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September 23, 2011

IFP Week, a Rooftop Films Grant & Heading Home

I left our cabin in Montana at 4 in the morning on Monday, was back in Texas by 12 that afternoon and sixteen hours later mailed off the draft of the script I'd been working on in that interim and headed back to the airport. I landed in New York at 10:30 that morning, with a little bit of window-seat sleep to ease the pain, and as I was waiting for a cab received a phone call from Mark at Rooftop Films informing that the same script I'd been up all night working on had just been awarded a Rooftop post-production grant. That's a good way to land.

I was here at Independent Film Week three years ago, when St. Nick was selected for the Rough Cut Labs. At the time, I remember feeling very aloof, existential, depressed, not quite sure what I was doing here. I wrote an article about the experience for Hammer To Nail, which no longer exists in their archives but which I retained a paragraph of below:

"So what exactly goes on at Independent Film Week? Let me avoid answering this question by noting that, in asking a filmmaker to cover the event, my editors here have perhaps unknowingly run the risk of entrusting their coverage to someone whose approach to the business of motion pictures might be described by some as self-sabotage; someone who might actively avoid taking meetings or even talking about his film; someone who might, on a whim and for reasons entirely unrelated, decide he needs to give up coffee one day into the week and thereby incapacitate himself with severe caffeine withdrawal symptoms. Someone who may, indeed, spend the entire first day of Independent Film Week off in Brooklyn making an independent film.

Three years certainly make a difference. James, Toby and I have this meetings thing down.

Four days later and it's back to Texas, and then to Milwaukee, and then back here to New York, where I'm taking part in the inaugural Emerging Visions program at the New York Film Festival. In between now and then I've got another draft of the script due, which means I'll inevitably be doing a lot more writing here.

Posted by David Lowery at September 23, 2011 10:35 AM