Thursday, April 9, 2009

Director’s notes

[I need to write these for the festivals]

Cryptopticon came to me as a dream.

Another story was before me – cryptology loomed large – lots of research and material was there - yet I couldn’t get a sense of the frame of the story, or a handle on what was the story moving towards.

I felt and intuited that it was a thriller – a mystery that needed to be solved - but wasn’t sure what was at stake if we didn’t solve the mystery and who was the character that made it all happen – anyway, it wasn’t working.

I’ve just realised that I started writing about the film from writer’s angle: story and narrative issues – when the title of this is in fact Director’s notes. As it will become apparent the two are intermingled in my mind. Above all because writing screenplays for me is a visual emotional effort at first which is then translated into a logical one of sequences and scenes.

As an aside I’m writing this blog entry because several film festivals expect to have a director’s statement about the film – which I think is okay from a press/media release angle and a necessary marketing tool - but it is artistically distant from film making – I make films to give light to inner emotions and mental images – if I could capture all in words – no need for the camera is there? But I repeat myself – I think I’ve said this before in an earlier post.

So I dreamt it all. The whole story from beginning to end came to me early one morning – that was a very happy day – I’ve had this kind of epiphanies before – but mostly for a single scene or sequence - never for a whole film…

And then it became obvious that what I wanted to do was make a film that had strong abstract elements – that it wasn’t clear-cut what was happening and how – and that each viewer would take away what they wanted from the film.

Suffice to say that some people who read the screenplay – would complain – “I didn’t get it.”

Well, as in any abstract painting - you get out what you put into it – this wasn’t a film with a definitive moralistic statement or closed loop narrative – rather an Alice-in-Wonderland psychedelic journey for the spectator.

With this in mind then as a director I wanted to delve into what is the best way to capture this hallucinogenic story?

In camera is the answer.

Indeed, this story can only be told with a camera – a theatrical representation of the same action – would have none of the impact or subtleties of the film – which for me is a good test of cinematic potential.

The idea was that this was routine gone wrong – with a thousand eyes looking onto the setting – a thousand cameras.

So my directorial ambitions were simple. Bring to light what had only happened in my mind’s eye.

I believe it worked: script and direction melding into a rollercoaster of broken emotions and chilly thrills.

Qui vivra, verra…

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