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August 1, 2008

Precedents

I'm showing St. Nick again this evening, to a few select folks. I'm at the point now where I'm watching it repeatedly, all the way through, on a pretty regular basis. I'm still too excited about showing it to people to not sit there and watch it with them (although I suppose I'm earning the right to never sit through it again after its eventual public premiere).

As I mentioned way back when, the spark for this movie was a web series that I was making with my brother and sister that I never finished. It was a different animal, with separate intent and purpose, but I re-watched the first episode the other day (the only one I ever actually cut), for the first time in ages, and was surprised by how closely it adheres to the first ten or fifteen minutes of the movie. For example, the first shot of each:

There a handful of little things like that scattered throughout the film. Basically, I rip myself off a lot. There's an alley that was behind my old apartment that I used in a music video I made last year (which will officially be seeing the light of day soon), and again in a static shot of the neighborhood in the film.

And this photo I took in Marfa last October was the inspiration for the shot of the kids entering the house.

There are a lot of others I've discovered, too. A few conscious, but most of them not.

* * *

I cut anther four minutes out of the movie today, taking it down to 83. But I think I might put a few of them back in. I don't want to be a running time bully.

Okay, I'm gonna stop talking about this movie now.

Posted by David Lowery at August 1, 2008 9:36 PM