Action-Thriller

Action-thriller is my genre. I’m working on a new movie now. I’m feeling that familiar tingly thrill I always get at the beginning, the moment when I know I’ve got it.

I spent over an hour talking to the producer on the phone about it yesterday.

“Where are you?”

“Lying on my bed.”

I told him I had been at a cafe where we had once had breakfast but I had walked home because I didn’t want to be distracted by noise on the call.

“You don’t want a bunch of screenwriters overhearing you pitch our movie?”

“Well, see, that’s the point. That place IS full of screenwriters, but they wouldn’t bother listening to me. Because I don’t look like a threat to them.”

I had walked home for the call down the Venice Boardwalk — ocean and tourists and street performers and homeless streaming past me as my thoughts bounced between another producer call from that morning and the pitch I had been working on that afternoon at the cafe and trying to focus my thoughts for this call — what should this movie be? How should it feel? What, of everything I have to say, do I want to say in this one? I felt like George Clooney in the back of the cab at the end of Michael Clayton. The world streaming past me and my thoughts streaming past with it.

Sometimes I feel like my default state is overwhelmed.

Action-thriller. Action: doing. Thriller: caring.

We circled closer to the movie on the call, then he told me to think about it.

I went across the street for a swim.

As I walked back up the boardwalk — soaking wet, shaking with cold, covered with sand — strangers stared at me. I thought

This is what it would feel like to do an action sequence in a crowded public space. You would look weird and brutalized. You would look the way you feel. Tourists would stare at you.

But the action is only one half of the equation. That’s the doing. There is also the thriller. The caring.

I received a phone call today. Now I have the whole movie. The doing and the caring. He doesn’t know yet.