turned a person's hair white. I want proof that there are quantum possibilities that defy explanation, little strings hanging off the curtain separating us from the mechanism that runs the universe that can be tugged at. The funny thing is I do not believe a single one of these stories. The skeptic within me tears them to shreds. But I love them all the same.

I haven't had time to look at the news for days (I usually start my morning off with a survey of deplorable world affairs), but last night I had a dream about New York flooding and today my friend told me it had indeed rained something Biblical that night. I had a sense of total and utter deja vu today (they say it's merely a glitch in the brain; your subconscious reverses the flow of information into memory). It was so disarmingly specific. San Diego, watching a band play in their rehearsal space, having Tarin there with me, feelings I have about other people in my life, the knowledge that I'd sent a present to someone. My rational explanations cannot erase the strangeness of the sensation.

I rarely ever dream about people I know. I am even fascinated by nightmares. I am plagued by some; girlfriends of mine will tell you that occassionally I wake up shouting in the night, wild eyed, or sometimes I beg them to wake me up in a whispering voice. As the terror abates I feel as if I've been given something, a piece of a puzzle or a little sign to ponder over. Good dreams are even better, ones where I meet people I miss the best, and I never want to wake up on those days. I often roll over and try to wish myself back to sleep to resume them, but it never works.

They say that due to the construction of a film camera's shutter and a projector, that when you watch a movie projected on film you actually spend 1/48th of a second in the dark for every 1/48th of a second you see an illuminated frame. I do not find it coincidence that dreams are predominantly visual.

All that digression when I should discuss watching the band. Today I got to see them live for the first time, and not for long enough. If there is any alchemy in the world, it's the transformation of feeling that watching a performance can give you. Tarin and I left the practice space smiling, feeling pretty damned lucky to be working on such a beautiful song. One of the reasons I like videos, and am envious of musicians, is their ability to access emotions so immediately in such a a short amount of time. A good song takes me on an epic trip inside my head in the space of minutes. Just like dreams. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I wish the world and dreams were indivisible.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Cheated Hearts

This is one of my favorite videos of this year. I wrote a very similar treatment for a different band, which was rejected, and now I will never revisit it because you can't top this. Perfect for the band, too.

super zidane bros

Just something to laugh at this morning while I wait for my insurance broker to get in from lunch so I can lock down production insurance.

a musing on perfect days

After just finishing my last post I remembered something that Anne and I have talked about.

Giant Robot, the magazine, and their perfect days.

Martin asked me casually once to do one maybe. Anne already has. It's become one of my favorite things in the magazine; part of this video I'm trying to shoot now is about explicating the depth within a prosaic day, how our interior minds charge the ordinary. I think it's a really sweet gesture to read different people's takes on what makes a perfect day.

I thought of it too because if I'm asked to think of a perfect day, I suppose I could write about directing as I love shoot days like no other. But I wouldn't say they're perfect. Maybe too stressful, even, despite the enjoyment. I'd probably write about a day spent scuba diving.

But here's my ultimate musing: why is that thus far no one has ended their Giant Robot perfect day with getting laid? I mean seriously, it's a perfect day, and don't tell me that a perfect day ending with getting wickedly laid and a midnight feast followed by spooning isn't pretty much the be all end all epilogue...

But then Anne told me that the point is to write up a perfect day you set out to have and document, not one that has already happened or you dream up. First person to offer a smartass response as to why I wouldn't be able to write that up gets a laugh.

a multitude of drops

lockdown. right above this desk is a chalkboard. i've actually used it. and i'm crossing things off. commitments must be made.

Sometimes people call me when I'm working on these projects and I feel guilty because I have so little to say - minutiae runs around the inside of my head like goldfish in a small bowl, small details that must be kept track of. A lot of filmmaking is compromise, or balancing things - this is the core of cinematography, and it seems to apply to everything else. In photography your depth of field is dependent on how much light you have and the lens you're using - change the terms and it applies to how you deal with people and get a disparate group to collaborate. I don't know how interesting that is on a moment to moment basis. I remember coming home from film school loading up on gossip from my then girlfriend's job in Human Resources at the Financial Times. I loved it. It wasn't filmmaking.

