Burden of Dreams

Life Through Movies #8

“Cinema is a dream directed” - Luis Buñuel

11 years. It had been 11 years since I stepped in a film set as part of a crew. I was invited to participate in a short film this week and for someone that watches and thinks about movies so much, being on the side of making them made me nervous. An element of being the least experienced person in the room contributed to it, and another, deeper one, was my own personal questioning: will I still like it? Had I idealized the dream of making movies?

I arrived at the set at 6am to start helping out and attempt to answer myself in the process. We were shooting for four days in and around an apartment in the Narvarte neighborhood of Mexico City.

After everyone had a quick breakfast, a few emotional starting speeches were made.
Everyone out of the 21 person crew and cast had either taken a pay cut of their normal rate or not being paid at all in order to accomplish one thing: lay into film Valeria's childhood story, filled with abuse, nightmares and growth. A kind of catharsis for her that will eventually also bring healing to the spectator, or at least start a conversation around growing up as a misfit in a patriarchal society.

She'd written the script and was also directing, aided by her partner, Nicolle, as First Assistant Director. My role was to be Production Assistant, which in this case was short for moving furniture around, setting up food or running to the store to buy gum to satisfy healthy cravings. But never did I feel like repetitively laying down bricks, more like building a cathedral.

And as we prepared to shoot the first scene, I began feeling an excitement I had only felt 11 years prior. I could almost touch this special energy of having a coordinated group in the process of visually capturing what was once an abstract idea in someone’s head.

I realized being on set is the process where the bridge from thoughts and words to moving images is collectively crossed in an organized, beautiful chaos.
And this crossing gives me a high unlike any other experience.

A strange melancholy filled my body wondering about all the sets I hadn’t been to, either because I was focused on another kind of career, or simply because I wasn’t born yet. Thankfully, a few great documentaries have been made on this magic that happens behind the camera.

My favorite is Burden of Dreams, about the making of the movie Fitzcarraldo, where the protagonist is obsessed about moving a ship over a mountain to access a rich rubber land in the Amazon. The obsession is even greater in the director Werner Herzog, who literally has the crew manually move a 320-ton steamship over a steep hill. Couple this with the Amazon jungle, an indigenous tribe part of the cast and the explosive relationship between the lead actor and Herzog, and you have one of the most epic documentaries about the struggle of making a film.

I had always intuitively understood Herzog’s justification for obsessing over such a monumental task, and now, participating in this short film with even my minuscule role, I could confirm in my own skin the deep satisfaction it brings me to make movies. And I deeply craved to experiment the feeling of making a story of my own come to life, with me steering the ship.

On the last day of filming, I got a text from one of the key employees at my startup asking for a call with me. This almost never happens and it immediately made me think that she was quitting. My head raced towards the actions I'd had to perform in order to fix it if she leaves, pulling my focus away from writing, from filmmaking, from the creative side that I have just so recently untapped and deeply loved.
This all unleashed an appealing and guilty fantasy of just leaving everything and focusing on making movies, while asking myself: what would it take for me to accomplish this without the “distraction” of making money? I took the call and ended up being nothing serious, but the thought remained.

A few hours later, after 4 intense days of shooting and as the last shot was being called out, with everyone around buzzing with excitement from completing what we set out to do, I had only confirmed to myself what I knew all along: I will make a movie.

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Thank you to all the cast and crew of Even in the Light for allowing me to participate in bringing this dream to a reality.

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LOOK OUT FOR:

The time and place to deeply talk about my revered Werner Herzog will come. As will the unpacking of all the learnings in the last days.
For now, I’ll be adding here some insights and observations from being behind the camera:

• On the first day, I mindlessly wore my most colorful t-shirt forgetting it's good etiquette to wear dark, ideally all black, clothes on set, as they don’t bounce or produce a reflection of colors. All good, no one seemed to care amid the chaos of setting everything up.

• Though there has to be someone keeping track of everything that matters. In this case it was the sweet actress Lee Anne, who was the producer on this short, and who I had randomly met in a meetup a few months back where I offered to help out. She'd explain to me certain aspects of filmmaking or add specific facts, knowing I was there to learn. And also just by watching her I would learn so much, the way she kept track of every cent and person, both before and during the shooting, is key for a film to work, and she did an amazing job at it

• Because it is indeed a lot. For a short film that will last around 15 minutes, the amount of lighting equipment, art props, camera, monitors and all the people involved to make it happen is simply outstanding

• On top of that, we were filming in 16mm, an uncommon choice in the almost ubiquitous digital landscape that movies today are made. This added a layer of complexity to the shooting, since literally every second of film counted. We had 4 cans of film which amounted to around 1 hour of filming, or an average of 2 takes per shot. The room for mistakes was small.
  In one of the longest takes, the acting was perfect but they realized afterwards that the Cheerios branding was clearly visible in the box of cereal. A decision had to be made on the spot, between fixing it by expensively blurring it in post-production, or doing a retake and risking running out of enough film to shoot the remainder of the scenes. Through some quick calls to experts outside the set and a few back-and-forth between the direction team, they decided to re-do the take. I was mesmerized while witnessing the whole situation and how professionally they solved it

• Which was a recurring feeling: how professional it all seemed. I don't have a lot of comparison points, but this just felt so top-level from the beginning, like you knew you were working with people that knew exactly what they were doing. I then began confirming this through hearing that most of the crew had worked on top-level productions and with the biggest directors in Mexican cinema

• DIRECTION. I've always pictured that making a movie is like running a startup, and though this experience made me corroborate there are indeed a lot of similarities, the process of shooting the film itself feels more like making an outstanding amount of micro-decisions in a short period of time. From the basics of saying when to start (“Action!”) and cut a shot, to the framing, to deciding if you have what you wanted and can move on to the next one, to the actor being in the correct place or with the correct expression, to the look-and-feel being what you’re looking for, to... It feels like a ship on flames where you have to make quick life-or-death decisions, a thousand times over. How you handle this pressure is where your leadership style kicks in and nothing can hide it.

• LIGHTNING. The lightning crew was extra special. This group of mostly women with such a strong personality and efficiency, and mostly, with the best self-branding I've encountered lately: Amazonas Eléctricas. And I recently found out that a documentary on them just premiered on Sundance.

• ACTING.

  • The protagonist was played by 10-year-old Renata. Her first time acting on any kind of fiction film, I was impressed by her ability to enact the character with such nuance and precision, even during difficult scenes, which the short is filled with. Thankfully the relationship between Valeria and her was the exact opposite than Herzog with Klaus Kinski

  • A tiny thought I had was the importance of what an actor decides to do for the first take of a scene. How they place their hands over one another will forever determine how they have to place them in all subsequent angles of the same take, sort of like Nietzsche's eternal recurrence (haha)

• SOUND.

  • A magical moment (probably only to me) was recording the room tone, a couple of minutes of extreme silence where nobody moves but nervous gazes and uncomfortable smiles are interchanged, allowing the sound engineer to record the sound of the room, which is unique and can later serve to fill in spaces where an unwanted sound bleeds into the scene

  • This would prove important, since la Narvarte is on the airway of the busy airport a couple of neighborhoods away, which at some point they had to time how often the planes would pass (every 40 seconds) to allow for filming in between and avoid the sound bleeding into the recording.

  • It's also in Mexico City, where the sounds from the city are almost impossible to avoid. At one point I had to go out and stop the "Colchooonees..." truck from driving through the street because it was bleeding too much into the recording.

Enjoy!