How to make a doc (P.5.4)

Behind the scenes tensions were running pretty high at the start of this year.

I was six months into a film and only felt good about one of the three Lear scenes, and I was completely unhappy with all of the interviews I had conducted up to this point. This was a very difficult, and frustrating time because I could feel the weight of the project on my shoulders, but had little idea what the project was about.

It was only after some serious soul searching, and a lot of e-mails back-and-forth between the cast members and myself that I started to get a sense about the real life characters in this movie. Their stories were variations of the Lear story. I was floored by this.

Perhaps the life lesson I have learned from this entire project is the importance of listening. I believe you have to listen to a story (about a hundred times) before you can tell the story like it's your own.

At the moment the project became a film about people -- people who happen to be play-acting King Lear as we enter their lives -- that was when the film found it's story.

The next task, for me, was to convince the Executive Producer of the film that this was the right path to follow.

The following e-mail was his response:



January 20, 2008

Chris and Stu,

After our talk on Thursday and reading through everything, I think we’re now on the same page. As I understand the current concept of the film, it focuses on a group of actors (i.e., Peg, Adrian, Stu, and Sara Jane) who are dealing with issues of aging (or ill) parents while exploring Shakespeare’s vision of aging and family in King Lear. The explicit theme of the film will be to suggest that Shakespeare’s insights have value and relevance in our world by offering us a safe way to talk about issues that profoundly concern us. The more we understand Lear and his daughters, the better we can understand ourselves.

Implicitly, the film will show that as the actors get to know each other better and understand Lear better, they do a better job in bringing the scenes to life. Thus, the second scene is far more powerful than the first and the third (ideally) even better.

While the three scenes offer an obvious structure for a three-part film, I think the key issue now is to identify the scenes that show progression. For example, would seeing Peg taking care of her father be strong at the beginning and seeing him giving her away at the wedding near the end be the direction (i.e., beginning with the challenges and moving towards the underlying affection)?

I believe a film like this will be better as a film than the one we originally planned. But the two clear constraints are that we devoted most of the budget to filming the first and we still need to make the final product something which can be used by various groups as a tool in discussing aging in America.

Socky