CHAPTER 2

IDENTIFYING YOUR THEMES AS A DIRECTOR

DOING SOMETHING YOU CARE ABOUT

While you are learning how to use the screen you will want to shoot projects with some special meaning. Filmmaking is too long and arduous to commit your energies to doing just anything. In any case, people are attracted to the arts for good reasons. Human beings are by nature seekers, and though the nature and direction of everyone's quest is different, everyone seeks meaning in our brief sojourn. The more urgent and fatal the attraction to this journey, the more intense the work is likely to be. When we find an answer, it glitters—but only for a while. Soon we face the more profound question underlying it. The truths we find for ourselves are relative, never absolute. Perhaps it is the search more than the discoveries that lend us grace.

Make your earliest filmmaking not just an exercise in skills but about something. Whether you write your own stories, have someone else write a script, or choose something to adapt, you will always face these central questions: How am I going to use my developing skills in the world? What kind of subjects should I tackle? What can I be good at? What is my artistic identity?

Those with dramatic life experience (say, of warfare, survival in labor camps, or of being orphaned) seldom doubt what subject to tackle next. But for those of us whose lives seem ordinary, finding an identity for your undoubted sense of mission can be baffling. You face a conundrum; you can't make art without a sense of identity, yet it is identity itself you seek by making art.

Many people gravitate to the arts because they feel a need for self-expression or self-affirmation. This is treacherous ground, for it suggests that art and therapy are synonymous. They overlap, but they are different. Art has work to do out in the world, while therapy is self-referential and concerned with personal wellbeing. There's nothing wrong with this when that's what you need, but self-affirmation in the guise of art leads down the slippery slope of self-display.

Trying to establish your individuality and worth by making films about yourself is risky because it invites you to compare yourself with the ideals, role models, and ideologies that make up the received wisdom of your time. Making an inventory of your beliefs and achievements inevitably produces homily. This comes from the anxiety, comparison, and competitiveness that fuel the misguided quest for individuality in a society (in the West, anyway) that marches in ideological lockstep. For we live in an age that idealizes the notion of individuality. It tells us that our Self is that which is different from everyone else's. Historically this idea gathered force when humankind began questioning older notions of God and placed man at the center of the universe. The Hindus believe differently; to them, Self is that which you share with all creation. Significantly, their ideology is inclusive while the Western one is isolating. Most people trying to create something actually subscribe to both ends of the spectrum. They want to be individual and recognized, but also to create something universal and useful to others.

You may be asking, “Does all this philosophy and psychology stuff really matter this early in my career?” Yes, I truly think it does. Your beliefs about creative expression, whether you are aware of them or not, will determine whether you will be happy and productive working in a collaborative medium like film.

After observing generations of film students at work, I have come to believe that few fail because they cannot handle the work or the technology. Mostly they fail because they are ill-equipped to work closely with other people. The root problems are usually control issues related to a fragile ego and an unwillingness to make or keep commitments.¹

No doubt the reasons for this inability lie deep in family, social, and even colonial history. Wherever survival depends on jockeying for a favorable position in the eyes of an overlord or something else entirely, it is only human to be competitive, especially if there is no countervailing religion or other system of humane belief to help keep larger aims in view. Nobody living in the long shadows cast by the hierarchies of a farm, plantation, factory, corporation, military unit, class system, political party, social institution, or dysfunctional family has evaded the experience of having power abused, nor have they failed to learn how to curry favor and make headway by stabbing the unwary back.

Antisocial habits, as they emerge in work or marriage, are things anyone can reject or modify, if they matter enough. Indeed, much of the group work in a film school program exists to sort through these problems and help students locate their best partners. The importance of this cannot be overstated. George Tillman, Jr. and Bob Teitel, the writer/producer/director team responsible for Men of Honor (2000), were a black student and a white student who met in my college's second-level production course. After leaving Columbia College Chicago, they began their professional output with Soul Food (1997) and have worked successfully together ever since meeting. People find whom they look for, and countless relationships that have persisted over decades have come from similar beginnings.

Most film students, when asked what they want to create, are not only confident that they know, but insulted by the question. They see directing as learning to use the tools of cinema and the rest following naturally, but their work is content to imitate a genre they enjoy. Unless you have strong persuasions about cause and effect in life, you will remain invisible to film audiences, no matter how competent you become with the tools. How, then, can you define your outlook to make yourself ready to direct fictional films?

