A creative response to the times.
Chapter 20: What do you make when you're in the middle of it all?
First off, apologies.
This post is being written, and going up, a day late. My aim was to put a piece up every Friday. Unfortunately there’s writing, and there’s life, and sometimes the schedules clash.
But that’s okay. Or you have to find a way to make it okay.
Looking back, that’s what a lot of The Lockdowns of 2020 were like. All our pre-existing, pre-imagined, life schedules clashed with The Pandemic. And we had to find a way to make it okay.
Even when it wasn’t okay.
My way was to make stuff.
Creating 20 films in 20 weeks gave me a purpose. It gave me a creative outlet. And it gave me some kind of agency in a world where everything seemed to be out of our control.
And as I continued to work, to write scripts, to work with actors, to produce films, a thought kept recurring to me.
This was an opportunity.
Or it was a collection of opportunities all wrapped-up in one stupid, overly ambitious project.
There was the opportunity to create characters. There was the opportunity to learn how to work with actors. There was the opportunity to figure out how to use the tech. And there was the opportunity to see just what I was capable of.
But there was also one other opportunity.
And maybe this one would be the one that would be the most valuable in the years to come. Because what I figured out was that I had the chance to create a body of work that, in part, responded to these unprecedented times, during these unprecedented times.
I had the chance to grab what I could from the chaos, and create.
No doubt in years to come people will create work that reflects on The Pandemic. And no doubt a lot of it will be excellent. But it will be retrospective.
My films, whether good or bad, were a response to the here and now.
If I were to write many of the scripts today, they would be different. Because the world is different today. And so am I.
There is an edge in many of the films that is absolutely a product of the times. I think the edge was something to do with fear. Or more accurately, a response to the fear that underlay so much of life in 2020.
In 2020 there was no vaccine. And, apparently, it might take years to develop one. So fear didn’t seem an unreasonable response to where we were.
My response was to make films.
Films informed by the world we were living in.
Here’s the next film. It’s called ‘Curving The Run’ and it features Nicole Miners. I wanted to work with her because I saw a short film she was in, set in a library I think, and in it there is one moment where she reacts to something that is said to her, and there is a look in her eyes that conveys a whole world of thought.
I thought she had something.
Quite how much she had I didn’t really understand until she sent me the final take of ‘Curving The Run’. It’s outstanding. And so is she.
Coming next Friday: A Walk In The Park.
But first here’s the brilliant Nicole Miners in ‘Curving the Run’: