July 22, 2004
Well, I'm mostly all better, at least on the surface, at least enough to have gone to see Garden State this evening. Zach Braff was there; I've never seen his TV show, and in person he was so different from his character in the movie that it left me quite impressed with his acting skills. He's not bad at the whole writing-directing thing, either. The film wasn't perfect, but oddly, that's what really sold me on it; it has all these little technical errors, that I've made on my films, like eyelines that don't quite match or cuts that don't quite cut together. It was almost comforting to see that someone else, with a 2.5 million dollar budget and amazing actors, can make the same mistakes as me, and that the film can still be really good anyways.
He said a few things in the Q&A that indie filmmakers just hate to hear; like, how with both him and Natalie Portman involved in the project, studios still wouldn't give him a cent to make it. "These are the kind of projects we might buy after they're made," they all told him. Arrrghh. Also, knowing that, even if I have a 2.5 million budget for a film, I'll still be roughing it makes me feel like I have a long way to go.
I wanted to ask him about his adaptation of Andrew Henry's Meadow, one of my favorite books growing up, but as always I remained shy and reticent. There was early word from our contacts at the theater, later proved false, that Natalie Portman might be there; god knows if she had, shy and reticent would have become...well, a million times more of the same.
I'm now off to open up the Deadroom Final Cut Pro files for the first time in months (1.5 months, but it feels like more). I don't even remember which folder the final cut is in.
Posted by David Lowery at July 22, 2004 1:49 AM