Really, your options at any given time are mercifully few and simply need uncovering. Each person's life has marked them in unique ways, and these marks—whether you are aware of them or not—determine how you live your life, what quest you are pursuing, and what you have to say authoritatively through an art form. You can ignore this or deny that you carry any special marks, but this does not affect their power over you. Or, you can acknowledge that there is an emerging pattern in your life. When this happens—alone, with a friend, or with a therapist—we suddenly feel the rush of relief and excitement that comes from seeing what has been driving us. A man's character, said Heraclitus, is his fate. In a close community, everyone can see over time how others act according to the marks they carry, but only with difficulty do we see it in ourselves. Thus, we play a major part in making our own path anyway.

This was not something I appreciated myself until I was into my 30s. As part of a study program, I was required to watch all my documentary films and write a self-assessment. Though they were all about different topics, I was astonished to find they had a common theme that had hitherto completely escaped me. It was that “most people feel imprisoned, but the inventive are able to adapt, rebel, and escape.”

How could I have made more than 20 films and never noticed this one constant? The explanations came sailing in like homing pigeons. I had grown up in a family relocated by World War II into an English agricultural village. We were middle class and isolated among the rural poor. For the first several years my father, a foreigner, was away serving on merchant ships, and my mother found nothing in common with her neighbors. Going to a local school, I had to contend with kids who jeered at the way I spoke. I was derided, my possessions envied, and sometimes I was ambushed. Thinking we were “better” than the local people, at some point I drew several conclusions: that I was different and unacceptable to the majority, that fear was a constant, and that I must handle it alone because adults were preoccupied. I found I could get out of tight spots by making people laugh, and that outside home it was best to become a different person. Later, when I read the history of English rural misery and exploitation, I understood the hostility to what I represented. Losing my fear, and with it an inculcated sense of class superiority, my relationships with my fellow conscripts in the Royal Air Force—where the whole thing might easily have been repeated—was quite different and very gratifying.

The common thread in my films came from having lived on both sides of a social barrier and empathizing with those in similar predicaments: the black person in a white neighborhood, the Jew among Gentiles, the child among adults. Any story with these trace elements quickens my pulse. But for many years (and more than 20 films) I was quite unaware that I carried a vision of life as a succession of imprisonments, and that from each there is always the possibility of escape for the determined few. Perhaps this mark is in my family, for each generation seems to move off to another country.

A biography by Paul Michaud about the late François Truffaut links such films as The 400 Blows (1959), Jules and Jim (1961), The Wild Child (1969), and The Story of Adèle H. (1975) with pain Truffaut suffered as a child upon being estranged from his mother. His characters' rootless lives, their naïve impracticality, and Adèle Hugo's neurotic, self-destructive hunger for love all reflect aspects of the Truffaut his friends knew. This does not reduce or “explain” Truffaut so much as point to an energizing self-recognition at the source of his prolific output and to show that self-recognition can always be turned outward to develop stories that are universally accessible.

You may wonder whether it's helpful or destructive to “understand” your own experience too well, and whether it's productive to seek professional help in doing so. There is a different answer for each individual here, but psychotherapy is hard work, and those who pursue it usually only do so to get relief from unhappiness. Making art is different, for it concerns curiosity and the fundamental human drive to create order and suggest meanings. You should do whatever prepares you best for this. Below are some techniques for clarifying your sense of direction and the imprint that life has made on you. If you find them interesting, you can explore them in greater depth in my book Developing Story Ideas (Focal Press, 2000).

FIND YOUR LIFE ISSUES

You carry the marks of a few central issues from your formative experiences. Reminders unfailingly arouse you to strongly partisan feelings. They are your bank account of deepest experience, and finding how to explore and use them in your work, even though they seem few and personal, can keep you busy for life. We are not talking about autobiography, but about having a core of deeply felt experiences whose themes have endless applications.

There are, of course, right and wrong ways to gain possession of your own particular life issues. A wrong way is to entrust someone else with deciding what you should be or do. To find what your own life issues really are means confronting yourself honestly and paring away whatever is alien to your abiding concerns. This is not easy because of the shimmering, ambiguous nature of what we call reality. What is real? What is cause and what is effect? Perhaps because film appears to look outward at the world rather than inward at the person or people making the film, many filmmakers seem content with a superficial understanding of their own drives. But if drama is to have a spark of individuality, it must come from a dialogue—with yourself and with an audience.

PROJECTS

The following are some exercises that you may find helpful.

PROJECT 2-1: THE SELF-INVENTORY

To uncover your real issues and themes, and to therefore discover what you can give others, make a non-judgmental inventory of your most moving experiences. This is not as difficult as it sounds, for the human memory jettisons the mundane and retains only what it finds significant.

