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August 30, 2006
A Not Quite Universal Dream
We went to see the glorious 8 1/2 the other night (part of the Tutto Fellini series at the Modern). I'd never seen it on the big screen before, and I'd also underestimated how long it had been since I last watched it.
Or rather: I knew I hadn't seen it since I was in high school, but I hadn't considered the fact in the space between then and now, I've made a handful of films. The experience of which made it a funnier and more desperate picture, just as the experience of watching it was marked by both newfound empathy and a rather spine tingling narcissism. I was reminded of how Francis Ford Coppola said that, when he viewed it while making Apocalypse Now, he felt as if it was all about him. And he was right. It's all about any filmmaker who watches it, I think - including Fellini, who was only telling most of the truth when he said that, of all his films, this one is the least autobiographical, the most fantastical.
The narrative structure of 8 1/2 would appear to be an intertwined thread of dreams and reality, but I think it's just as accurate - if not more so - to read the entire film as a dream. Individual scenes may appear to reflect or refract some degree of realism, but the manner in which they are articulated with the fantasy sequences betrays a strong bedrock of unconscious logic (the same sort Lynch would use to finish Mulholland Drive some decades on). And it is this dream form that allows every filmmaker who watches 8 1/2 to see his or her reflection in the screen.
Indeed, I've never met a director who hasn't dreamed of showing up to set completely unprepared. It happens to me without fail, like clockwork, everytime I embark on a big production, and sometimes in between. It sure as hell came to Coppola on the set of Apocalypse Now, and I'll bet Fellini knew all about it, too. He may not have seen himself in Guido, but I'm sure he saw himself in the film itself. It's good old fashioned artistic anxiety, and to a significant extent, anyone can relate to it; but what I couldnt comprehend in a complete sense the first time I saw the film all those years ago was that filmmaking is a unique art in that it is in no way (at least in most cases) singular. Indeed, what makes these dreams so nerve wracking and Guido's shortcomings so deliciously catastrophic is that there are so many people there on the set. Crew members wondering what shot they should be preparing for, actors wondering how to play a scene, all of them waiting for you to make up your mind. It's a highly specific version of the old going-to-school-in-your-underwear nightmare, and Fellini captured it in 8 1/2 so perfectly that I experienced a bit of deja vu throughout it - not because I'd seen the film before, but because of what I've come to understand since seeing it last.
Yen is probably due to start having the dream any day now. Ciao starts shooting on September 16th. Three days of six day weeks, all of which I'll spend managing all the footage. During the test shoot in LA last week, I figured out a pretty efficient workflow with the P2 cards: backup to hard drive, copy to RAID, import to FCP, rename, categorize, etc. It's pretty efficient, but it's going to be a time consuming process, and I'm looking forward to getting past all this technical stuff, all these officious acronyms and workflow issues and getting down to the actual art of the editing process (regardless - after working with the camera for one weekend, I never want to shoot anything on tape ever again).
Cutting together the footage from that test shoot, it finally hit home: this is a pretty major production, and although I always knew I'd be the editor, I only just suddenly I realized that I'm going to be editing it. Time to mentally prepare myself. To that end, I guess it's about time I actually read the script for the film. Last summer, I stopped reading the drafts that Yen kept refining; I'd looked at the script so many times, been so critical of it, that I'd lost perspective. I'm pretty sure I can go over it now with fresh eyes, but maybe I actually shouldn't. Maybe I should cut the film based entirely on what I see in the footage, and what Yen tells me he wants. It might actually be beneficial.
Posted by David Lowery at August 30, 2006 12:08 AM
Comments
it's up to you david, on whether you wanna read the new draft. i'm still making some minor adjustments (mostly dialogue) as we speak, but the structure pretty much stays the same. i'm tempted to ask you not to read it now and we'll figure it out in post (which is not difficult; the narrative is very straightforward after all), but i'm thinking that maybe it's better if you read it now just in case you catch some glaring error that no one else has noticed yet ... before any frame has been shot!
Posted by: Yen at August 30, 2006 01:14 PM
It probably is better to read it, especially since I'll be logging all the footage. But once the shoot is over and we're in the editing room...no scripts!
Posted by: Ghostboy at August 31, 2006 12:04 AM
Fair enough!
Posted by: Yen at August 31, 2006 07:34 AM
I too think this is the best way.
Posted by: jmj at August 31, 2006 10:17 AM