I'd spun in my head a dozen more Proustian onsets to this entry, but then thought better of sentimentalizing something I've long since retired. One critic, noting last year that St. Nick was being billed as my first feature film, surmised that I'd apparently distanced myself from it. This is true, in a sense; in private, I'm very proud of it, but there's no need for it to exist in the public eye. I've got other work that I'm happy to be represented by; this one can fade away. The same can be said for much of my output between then and now, which I've pared down to the one or two offerings I feel actively contribute to my body of work, excising the many whose value was in teaching me what not to do.

I do my best to regret nothing in life, but were I to allow myself some celebratory leeway in this regard, I'd wish that version of me who was nervously directing coverage in a kitchen for the very first time ten years ago this morning had learned a little more quickly how to throw that coverage away and get to the heart of the matter. With any luck, he'd outpace this current, clean-palated me, who often - but not tonight! - thinks that that he has indeed learned just that.

I came out of that film with a many memories, mostly faded, and a few dear friends with whom I'm still making movies. Yesterday, I met up with James M. Johnston to sign off the last few contracts for St. Nick's distribution. You can find him in the picture below, taken on the last day of our first collaboration. Also in there is Adam Donaghey, who has three new films he produced playing at SXSW this year. I look forward to making many more films with them both.

Everyone else in the photo has more or less vanished.

As has been writ often on these pages, this film is a particularly beloved one of mine, my involvement with it notwithstanding. I can't wait to see it with an audience, and on the big screen. You can see the trailer, soon to be updated with festival laureates, right here.

There are tons of other great films in the lineup - I'm excited about friends' new offerings like Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture and Aaron Katz' long-awaited Cold Weather. Clay's film Earthling is in competition, Lovers Of Hate will have its first Sundance encore here, as will Cyrus and Enter The Void. Oh, and Trash Humpers is playing!

There are a few new things of mine that will be playing as well, to be announced at a later date. But ultimately, March in Austin is all about Audrey The Trainwreck for me. It's the real deal.

I have yet to see Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lovely Bones - my opinion of the novel, compounded by the torpor of special effects so pronounced in the trailer, has not sent my scurrying to the theater - but I couldn't help but think of it while watching Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void, and apply it's touchy-feely tagline -'The story of a life...and everything after' - to Noe's vision of just that. Enter The Void, to be fair, is touchy-feely too, in its own inappropriate fashion, and it's perhaps even more dependent on CGI trickery than I presume Jackson's opus is, but it doesn't commit the cardinal sin of realizing the inconceivable. He gives us visions we can relate to - such as a sexual climax filmed from inside a woman's vagina. It's somewhat funny, but also so operatically audacious that it achieves its desired effect in spite of any laughter.

Noe isn't interested in heaven, and death seems to be a means to an end more than a raison d'etre; his intentions, he explained after the screening at Sundance, was to make the audience feel like they were on drugs. He pretty much succeeds. Early in the film, Oscar, the young protagonist, takes a hit of DMT and lapses into an extended reverie of computer generated abstractions - long tendrils of unfurling bioluminescence, swirling flagellum trailing into floral orifices, forever shifting and branching. It's comparable to the final flight in 2001, and also perhaps to a screensaver, but what's remarkable about it is how it captures in visual terms precisely how one's brain functions when under the influence of hallucinogens. In other words, it's not a visual representation of a hallucination (which is only a few degrees less dangerous than representing the afterlife), but a road map, if you will, to how a hallucination works. It's a guide which the rest of the narrative will follow, in a more figurative sense, and during the last 45 minutes, when ennui and distended repetition begin to grate on one's shellshocked eyes and you just want it all to stop - well, you can't take Noe to task for inaccuracy.

You also can't quite take him to task for shallowness, which, to a large extent, Enter The Void is. There's nothing dangerous about the film's provocations. It's unsetting, but not intellectually or ideologically so. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Noe's nihilism, much like David Fincher's, is mostly surface; it's aesthetic window dressing for bravura filmmaking, and indeed, the technical work on display here is of the highest order, graceful and intense and frequently dazzling. There's an enormous amount of digital work on display, but it's nearly impossible to tell where the special effects sequences begin and end. Hence, the film functions as a cohesive whole, a singular experience, and we're able to take a vested interest in the sad lives Noe puts on display. Irreversible worked in a similar fashion - a threadbare story made grandiloquent through craft and conceit. That film, of course, also had two almost unbearably disturbing scenes, which Noe seems to have no interest in topping. Indeed, for all unpleasantness he pushes our noses into here (a violent car accident and its aftermath, an unnervingly realistic abortion), he ultimately reveals himself to be a great big softie.