1. Go somewhere private and write rapid, short notations of each major experience just as it comes to mind. Keep going until you have at least 10 or 12 experiences by which you were deeply moved (to joy, to rage, to panic, to fear, to disgust, to anguish, to love, etc.).
2. Stand back and organize them into groups. Give names to each grouping and to the relationships among them. Some moving experiences will be positive (with feelings of joy, relief, discovery, laughter), but most will be painful. Make no distinction, for there is no such thing as a negative or positive truth. To discriminate like this is to censor, which is just another way to prolong the endless and wasteful search for acceptability. Truth is Truth—period!
3. Examine what you've written as though looking objectively at someone else's record. What kind of expressive work should come from someone marked by such experiences? You should be able to place yourself in a different light and find trends, even a certain vision of the world, clustering around these experiences. Don't be afraid to be imaginative, as though developing a fictional character. Your object is not therapy, but to find a storytelling role that you can play with all your heart.

Even though you may have a good handle on your underlying issues, try making the inventory anyway. You may get some surprises. Honestly undertaken, this examination will confirm which life-events formed you, and this in turn will focus your work on exploring the underlying issues they represent. You will probably see how you have resonated to these issues all along in your choice of music, literature, and films, not to mention in your friendships, love affairs, and family relationships.

PROJECT 2-2: ALTER EGOS

Try taking an oblique approach to your deeper aspirations and identifications. Because particular characters or particular situations in films, plays, or books often trigger a special response in us, these offer useful clues to our own makeup, though the larger part will always remain a mystery. The purpose of this project is to discover some of your resonances.

1. List six or eight characters from literature or fiction with whom you have a special affinity. Arrange them by their importance to you. An affinity can be hero-worship, but it becomes more interesting when you are responding to darker or more complex qualities.
2. Do the same thing for public figures like actors, politicians, sports figures, etc.
3. Make a third list of people you know or have known, but leave out immediate family if they complicate the exercise.
4. Take the top two or three in each list and write a brief description of what, in human or even mythical qualities, each person represents, and what dilemma seems to typify them. If, for instance, O.J. Simpson were on your list, he might represent someone whose jealous passion destroyed what he most loves.
5. Now write a self-profile based on what the resonances suggest. Don't hesitate to imaginatively round out the portrait as though it were a fictional character. The aim is not to define who you are (you'll never succeed) but to build a provocative and active picture of what you are looking for and how you see the world.

PROJECT 2-3: USING DREAMS TO FIND YOUR PREOCCUPATION

Keep a log of your dreams, for in dreams the mind expresses itself unguardedly and in surreal and symbolic imagery. Unless you have a period of intense dream activity, you will have to keep a record over many months before common denominators and motifs begin showing up. Keep a notebook next to your bed, and awake gently so you hold onto the dream long enough to write it down. If you get really interested in this work, you can instruct yourself to wake in the night after a good dream and write it down. Needless to say, this will not be popular with a bedroom partner.

Dreams frequently project with great force a series of tantalizing images that are symbolically charged with meaning. The British novelist John Fowles started both The French Lieutenant's Woman and A Maggot from single images, one of a woman gazing out to sea toward France and the other of a mysterious group of horsemen crossing a hillside accompanying a lone woman. Whole complex novels came from investigating the characters “seen” in these alluring glimpses. You too have hidden patterns and propitious images waiting in the wings to be recognized and developed.

THE ARTISTIC PROCESS

Practitioners in every area of the arts agree that there is an artistic process, and that to find it is to plug into the heartbeat of being alive. Craftspeople report the same exhilaration, and who is to say they are not artists, too. Being on the path of the artistic process is like finding you are on the most significant journey of your life, one that opens up doors to meaning, one that reveals connections to a larger whole.

This search for your own path, for the truths underlying your formation and patterns, starts feeding itself once you make a commitment to expressing something about it. This willingness to begin the journey sustains the artistic process; at the beginning you get clues, clues lead to discoveries, discoveries lead to movement in your work, and movement leads to new clues. A piece of work—whether a painting, a short story, or a film script—is therefore both the evidence of movement and the engine of progress during the search for meanings. Your work becomes the trail of your own evolution.

As you get ready to produce, search for that special element that fascinates you. It might be expressed through mountaineering, the rescue of animals, something involving water and boats, or love between school friends. You explore that fascination by producing something external to your own thoughts: the piece of work. What begins as a circumscribed personal quest soon leads outward. You might take two opposing parts of your own character during a trying period of your life and make them into two separate characters, perhaps making imaginative use of two well-known political or historical characters to do so. Making profiles of historical personalities, social assumptions, political events, or the temperaments of the people most influential in your life will all contribute to sharpening and shaping your consciousness. Doing such things well entertains and excites your audience, who are also—whether they know it or not—pursuing a private quest and starving to go on similar journeys of exploration.

¹ I am indebted to my Buddhist colleague Prof. Doreen Bartoni for enlightening conversations on this subject, as well as to her example of egoless leadership as a dean at Columbia College Chicago.