30.06.26
Re-finding your craft
One of the most rewarding things about this project has been exercising old muscles that haven’t been exercised for a little while, and rediscovering old inspirations.
The COVID period was difficult because (at my former studio) we couldn’t produce. Most of our shoots took place overseas, and because of the restrictions on travel, because of the issues with securing insurance, because of the lockdowns, there were a couple of years during which we were unable to be in production.
From an economic standpoint, the situation wasn’t as damaging as it could have been. We’d released several new feature films just as the pandemic started, so we had movies coming to market at a time when everyone was at home looking for things to watch. The timing was a fluke, had the virus hit a few months earlier, we would have been in serious trouble, but, as it turned out, we were well placed to weather the initial phases of the pandemic.
As time wore on, the route back to production remained unclear. There were lots of conversations with distributors and other industry people; I went to Cannes, the first one after the world started to reopen, just to see how the land lay, and it was clear that things were shifting very fast.
While filmmaking remained impractical, we pivoted to finding other revenue sources: publishing, physical media sales, some ecommerce. And so there came to be a wide expanse of time in which I just didn’t make films.
As I make this one I am reminded that “it’s been a minute”, as our American cousins like to say.
After a long career and numberless projects, I’d always assumed that filmmaking is a business that I know so well that I can pick it up effortlessly at any time of my choosing. In fact, production had been so intensive running into the pandemic that the early stages of lockdown were a welcome chance to step back, re-evaluate, and maybe do something a bit different. But what I have found is that, no, it’s not effortless - like all muscles, if you don’t exercise them, they start to weaken.
Of course, all truisms have an inverse, and any muscle that you work very frequently soon starts to activate from habit and memory, which is a different form of weakness. It’s easy to fall into routine, patterns, reflexes which make the work easy to complete but which can also make it feel stale.
As I reawaken these muscles, I’m trying to be conscious of the risk of falling into old patterns and habits, rather than responding creatively to the material as I shape it. I can feel those muscles pulling me to do the same things that I’ve done in the past, and sometimes that may be with good reason, but I’m careful to ask myself whether those decisions really are the best ones, and not just the easy ones.
I’ve spent some time looking back at reference films, and refreshing myself on where I have found inspiration in the past, asking myself whether I’m thinking as creatively as I could be, albeit in the teeth of enormous limitations. Those limitations are definitely something that I have been grappling with this week.
One of the things I always find essential in post is to have a big screen on hand. If you are just looking at your film on a computer, you will not see it properly; you will not have the sense of it, the sense of its rhythm and feel. A couple of weeks ago, I felt that there was something wrong with a sequence that I was working on but I couldn’t quite place why. I reminded myself that I’ve known this principle for twenty years: I’m not seeing it properly. I went and bought myself a big new 4K display, watched the sequence, and spent the rest of the day completely recutting it. Once I pulled myself off the computer monitor and watched it on a proper screen, I could instantly see that it wasn’t right, wasn’t working.
That has been the experience of coming back to my core craft after “a minute”: the muscles ache, but in a good way.