In 2004 I attended the Cannes Film Festival as an
intern for this program they have there called The American Pavilion.
Essentially what that meant is that I, along with a hundred or so other film
students, received individually appointed tasks for six or so hours each day,
the remainder being yours to do with what you will; for me this meant seeing
three or four films. For others it meant schmoozing with whomever would let
irritating twenty-year-old Americans, reveling in their ability to drink openly
and freely, hang around and collect business cards.
It was, in some ways, an amazing and life changing
experience. I watched the other ‘interns’ gather business cards by the dozens,
cramming them into pockets and bragging about all the opportunities they may have
just made for themselves upon their return to America. They’d gather and look
important (never stopping to realize that at the age of twenty there is no such
thing) and get ‘dressed up’ and play pretend. What struck me the most was the
game of ‘guess who I saw today?’ The rules are simple: talk about which
prominent directors, actors or producers one had spotted that day. Bonus points
for talking to them, game over if you got the business card and set up a
lateral move to become their intern at some later date.
The game confused me. The only victory I coveted for
myself was to be on the other side of it. I was nineteen at the time and told
myself that the next time I went to a film festival, I didn’t want to be
helping or bothering filmmakers. I wanted to be helped by the festival staff,
making my visit to exhibit my own work as easy and pleasant as possible. I
never had another internship.
Five years later, in 2009, I
had finished my first film, IMPOLEX, an absurdist fantasia about V-2 rockets
inspired by the research I felt compelled to do after
finishing Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. It cost $15,000 and was
filmed in seven days in the summer of 2008 with a crew that could all fit
around a single table.
Aside from sound recorder Adam Grass, who is presumably taking
this photo, this is essentially the entire crew of IMPOLEX: two actors,
cinematographer, me, and my girlfriend.
I was twenty-three when we made it and twenty-four
when I was given my first ever all expense paid round trip ticket with full
hotel accommodations, to go to the CineVegas Film Festival and present it. This
felt like mission accomplished. I was three years out of film school and this
goal I’d set for myself was coming true. And that was the end of that; nothing
else would ever be a challenge.
Except it wasn’t the end of that at all. CineVegas
was an incredible experience, but it was also damned humbling. IMPOLEX played
in the midnight section, right where it belonged, and I believe the total
attendance for two screenings was about fifty. With nothing to compare it to,
this felt great, even though the festival was held in a commercial multiplex
with theaters that sat over two hundred. Remember: I was twenty-four and
looking out over the 85% empty screenings, felt my life’s work had been
accomplished. It even got some notices in the press, mostly due to my incessant
badgering of people and also a retrospectively mortifying persistence to get
every single person I met to come see it.
I met a handful of great filmmakers at CineVegas, not
to mention the excellent programmers of the festival, Mike Plante and Trevor Groth. It was
incredibly meaningful this past January when Trevor introduced the premiere of
my newest film Listen Up Philip at Sundance to an audience that numerically
exceeded IMPOLEX’s at it’s first two-dozen screenings combined. The first thing
I said after he passed me the microphone was a memory about arriving at the
Palms Hotel and Casino, so eager to be at my first film festival as a director
that I went to the filmmaker check in before even going to my room, and was
greeted by him and Plante only to be mocked for wearing a tie, apparently
having been misinformed about the dress code in Las Vegas.
However something interesting seems to have happened
to that crop of filmmakers. Aside from Bob Byington, whose film Harmony and Me was a
highlight of the festival and who immediately turned into a friend and
collaborator, we haven’t seen new films from just about anybody else I met at
CineVegas. There were some very interesting and original films there, and I got
to know their makers well. But as of 2014, I haven’t re-encountered these
directors at other festivals, and I am unsure what happened to most of them.
It’s curious, and I wonder why it is that five years later I have made and
premiered two more features and completed a (currently unviewable) television
project.
I had this discussion with my friend and fellow
filmmaker Chad
Hartigan recently, and the conclusion we arrived at was this: the
smartest and also stupidest thing we could have done after making our minimally
received first films was to quickly make second films. IMPOLEX didn’t create
any immediate demand for a follow up. I could very easily be somebody who made
a film that played at CineVegas in 2009 and as of this day, have yet to
complete another feature. But at the age of twenty-four, that trivial scrap of
encouragement was not only enough to keep going, it was more than enough to, as
we did in many late night blackjack games in the Palms, double down and go bigger,
bolder and broker on the next one.
Chad and I realized that we were put into enviable
positions at relatively young ages with our somewhat under-screened films. We
had enough momentum to keep going but had neither wisdom nor caution. Being
youthful and naive is valuable if you have only one goal in mind and haven’t
yet grown into being smart enough to have a logic center that points out how
foolish your endeavors are. Premiering IMPOLEX at CineVegas provided me with
the perfect cocktail of excitement and ambition necessary to make another film,
The Color Wheel, just one year later. During the production and post-production
of that film it finally hit me: this is likely a huge mistake. Going double or
nothing is crazy, and I am likely to be left with nothing.
IMPOLEX, it turned out, wasn’t endgame for me but was
instead just step one. I’ll never forget, nor miss an opportunity to tell of,
meeting Dennis Hopper poolside in Las Vegas and telling him that his film The
Last Movie was one of the biggest inspirations for IMPOLEX; his status as the
celebrity chairman of CineVegas made the whole festival experience even more
profound. But that’s not to say that in order to have the feelings of
encouragement and support, you need to be flown to a nice film festival. Even
in five years, the landscape has changed enough that I believe people can find
that positive feedback in any number of places. If IMPOLEX were being finished
in 2014, it would probably be on NoBudge within a week of its festival debut,
if it even had one. (The 2009 edition of CineVegas turned out to be [its] last. In a way, I
felt like IMPOLEX was on the last chopper out of Saigon; I have no idea if a
prominent and well funded festival would have thrown support behind the film in
2010, though I must mention that it was also embraced by several excellent
underground festivals, such as Migrating Forms, Chicago Underground, and Melbourne Underground.) All being flown to
Las Vegas and given a hotel did for me was perpetuate the myth about myself
that I needed to believe in order to forge ahead, an experience currently
available in many more ways and places than it was then, at the last gasp of
the old guard.
I guess I finished The Color Wheel soon enough after
IMPOLEX that whatever minimal scrap of momentum I had was still there, thus
allowing the new film to have a life that greatly exceeded that of its younger,
scrappier, weirder brother. Of course I still hold IMPOLEX very close to my
heart; until I finished Listen Up Philip I routinely said, and meant, that it
was my favorite of my own films. I still can’t really explain my intentions in
making IMPOLEX, though my fondness stems from it being about 95% what I wanted
it to be. I’ve learned that is a very high percentage and I’m proud of getting
so close on my first try, whether or not it connects with anybody else or makes
a lick of sense to them.
It’s pretty rough and, like most first films, laden
with choices I can no longer justify. But, thanks to my friend and the film’s
first and biggest supporter Ronald Bronstein, the word ‘unjustifiable’ was
always in the official synopsis, so I guess it all comes full circle. Leos
Carax has said that your first film is the only one you wait your whole life to
make; IMPOLEX is far from perfect, but when I look at it now, I see the
ambition of a young filmmaker nervous that this will be the only one, so why
not just go for it.
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