The first screening was wonderful. It looked really good on the big screen, and sometimes even beautiful. I made a lot of mistakes behind the camera, but there were lots of things I tried to do that did work, and never so well as when projected at large (I was pleased to see that the Hollywood Reporter thought likewise). I skipped the second screening to see a different movie, and now I regret it.

An anecdote: during the Austin leg of the shoot, I cut together the title sequence of the movie for the cast and crew's viewing pleasure. As temp score, I used the theme from Raising Arizona. Aside from the fact that it was instantly recognizable as such, it worked perfectly - so perfectly that there were doubts we'd find anything as good.

But then when I flew down to Austin last summer to work with Bryan on trimming his first cut, he suggested we drop in Power (Failure), a song by Kevin Bewersdorf. I dragged it into the timeline, replacing the Coen Bros. cue - and there it's remained ever since. It was perfect. So perfect that the opening sequence has hardly changed since that day, and Kevin ended up composing the entire score. If we hadn't used that song, I don't think the movie would be what it is, and we probably wouldn't be here today - it was the piece of the puzzle we didn't know we needed until it was in there.

So here, for your listening pleasure, is that song: Power (Failure) by Kevin Bewersdorf. With any luck, this will become the anthem of Sundance 2010.

And now I'm off to the screening!

Meanwhile, back in Austin, the press kit for Lovers Of Hate has just returned from the printers. It's something of a comic book, created by Monofonus Press (who helped back the film), and in it you'll find beautifully rendered illustrations of people who hold vague and eerie likenesses to the makers of the film. Including yours truly, represented by a black and white salty sea dog of a cameraman at least thirty years my senior. The picture is a cribbing of this photograph, which was taken on a very hot day in the back of an old Caddy in Memphis. The polar opposite of the weather we'll be hiding from in the Eccles when the lights dim on Sunday. Notice I said 'we.' I guess I've made up my mind.

Now on to the stop-motion part.

"Classic and romantic, wise and iconoclastic, light and serious, sentimental and moralistic, he created the ‘Rohmer’ style, which will outlive him.’’

Which coincided nicely with this passage from David Rieff's beautiful forward to At The Same Time, the final collection of essays by his mother, Susan Sontag, which I'm currently reading:

"Loved ones, admirers, detractors, works, work: beyond soon-to-be distorted or at least edited memories, beyond the possessions soon to be dispersed or distributed, beyond libraries, archives, voice recordings, videotape, and photographs - that is surely the most that can ever remain of a life, no matter how well and kindly lived, no matter how accomplished."

From which I'll skip to another passage in the same text:

"She was interested in everything. Indeed, if I had only one word with which to evoke her, it would be avidity. She wanted to experience everything, taste everything, go everywhere, do everything. Even travel, she once wrote, she conceived of as accumulation."

Accumulation. That's the end I have in mind as I plunge, sometimes greedily but just as often fearfully, ever forward, with as dense a bedrock of experience beneath me as I can manage to rest on when I get tired.

Part 1

By six o'clock, we had our antique movie camera but not our second cast member. We thought finding a gentleman with a moustache would be easy enough - a stone thrown in a hipster bar, perhaps - but such was not the case. Seven o'clock found us scouring Facebook, looking for friends and friends of friends who might fit the bill. Phone calls were made, but apparently 'tis the season for close shaves.

Finally we found someone - a graduate student in cancer related research. Would he fit in the period costumes already procured? He invited us over to a party at his friend's house. We showed up with a bag full of clothes and had him try them on during halftime of the big game. I took a snapshot on the old iPhone. He looked good and old fashioned - our second leading man was found. We thanked him, told him that we were getting started at three the next day and, on the way out the door, let him know that we'd be setting his head on fire.

Part 2

We were on our sixth or seventh take when the coyotes began to howl. By and by, their melancholy howls were augmented by another shrill, distant caterwaul - a siren, barely there, twisting its way through the breaks in those wails coming from no discernible direction. It wasn't really coming closer, it didn't seem, which didn't stop me from wondering, in the back of my head, if it wasn't coming for us.

We kept shooting as the sun sank lower and lower, until our latitude was lost and we could shoot no more. "Should we put out the fire, or just let it burn out?" someone (who may have been me) asked. In answer to my question, the flashing lights of a fire engine rounded the corner at the bottom of a hill. A fire extinguisher was grabbed, the fire doused, and a great billow of white smoke unfurled. Two firemen got out of the truck and began walking towards us. Up the dry, grassy hill that opened up onto miles and miles of dry, grassy fields, at the foot of which we'd lit a (properly controlled) fire because, after all, the shot would look so much better with it. The fact that we were on private property without permission was the furthest thing on our mind at this point.

They looked at the film equipment, and at the snuffed conflagration at our feet.

"Well, it looks like you've got everything under control," they said.

