I’ve fallen out of love with filmmaking.
So much so, that I’ve seriously considered quitting the game, selling my kit and doing something else. In fact, the only reason I haven’t is because I don’t have any other skill or interest I can progress a career in. I only really have one skill with that level of development… and I don’t love it anymore.
And this isn’t just something that’s come about as a result of the pandemic and lockdowns and limited opportunity to film stuff (although that definitely hasn’t helped) – this is something that’s been happening slowly, bit by bit, over the last few years.
When I started getting interested in filmmaking at the age of 19 it was a creative outlet that combined my love of storytelling with my love of martial arts (the first things I filmed were fight scenes after all) and as such, it was intoxicating. I would watch movies and take inspiration from what I saw, trying to figure out how certain shots were done and then replicate them with my friends. I would join filmmaking forums where other new filmmakers would upload stupidly-compressed AVIs of their films shot on their stupidly-limited miniDV camcorders. And when I went to university to study film and video production, I found myself surrounded by people who also wanted to make films and carve a career for themselves in this most competitive of industries.
My love for this craft was validated and my enthusiasm and motivation seemed infinite. Every project was an opportunity to learn something new, to try out a technique or use some new bit of kit. Every project was a chance to improve and when you did fail at something, it was a chance to learn from it and try again.
And then, around about 2013, I started to lose my motivation. I no longer had a circle of enthused friends with which to make films with and I was working in a day job that took every ounce of enthusiasm I had (for anything), kicked it in the nethers and stole its lunch money. I knew that I needed to find some motivation again. I needed a passion project that would showcase my abilities and remind me why I loved filmmaking in the first place. That passion project wound up being “Dead Meet” – a light-hearted short film with the sort of action sequences that had made me pick up a camcorder fifteen years earlier. I was betting a lot on “Dead Meet,” not so much financially but certainly from an emotional standpoint. I needed this to work.
And it didn’t. Not the way I’d hoped anyway. I struggled to find locations, I struggled to find extras, the film was shot across a nine month period and due to various let-downs in post-production, it took a year or more before the film was finished. And when it was finally released, I couldn’t have given less of a shit. Even when it started getting accepted into festivals and Francesca started winning awards for her performance, I wasn’t able to attend the festivals because I was working 60 hour weeks to keep the roof over my head. And this wasn’t due to the quality of the film – it was due to the fact that, overall, working on “Dead Meet” wasn’t an altogether positive experience for me. Previous short films, even with their challenges, had largely been a net positive… but when I needed a boost, “Dead Meet” just failed to provide it.
I figured I needed to surround myself with filmmaking friends again so I joined my local filmmaking club and even though many of the people there were new to filmmaking, I thought their enthusiasm might rub off on me. It didn’t. I tried buying new kit (because new kit often feels like progress) but that didn’t work, primarily because I’m experienced enough to know that the kit doesn’t really matter and old enough that shiny things don’t get me excited. I tried teaching filmmaking and although that appealed to me in many ways, it didn’t rekindle my love for the craft – in fact, I kept feeling like teaching the craft I once loved so much was like an admission that I’d failed. I even tried directing a few shorts again, but when “Instant” had many of the same issues that plagued “Dead Meet” (albeit to a far lesser extent), I just felt that familiar empty space where my love for this stuff had once been.
So if this has been a decline over several years, why has this come to a head recently?
Well, I can’t deny that the pandemic hasn’t helped. Not being able to meet people and do things has had a profound impact on all of us and I have no doubt I am not the only one feeling this with regard to their pre-covid interests and activities.
But I think the main reasons are to do with my own expectations. I wanted to use this time to write something that I could direct and the thing I wanted to direct was a feature. I’ve been trying to get my career started in filmmaking for nigh on twenty years at this point and I’ve still not pushed myself into making a feature film. And if you’d asked me why, I’d say it’s a money thing – I’m an unknown quantity so no-one with any serious money would back me, I don’t have an existing fanbase so crowd-funding is a waste of time and I don’t have any rich relatives to exploit so that’s out too. But while there is truth in that, it was also a confidence thing – I didn’t know if I had what it took to direct a feature and I didn’t want to try it and fail because even then, I knew that would’ve been that last coffin nail for my love of filmmaking.
So what I wanted to do over the pandemic was to come up with a feature film script that was so compelling that it would not only convince others to help fund it but also convince me that I could do this. That I still wanted to do this.
And as any creative knows, when you actually want to be creative, nothing sticks. Over the last year I have started writing no less than eight projects and not one of them has got beyond twenty pages.
It also doesn’t help that over this period I have seen many other people take the bull by the horns, write scripts, shoot projects in these limiting times and stay enthused. My friend Eric has even managed to get one of his feature film ideas off the ground. And I can’t say it’s jealousy so much as it is a reflection on me – if they can do it, why can’t I? And I’m starting to believe that instead of that rhetorical question being inspiring, there’s actually an answer to it. And it’s an answer I don’t really want to accept.
This is usually the point in these blog posts that I say I have a plan, that I have an idea of what I’m going to do and try to turn the negative into a positive. After all, the blog’s called Destination: Director’s Chair, what would it be without a few obstacles and insights learned on that road?
But this time, I don’t have a plan. I don’t know how to turn this around. How do people rekindle relationships that have gone stale? They go on date nights and try to treat it like they did when they first met. But I keep feeling that if filmmaking and I were to metaphorically try that, the restaurant would be crap, one of us would get food poisoning, neither of us would feel particularly amorous and I’d wind up sleeping on the couch.
Destination: Director's Chair 