I picked up a producer, a great guy named Kyle Detweiler. He's taken to it like a fish to water. We also hired the p.a. I wrote about the other day. She's fantastic, and I was right, much better than me. Just out of college, a Korean girl from Santa Cruz who can riff on any subject without taking a breath and make it hilarious. She's also deathly afraid of straws and seaweed. I sort of wasn't joking yesterday to the two of them as we worked that I'm going to have us go skydiving together when this is finished. I've got a really great crew. Tarin, now a three time veteran, showed up today and that made me feel even better about everything. She's my eyes. I can't speak enough of our collaboration; time and again I've forced her into difficult shoots due to the vagaries of everything we've worked on together, and every time she's been gracious and wonderful and always cheers me up by her presence. I have trust issues - I haven't spent a lot of time with Tarin in a personal capacity but I'd trust her with my life. It seems like a really long time ago I met her in the Coastal Cafe in Seattle with my friend Will Markwell hoping that she'd want to work with us. I'd have to say in my entire life I have met very few people who carry themselves with a certain amount of sincere grace, and she's one of them.

I skipped out yesterday because it was a pretty hard day. At the end of it all I was fairly incapable of communicating with anyone. Hyperattenuated focus isn't so healthy for the brain; although obsessiveness carries me through this work. Yesterday was about difficult compromises with people, which are the true heart of filmmaking. You start out with a film that plays on the back of your eyelids and on the way to realization it changes. I try to be open to that change, though, swim in the entropy. Like when you get in water and panic, the water changes around you. And I think some of the best things I've ever shot have resulted from that configuration of random chance that appears before the camera.

I am so sick of room service. But in the past, I'd often skip meals late at night when I actually had time for them. Shoots are weird; you either lose weight (like I tend to do) or gain it, one extreme or the other. I seem to be gaining it on this one. Even in a matter of days.

So we've got a shooting plan, and a list of locations, and a hundred small things to do in the beauracracy of life so our cameras don't get confiscated and people open their doors to the crew. I don't think I've figured out San Diego yet, which is what I hoped to do, but I think I understand now how to show the San Diego of the people who have made it home, thanks to their contribution. I am very weary and at a loss for words. But I can feel in that center of myself about an inch below my heart that come shooting days I'll be excited and energized. That place where you get butterflies. Tingling.

what day is this, anyway?

6 days to shooting. Itchy trigger fingers. Burnt out brains. Still no decent sleep.

Only had one decent night of sleep here. Right now I'm on autopilot, just trying to form a semblance of words to explain the day away. Later I'll read this and wonder how I remained conscious through it all. Started with an hour of email, and tracking down a package as I'm also concurrently having a Decemberists DVD made. I have actually hired people and delegated - very new to me.

Started getting my producer, Kyle, up to speed. Kyle went and sorted out information on permits and tried to get us some production insurance. My first real producer and I'm so grateful. It made me feel a lot better about everything.

I auditioned some actresses and ate breakfast at 4pm right when that wrapped up, and used the meal break to interview a potential p.a. This person I can automatically tell would make a better p.a. than I did when I did it professionally for Dreamworks, which is a good sign. They called us Dreamworkers. I called it indentured servitude. My crowning moment of glory was letting Jeffrey Katzenberg into our building when he locked himself out of it. Oh yeah, and the time two weeks into the job when in an elevator a coworker was making fun of Katzenberg and the doors opened to his face. I didn't get fired so it must've been subtle. I should write a book on how not to be a P.A. Step one would be not to carry delusions that someday you'll be a director and show them all...

Went from there to a meeting with the band's manager. Discussed moving the shoot up a day. Back to the laptop and more emails, and then finally sitting down with the DVD to take notes on a Decemberists documentary, which is coming together great. From there camera tests with another actor, and then an interview at the hotel bar at 10pm. Back to my room, more production emails and reviewing footage I shot today, then rewatching the DVD and compiling my notes for the edit. It's now 2:40 am, another day done, and I'm off to bed.

How fried is my brain? The only spare moment I gave myself today, had a late phone conversation that discussed spooning with otters (to wit, they replied 'this is the worst conversation i've ever had') and I tried to whisk someone away to wonderful sleep by telling them the best poop story I know. Charmed, for sure. I'm going to whisk myself away to sleep with overloaded neurons that are just spitting out white noise.

i came to show you mad love

I am declaring my new crush here:



Watch CSS' video here.

I want to go to Brazil just so I can shut down a highway and jump up and down on it with the single cutest singer in the entire world. Cansei De Ser Sexy are a Brazilian band with an album coming out on Subpop. They'll be on the road soon.

I was asked to write a treatment for this video but my friend, the wonderful Cat Solen (identity revealed if you so desire, Cat) got the job. She also got to shoot with my favorite collaborator in the world, Tarin Anderson, who has shot all my videos.