And then they left, proving once again that when you're making movies, you can pretty much get away with anything.

I somehow neglected to realize that 2010 was a turning point of any sort at all until just a few weeks ago, when I remembered an upcoming anniversary that I'll definitely be paying more attention to in the near future. Within this suddenly-defined envelope I rediscovered a catalog of encapsulated remembrances, all of which accumulated more import when applied to a timeframe. Many of these events occurred in darkened theaters, or their immediate proxies; indeed, the bulk of my cinematic matriculation occurred over the past decade, hand-in-hand with my own awkward shuffle into some version of maturity, and so I've commensurately been looking up and down at all those best-of-the-decade lists, remembering what came out when and where and, aside from wondering whether or not they're being compiled twelve months early (where does a decade begin and end, exactly?), considering which of those titles I'd pick for my own momentous run-down of millennial cinema.

I could choose ten films, or twenty-five, or fifty - there's safety in higher numbers, less of a need to choose between two favorites - or I could go in the opposite direction and narrow things down to a list of three films and one filmmaker. This accounting beginning almost exactly ten years ago, when I went to see Magnolia. It was technically a 1999 film, but it didn't reach Texas screens until early 2000. I loved it more than anything. I still love it, but I watched it again two or so years ago, and had I seen it for the first time at the age I was then (or am now), I don't know if it would have worked so well for me. Conversely, if I hadn't seen it then, I don't know if I'd be the person I am now.

That person was working as a projectionist in the summer of 2002, when a shipment of trailers from Technicolor arrived at the theater, containing the first preview for Punch Drunk Love. I spooled it onto a print, threaded it up and snuck into the theater to watch it, and I recall that as the first frames hit the screen, I thought to myself "There really is a new Paul Thomas Anderson/i> movie coming out" with the same out-of-body-reverence that generally accompanies the arrival of any anticipated landmark in one's life.

A similar thought occurred in late December five years later, when the lights dimmed on that first midnight screening of There Will Be Blood (which I think could handily take the title of best film of the decade were I to focus solely on individual films). Its own considerable qualities aside, what I love about it - what I love about PT Anderson in general - is that it's not just a great fucking movie, but that it is such a marked progression from the one that came before it, which was itself a huge step forward from its own predecessor. His next project, The Master, has just been announced, and with the press release came a shot of the strangest sense of anticipation. One part anticipation, three parts trust - what a true joy it is to watch such a gifted filmmaker grow over the span of his oeuvre! And on a more personal level, as a filmmaker, what a joy it is to try and keep pace.

This trailer is also a birthday present to me, as tomorrow sees the onset of the last year of my twenties. That odd year in which you can no longer say you're in your twenties, those twelve months during which various lapsed goals will resolve themselves in diminishing fashion, because really, who cares in the end? All of that is a very big reason why I love this film as much as I do.

Starring Tony Baker, Alexi Wasser, Nick Offerman, Jess Weixler, Danny Rhodes, Rebecca Spence and Alison Latta, and featuring an original score by jazz legend John Medeski, Audrey The Trainwreck will bow in 2010. Spread the word.

(I also participated in two polls over at Hammer To Nail - The Best of '09 and Best of The Decade, with both lists being confined to films with budgets under one million dollars.)

However, I'm going to take the liberty to be particularly Grinchy this Christmas Eve and say that my favorite film year, the one which demarcates the past twelve months more than any others, was my own. I'm not saying it's the best - not by a long shot - but when I think back on time spent in a darkened theater in 2009, St. Nick will be what comes to mind first. And I'll welcome it.

Yesterday called for air conditioning. I went running in shorts and a tank top and worked up a good sweat. Today brought more snow than I've ever seen on a Christmas Eve in Texas before. By nightfall we were stuck inside, all travel plans forsaken. We're going sledding in the morning. And this is why I love it here.

Whither the trailer for Lovers Of Hate? I'm not sure, but I do know that there are some pretty special promotional items being put together in time for its premiere. I was just going back through old e-mails, as I often do when I'm procrastinating, and found the one in which Lovers Of Hate went from being a hazy maybe to a sure thing - a sure thing that was suddenly going to be in production in less than two months. That e-mail came on November 18th. And then a month and change later, a year ago today, I landed back in the United States after an extended filmmaking trip in Costa Rica. I remember during that first week there, sitting in a slightly grimy hostel room, watching hundreds of ants swarm out of the guts of my MacBook and wishing I was home. The trip got a lot better after that, and we ended up making a movie I'm really proud of, and now here I am a year later, sitting here with all the windows open, hoping it gets cold in time for Christmas, and making a futile attempt to quantify.

I can't wait to get out of this editing suite and back behind a camera again. And then back to the editing suite, but with my own images in tow...