December 16, 2004
I was up until six last night watching the Return Of The King appendices, and I think I'm about halfway through them now. I think I want to show all three of the LOTR documentaries to the crews of every movie I ever work on from now on, just to get people fired up; I can't get over how wonderful and dedicated and involved the entire cast and crew was, and if I can ever achieve a working environment like that on my projects, I'll be a happy director.
I didn't start watching them until about three -- I spent the previous eight hours or so working on more tests for my new short. The results just keep getting better, but it's killing my back. I need some sawhorses. I'm not planning on actually beginning 'principal photography' until after the holidays, but there's a lot of trial and error to get through before then. Thank god the sun sets around five now, since I can't start until after it's dark.
So that and a few other tasks have been taking up most of my creative time lately, and I haven't been writing as much I should be; my review for The Life Aquatic is sitting in a nearly completed state on my desktop, along with an unfinished short story and a few other odds and ends. I meet with James every Tuesday to work on his new script, though, and that's been coming along well. Our different perspectives on things becomes more evident as we go along; the other day, we were writing a scene in which a couple talk while lounging in bed, and in a detail as minor as where each person was phyiscally situated in the scene, the difference between our personalities became suddenly clear. My instincts told me to have one person sitting up, their back to the other; James's notion, suffice to say, was more romantically inclined. Things like that, which I often wouldn't give second thought to when writing something for myself, make me think about myself a lot and whether or not I'm more misanthropic than I generally think I am. Another variable was in how we each go about dealing with younger characters. The children I write are wide eyed and very quiet, curious but a little bit afraid; his are prety much the opposite. This becomes problematic when we're both taking turns writing the same 13 year old character. It also goes to show how much we unconsciously draw from ourselves when writing, and how even the things we (and I'm using an all-encompassing collective 'we' now) think we've come up with out of thin air are biographically rooted in ourselves.
I've been dreaming more vividly lately.
Posted by David Lowery at December 16, 2004 3:27 PM