Lucky Filmmaker

I’m trying to sneak a movie in — in between my other movies.  I’m trying to sneak in making one, not watching one.  The Florida movie is in post; the Alaska movie is in pre-production.  In order to burn off some creative energy I’ve been filming Max, my five-year-old.  Max: building a tent, burying himself in a pile of leaves, or recovering in the hospital from surgery.  The clips form a delicate narrative, stacked from the tendrils of a child’s ephemeral ideas and improvised actions.

I was editing in my office when Max came by; he wanted to see what I was doing.  He wanted to help.  But I hid the screen from him and then I didn’t know why.  Maybe it was because the movie is supposed to be a surprise for him.  Or maybe it was because it wasn’t done.  It still needed an ending — I couldn’t figure out the ending.  The movie was about the experiential cacophony of being five, and I was waiting for a finalizing note to reveal itself to me.

Days later, it came.  It came at four o’clock in the morning.  Max woke me up, crawling into bed.  He said he’d had a nightmare, but he didn’t want to tell it to me because the dream would scare me too much.  I assured him that he could tell me anything.  So Max pushed in next to me and, sensing that something new was about to reveal itself, I reached over and turned on a voice recorder.  The dream was frightening, poetic, and deeply honest.  That he’d wanted to protect me from it, and carry the burden himself, was overwhelming.

I spent the rest of the night reassuring Max, holding him in bed until he was snoring on top of me.  Then, when morning came, and my wife woke up and Max was back to being himself, I took the story that was inside the voice recorder and headed off to work finishing the movie.

Ultimately, my movies are stories I want to tell my kids.  They like to tell me stories, sometimes in the shapes of dreams, and they know I’ll be brave enough to hear them; I like to tell them stories, sometimes in the shapes of movies, and I know they’ll be with me to watch.

Emily worked late last night, which left me scrambling to get both kids to bed before an 8:30 “Jonestown Defense” meeting at my apartment, with our two editors, actor/producer, and sound designer.  An important meeting to be sure, as we are facing a March 24 deadline to submit the film the Critics Week at Cannes.  I needed to have the kids asleep and out of the way.

Just as the meeting started, Max was up.  None of my tricks could keep him in bed.  Eventually I surrendered and let him stay up: squished in on my chair beside me, then sitting on my lap with his security cape, then climbing around on the floor beside my feet with a toy.  He listened, he tuned us out, he got snacks, he laughed, and by the end of the meeting, he raised his hand and — despite how “loud and fast everyone is talking” — chimed in with his own two-cents about our meeting.

Emily got home just as we were finishing up.  It was late — after 10 — but Max was in high spirits and bragging to his mom that he’d held court in his first ever movie meeting.  “Me and daddy,” he said, beaming.  When Emily asked Max what he’d learned, Max thought, and said, “Well, nothing about movies.”  He smiled.  Emily laughed.  The experience had given him much more, of course.

It’s a popular question in my circles.  Does being a parent make it harder to be a filmmaker?  Or harder, for that matter, to work in any type of profession where you’re a mixture of artist and entrepreneur?  Do the constraints on your time (transporting kids back and forth from school) and energy (“Daddy, let’s play!  Let’s play!”) sap those vital resources away from being able to be creative?  More than once I’ve been up late at night in my office, editing, with a kid on my lap, feeling torn about sending him away so that I could concentrate, or letting him stay there so he could watch me work, and ask his precious questions.

On a recent frigid day I was pushing Max on a swing, standing beside a friend who was there pushing her son.  Out of the blue, Max asked my friend if she had seen my new movie, The Jonestown Defense.  The movie’s not done yet, and no one has seen it, so she said no.  Max lit up with a sunny smile and said that he has seen some of the movie, and “It’s good,” he bragged about me, glowing.  I think he was retooling the memory of watching me edit from my lap, and then he was almost bursting with pride.  “It’s really good!”

Standing in a cold, barren Brooklyn playground, it was more meaningful encouragement for my work, for what I do, than I’d gotten from any important agent or professional in all the years before he’d been born.

I once read that Stanley Kubrick kept an editing suite at home so that, among other reasons, he could spend time with his kids while he worked. Apparently, despite the unruly demands of filmmaking, he was also quite a family man. When I used to have an office job at Imagine Entertainment in Los Angeles, I remember thinking how difficult it was to spend vastly more hours of each day with my colleagues, whom I liked enough, than my soon-to-be wife, whom I wanted to be with much more. Having kids increases the complexity of this ratio untold-fold.

What a great solution, then, Kubrick had, to bring his office home. Some of us have home-offices out of financial necessity; his was by choice. Terrific.

Back a couple years when I started my production company, Nigrita Films, I wanted to fuse these two forces in my life — my work and my family — and chose the name of the village in Greece where my father was born. If I was going to be out making movies, spending ungodly hours and weeks and months working, then I wanted to keep the connection strong back to home — even if the only connection I could afford at times was the name alone.