grants + labs/craving + aversion
This year I have been attempting to refine my mind’s focus with regard to validation and approval from outside forces. I’ve gotten a lot more patient with grant and lab applications and have been mostly successful in letting that process, the slow refining of each paragraph and sentence in the application, be the satisfaction, not the acceptance of some shadowy dream-making circle in the wings to whom I have previously ascribed mythic powers to grant me everything. Once I hit send, I presume I won’t get it - not in a defeatist way but rather a sort of relaxation of expectation - and get on with my life. Sundance Labs are notoriously selective and competitive, this is not news. But a couple years ago, in 2018, I got in to the 2nd round for one project on an application that I sort of phoned in so using that as a baseline, I busted ass on this years application. I was patient and took my time. Waking at 5:30 am every day and for weeks, polishing it, rearranging, refining, and shaping; getting it to the place where I thought it was good, and instead of hitting send, waiting a week, re-reading, finding the areas to improve and then doing so. This helped me speak with clarity about the project and about myself as filmmaker. I was operating from a position of confidence, not a position of deference; not needing the approval of validation, not striving to impress or dazzle, but only stating with transparency the narrative strengths of the project and how I was going to make it. When I finally hit send, I felt pretty good about my chances to get to the 2nd round, not in an arrogant or unjustly expectant way, just compared to the efforts of the 2018 application. That one I phoned it, this one I honed and refined and nurtured and patiently grew. Suffice to say this degree of confidence, despite its pure nature bred the tiny seed of expectation in me. This seed grew over the several months of waiting for response and eventually became as close to a foregone conclusion as my mind would allow. And so naturally, I did not advance to the 2nd round! It hit me in the gut, what? I had actually read on reddit about how one batch of applicants were emailed the wrong notifications once, denials instead of acceptances, and my mind actually went there for five minutes, thinking that a mistake was made. The proportion of negative reaction learning this lined up exactly with the size of the expectation. A lesson there. Or as Pavement says at the end of Shoot the Singer: don’t expect, don’t expect, don’t expect.
november motion
path
71 days until we shoot and I can feel glacial, subterranean things moving around to make space for other things. was home sick monday and cleaned my office, which sounds like the most anodyne non-filmic undertaking possible but in fact it was the most directly related activity to making Sister/Brother that I’ve done of late (minus doing 2 full schedules and script breakdowns and rewriting screenplay that is). Making space by subtracting everything that isn’t necessary. (This has external and internal components of course.) There has been such liberation in stepping into the limitations of this project b/c it means I am turning off the aspirational (read: whining) interior part of me, which doesn’t take action b/c it’s always waiting, reliant on outside forces. This instead is action by virtue of ownership. I don’t have the luxury of aspiration and so certain doors click shut with regard to casting, locations, shooting ratios and so forth. This is the hand you’re dealt, move forward. More to come.