Honestly, I think Cat did a far better job than I ever would have with this song. Then again, I would've shot the singer in closeup for four minutes. I bet she has a nice bunda.

Oh yeah and I just saw this: Zidane, the video game. Headbutt your way to victory!

places or people

Location scouting. Nothing but. Today was a good day to get lost. I never got lost enough, though.

San Diego is a character in this video. The label told me I could shoot LA or San Diego. Knowing the band was from San Diego I wrote the treatment specifically referencing its Casbah Club right at the start. It's how the idea came to me, really. After days of listening to the song (iTunes tells me, iPod not withstanding, that I listened to it 274 times), on the night before it was due it suddenly came to me.

I think hometowns are always important to musicians because they spend so much time away from them. Bands are more hardcore than a lobot.


Star Wars character or sales rep?

The name I've heard used to describe those ubiquitous wide collared pinstripe shirt wearing, bluetooth headpiece in the ear, attache case, Dell laptop owning, wedding ring hiding business traveller propping up the airport bar. Those guys go to the convention for a week but they don't show up in a different city every day year in year out. Touring travel is both exhilerating and wildly disorienting. The gravitational pull of home is so much more servere when there's no permanence.

I tried to fixate on a personal window to climb into San Diego (and Comic Con wasn't going to cut it) - and the first instant memory of the city was of being outside the Casbah Club, when I was on tour once a long time ago, and watching planes flying in really low right over the club. Roof scrapingly close. Like, see the faces on passengers close.


one of our locations

I had scribbled down something in an email to myself, just this: "it's about the feeling that something is over and has reached its inevitable finality and yet you can't help but try and transform the landscape around you with all of your memories." My initial reductive take on the song. And I tried to figure out the drum part in my head and there was something reminiscient of a clock in there. And that combined with low flying aircraft gave me my video idea. And I knew straight away that San Diego would be a character.

Wong Kar Wai once said his goal was to film the way a city smells, or something like that. I can only aspire to that. But I think I know what he means. The city in this video must be present as atmosphere. If I've said casting is like searching for true love, a city is like your family. It's ever present, and it's both good and bad - there are parts you accept about it and parts you hate about it in equal measure, but there's nothing you can do to change it and accepting that you have love. Our background has to resonate as a constant mood. So location scouting has been difficult. Because I'm not really looking for specific locations. I'm looking for a configuration of telephone wires that hangs low somehow, a concrete flyover that looks hideous and monumental at the same time, a deep orange that actually buzzes underneath a sodium lamp at night.



We charge everything in our lives with memories of the people we shared them with. Music attaches itself to a kiss or a breakup. Smells remind you of someone who's gone. A photograph features silver halide crystals that contain the wealth of a novel. And so we do with our cities, coat their surfaces with a fragment of conversation here, a glance there.

The strange thing is that I find so much American filmmaking absolutely loses the texture of the reality most of us live in. I thought it was revelatory in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when it turned out the girl worked in a Border's or Barnes and Noble. It was so shocking - it wasn't product placement, it was a reflection of how real couples I've known actually work in places like that. We all pass by strip malls or ugly facades every day. Entire epics are playing out in Target parking lots across the country. We paint over, transform in our memory, so that asphalt lot becomes something best remembered in a hazy dream. This video is about two people missing one another. What I'm hoping I can impart is that their city transforms in that reverie.

On the subject of asphalt: I believe that Pacific Coast Highway is the single greatest strip of asphalt that exists. Being out there today - the highway i was born closest to, I finally for a moment stopped missing New York. But I do miss some people badly, already. I ended the night looking at waves coming in the dark, just a thin band of blue on the horizon. Something primeval in me always stirs when I see that, and then stars like you can't see anywhere else. I drove back to San Diego, sand in my feet, exhausted but feeling that a curtain separates me from this piece and it's starting to open.

no hands!

Pele once said, penalty kicks are a cowardly way to win.

Update: Zidane just lost his f**king mind. That was totally uncalled for bs. France deserves to lose. This is disgrace that this is how he's going to retire out of this.

World cup final, watching it in the hotel bed. I should be working but there's some shit you have to take a break for - like moon landings or presidential elections or sex, which also seem to happen every four years. I'm rooting for France. Jimmy Lavelle, the man who is The Album Leaf, is rooting for Italy as he's got a lot of Sicilian going on. So last night I told him I was rooting for France, putain. And he told me I can cry on his shoulder when Italy kick their asses. See, I'm forming a relationship with the artist. Smack talk: bonding men since the dawn of time.



