Drilling Deeper

I was at the cafe today listening to kundalini chants trying to answer the following questions from my producer on my action thriller movie:

In one sentence — who is this character, why do we care?

I was really sweating these questions.

I had already jotted off a note to him — I can feel this movie, and that’s what matters to me as an artist. But I do understand his need to be able to convey it, so I was sitting there thinking hard about how to clarify the answers.

It’s not that I don’t know the answers.

With everything I write, I traffic in complexity. The art is in the distillation of complexity. The hat trick is in displaying the distillation so smoothly and efficiently — setting up the dominoes in such a way — the audience truly believes they had the idea to knock them down.

I know the answers to these questions —

But my movies get really big — beneath the surface — before they can be contained in one sentence.

So I was sitting at the community table sweating. Drinking a coffee colada (iced coffee with coconut cream) that was also sweating from the fact that it’s always muggy in this place, a cafe that’s basically an open-air garage.

I was listening to chants, crawling out of my skin, trying to push myself emotionally to that bigger-then-smaller place.

Just describe the underwater portion of the iceberg in one sentence.

I considered taking a walk even though I had already walked to the cafe. I considered lying on the ground with my legs up the wall. My journal was lying next to me on the table as it often is. I decided to read the last week of pages, to see what my self has been telling me.

So often I find that a question asked on one side of my life gets answered on another.

As I was reading my journal — a mix of left-hand writing after meditating hanging upside-down and morning pages and other random notes and questions and to-do’s, a friend called. The first thing I said was “I can’t really talk, I’m working.” Then I paced behind the cafe while we talked for thirty-five minutes.

Side characters answering main questions is what writers call “theme.”

I had left my friend a message yesterday telling her about my jealousy and bad feelings about male writers. She works in the industry in a different job, and she talked about how she has all the same feelings. How she has agonized over how no one’s time is valued less than a single woman (even coupled women’s time is valued higher if they are attached to men), how the men she works with all have women at home to make their lives work for them so they can get ahead at work. How their paths are smoothed and made easier for them in infinite ways that are often invisible to them.

This isn’t what my movie is about but being able to share such raw, ugly feelings with a friend who mirrored them back — who saw me and made me feel like no matter what I feel I’m ok for feeling it — that is intimacy and intimacy is dangerous. Dangerous is what my movie is about.

I got an email from my producer while we were talking that read just “how’s it coming?”

After I hung up I wrote him the one sentence he was looking for. But I also wrote him another paragraph, drilling deeper into the layers and metaphors and complexity I see in this movie.

I walked home. I swam in the ocean. I did my kundalini chant on the beach, drilling deeper and deeper, shivering wet as the sun set behind the Santa Monica Mountains and strangers stared at the incantation of something otherworldly.