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April 05, 2006
...and ends.
We finished up the Austin leg of the GDMF shoot yesterday (an auspicious end to the production; hopefully, we'll be shooting all our films there in the near future). This film certainly kept us on our toes. Maybe I just noticed it more because I was producing. Or maybe after being spoiled by the relative weightlessness of the Outlaw Son, I had nearly forgotten what it was like to fall behind schedule, or to have locations drop out at the last minute, or to wrangle a room full of nearly twenty actors, or to actually need an assistant director. It was extremely exhausting and frequently stressful, but I think that duress made the entire process more memorable, and more valuable; and from it, James and his actors pulled the elements for a fairly remarkable film. We'll find out for sure when I start editing them together next month, but I'm already pretty proud of what they accomplished. And jealous. In a good way.
It was good to get some more producing experience under my belt; it should come in handy this summer. And it was somewhat fun to flex my cinematographer muscles again, since Clay had to abdicate after the first two days. I know there's at least one shot that I lit halfway competently.
A good memory from the other night: crashing with James at our friend Marc's completely vacant apartment in Austin (which he'd just moved out of the day before), staying up late, drinking a bottle of wine from paper cups and talking about filmmaking, both specifically and in general, with an enthusiasm only slightly abetted by inebriation. These are the sort of things we've done a million times before, and that I naively hope we have a million more opportunities for - even though I know that things will change. We always make our movies knowing that it's only a matter of time before we're not serving as each other's crews any longer - at least not in the same capacity.
Which reminds me of something from David D'Arcy's oustanding interview with David Cronenberg last week. It'
I try to crush all other filmmakers. I think it's important to be honest about that. In fact, it was a process of coming up from the underground. I had a lot of friends who were underground filmmakers. One of them was Ivan Reitman. Of course, he's very successful in Hollywood and moved to LA a long time ago from Toronto. But others did fall by the wayside and never became filmmakers for various reasons. At a certain point in your career, you have to do it yourself. There's only so much help that you can have. For a long time, I wasn't making enough money to survive, so I certainly couldn't help anybody financially.
It is important to b honest about that, although but my optimistic side tends to believe that I'll keep trying to help, even when I can't.
Posted by David Lowery at April 5, 2006 08:21 PM