So why France? I lived in Europe for eight years, and in 98 I watched their matches because a lot of their players were on my favorite teams in the English premiership - except for their monumental goal keeper, Fabienne Barthez. The Bhudda headed keeper tends goal like Al Gore hates global warming. And there was an extra little thing going on - a lot of French people didn't believe in their team, with political commentary running that there's no way a multicultural team made of so many immigrants would ever bring the nation glory. Zidane is Algerian (like my other favorite football player, Camus). I like underdogs, even more so when an issue is made of their race. And one other thing: people in Paris were some of the kindest, least snobby Europeans I ever met. It's different for everyone.

It's a pity that we never got to see Eric Cantona play for the French national team. He was the Man United (England's version of the Yankees) captain who reminds me why I like soccer players: he did abstract paintings, and his hero was Rimbaud. Add to that this incredible footage where Eric launches a pretty good flying kick at an abusive fan. This led to a press conference where Cantona said only this, slowly "When the seagulls... follow the trawler... it's because they think... sardines will be thrown into the sea." Cantona also got in a bit of trouble for bitch slapping someone who had the temerity to make racial insults to another teammate.

Well here we are in the 88th minute, tied. France have a habit of miraculously scoring goals right about now. Either that or I'll be crying on musician shoulder's friend while he kidney punches me. I wish this would happen more than every four years.

across some oceans

Sitting here doing production work, waiting for a phone call back. One thing I do like about blogs are when someone posts a link to something interesting, like Claudine to that old magazine or Saelee reminding us that the first space travellers were animals. So here's a video that I've responded to in recent days. I don't really care for the song but the piece transcends it. It's purportedly real footage taken by a fan of the band who they offered to pay for travel to Nederlands if she'd shoot the experience.

Watch the video here.

Watch an interview with Marta here.

I loved the piece instantly because my days of travelling like that are long over and I miss it. I also like that you can actually watch in the span of a few minutes here someone falling in love with travel, with the wider world, with filmmaking itself (when she leans back on the plane) - and the sort of loopy falling into yourself that occurs on the long haul solo trip. But there have been a lot of discussions about how real this video is which make it worthy of a William Gibson-esque Pattern Recognition plot device. At the music video discussion site antville, right here we fell down the rabbit hole deep going over this one.

casting update

I just got off the phone with an actor who I think is it. To continue my metaphor, sometimes you don't know someone all that well but for some reason you just know. There's all sorts of stuff you can let get in the way, but you intuitively know that this is the pure reaction, and for some undefinable reason you're drawn to them. I've seen some of the guy on screen, and I think he's perfect for this part. And his favorite directors are Wong Kar Wai and Terence Malick.

casting, or true love on a deadline

I hate casting.

Casting may be the single most important decision you make. I do believe that the best thing a director can do when it comes to actors is cast the right ones and then get out of the way. Follow this by taking credit for how well you directed the actors. I'm sort of not joking. I believe you're there to guide the actors, direct them to places, tell them when it's not working... But for the most part, get the right people and you're there.

But casting, the actual process... It's quite similar to telling yourself "right, today, starting now, I'm going to find my true love. And I have to do it within one week. And they have to live in this specific area. And they have to possess these attributes... Also, they have to be cheap" I know enough from my nonexistent love life to determine that a person can't do this. And the same way we can daydream about impossible couplings and variations (eva green, you'll fall for me someday... eva green, you're so right for this part). When it comes to casting, I have to delude myself I can find true love under the gun.

I feel guilty every time I dismiss someone for how they look, but it's automatic. I think of the people I know I want, but can't get. I feel guilty that I cannot personally write everyone to tell them, nope, sorry, in a nanosecond I saw your picture and decided then and there that the genetic configuration which led to your face, it doesn't work for me. Or a kinder version of the same sentiment. In other words, I have to lie.

Then there's the desperation factor. And there's this whole thing where... The other day I read something about "the myspace generation". That phrase makes sense to me. One of the strange things about my preference for actors is I don't want actors who visibly want to make it so badly. It's not because I dislike ambition; it's more about how I want people who want to do it out of sheer love or enjoyment of acting, of becoming someone else in a moment truthfully. It's a profession that just happens to attract a lot of people who are interested in it for other reasons. Or people who assume they should do it because of how they look.

(If you want to see an extraordinary movie that has a little subtext about the relationship between prostitutes and actors, try Fellini's Nights of Cabiria. Oh and because I like the lowbrow, too, the recent Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and of course Stephen Chow's King of Comedy. Check that out, I went from true love to prostitution in a few paragraphs.)

