 |
||
|
Happy as I was to be making films I was left with this frustration of having a potent idea to develop but something that was way too strange for the relatively conventional world of cinema.
From time to time I would review the script and the idea came to me that perhaps it would be possible to work it into a film script. I did a first draft and looking back on it I see that it was a very obscure and difficult piece of work.
It is interesting what time does to ideas. The next time I re-read the script, prior to doing a second draft, I was struck by how my feelings had moved on. Certain ideas that I had regarded as crucial now seemed less substantial. Other ideas seemed to have more charge than I had realized. So I re-wrote and made changes to the overall structure. Although the whole was still very dense, too dense, a shape was beginning to emerge. It is fascinating how these things begin to assume a growth of their own.
Over the next twelve years this process was repeated regularly. The ideas stayed in my mind and I began adding things and taking things out of the structure. During this time I was constantly making films and learning about the reductive process, becoming less precious about images and ideas, in fact becoming quite vicious with myself. I had learned the hard way that you do yourself no favors by holding onto things that do not belong within the big structure. And ideas are never really lost. One still stores them and they come out in a different way in an entirely different context. The crucial thing in cinema (or life for that matter) is understatement.
Several times the project almost got made. Possible producers would read the script and be fascinated and puzzled by it. They would go out and try and raise money for it only to be thwarted by the 'suits' who invariably did not get it.
2 of 4