My favorite actor is a guy named Carl Ng. This is due to the fact we were friends in film school and Carl displayed this quality I'm talking of, where it seemed that he really did it for the right reasons and never made assumptions about what it would bring him or aim for that, his ideas were always good and valuable, and he seemed to have never lost that openness that isn't childish but children have... An ability to be themselves in the glare of others or even a camera. Look into a baby's eyes - they look directly back at you without worry or a need to glance away out of being uncomfortable because they haven't developed neuroses about themselves. Like Rimbaud wrote, "je est un autre". An actor has to be able to be looked at unsparingly, especially perhaps in moments that are painful to see. That is the value of actors, why they are so important. Like the rest of us they have self doubts and flaws, but they're required to be open about them fearlessly. Carl is also, like me, half caucasian and half asian. Getting roles in England, not so easy. At some point here I will probably write a rant about the nonexistent leads for asian people in English speaking films. But since moving to Hong Kong he's had some great success. I asked Carl if he'd do this and I'd even pay to bring him out here, but he just got a part in a well respected arthouse director's next film and I'm overjoyed for him. I used to think I was crazy in that I knew he had something very unique.

I'll write next about what this video is about, but it's not a conventional music video in the sense of what people immediately assume when they think of videos. It's about a couple separated by circumstance, and they are in every shot and I need them to be real and the emotional anchor for the piece.

I remember the first thing I ever shot on film, in film school (it was called 7 Day Crush, which is a title I still love even though the film sucked)... And I've always written, and been satisfied that it exists on a page... Seeing people enact out what was locked in your head is the most uncanny, thrilling part of filmmaking. When I started filmmaking I assumed that my strength would be how to visually realize a story or technical disciplines; but I'm finding the best part is working with actors. But just like my personal life, the search for an ideal person is waylaid with traps.

We haven't cast anyone yet. I can't sleep because of it. Somewhere, out there in San Diego are the boy and girl I have in my mind. Do you ever dream about people you don't know yet seem fully real to you, actual people with personalities, flaws, quirks, habits? I'm in the process of trying to get one of them to bust out of my head. The score stands: video 0, skull 2.

coast to coast fireworks

Hello.

It's 8pm, dead on. I have not eaten today, I went to bed last night at 4am doing work with a pint of vodka and tonic slowly ebbing from my system, I could use a shower badly, and I'm already a mixture of adrenaline and exhaustion. I'm in San Diego. I flew here on the fourth of july, a late and oft delayed flight due to the thunderstorms which have hovered over New York menacingly all summer long. Of course, friends back there now tell me the day after I left all of a sudden the humidity and sauna like uncomfortable-ness left. Maybe they're trying to tell me something?

It was an incredible flight because I had a window seat and watched fireworks go off across the entire country below us, little sparkling flowers exploding over every skyline. I read a book from cover to cover on the recommendation of a girl I have a crush on. I haven't read a book in one sitting in years - I loved it even though it made me intensely sad - Sputnik Sweetheart by Murakami. It was tranquil, and pleasant, and I felt a little less alone because someone told me to read a book. Right now I'm feeling like a kid on Christmas morning waiting for presents combined with a deer in headlights.

Before we start discussing my bad habits, there's a reason I'm not looking after myself so well. This is not typical. Usually during the year I am sort of panda or otter like. At the moment, however, I am here by the Pacific in order to do my occasional job, which is directing music videos. Part of that job is going to hang out with band members late at night when you have a ton of work to do because they're very demanding and charming, and then you end up ordering a vodka tonic that arrives pint sized. And you pay four dollars for it and scratch your head thinking about New York.


this is what production looks like

I am doing a video for The Album Leaf, a wonderful band on Subpop.

Just like the Argo only had 365 days to save the Earth in Star Blazers... I only have 11 days remaining before we turnover our film cameras and start rolling. I've got locations to find in a city I don't know too well, casting to do, and a billion small incidental details that comprise the actuality of filmmaking. I've never been totally comfortable with blogging because I believe a lot of daily writing would be personal in nature, and I'm not one for that. But this gives me a focus and something to share. I hope to write here every day and take you through this entire process.

So hello, and I am so going to go eat something and pass out. Just a second ago, on the way back from a day of location scouting, two girls in the elevator here at the hotel were inside and one asked me jokingly to come visit her room as we stopped on their floor. And then I dropped a cigarette and my room keys and a bundle of papers. They left the elevator with one muttering "hey butterfingers". Such is my personal life, so we won't share that here. But filmmaking, I can bore you to tears with that.