30. I worked on my first French film in Paris.
It wasn’t professional by any stretch, but I needed some joy.
Bienvenue to the 30th article in my Medium publication, Inside Me Inside Paris, a work-in-progress memoir about my 2016 deep-dive into Paris & my journey to find my soul amidst the onslaught of depression…
C’est 31 juillet 2016.
I went to Montmartre to meet Geraldine to help her with the short film she wrote and was acting in. If this was LA, I wouldn’t involve myself in something this small, but maybe the experience would be an opportunity to find and build a professional filmmaking community in Paris. As with everything in Paris, I was open to anything and expecting nothing.
Geraldine and I drove to the outskirts of Paris, where I met the director Craig who was playing with a brand new Canon 5D camera, literally right out of the box. The Canon 5D can make anyone feel like a genuine filmmaker because even the shittiest stories at least can look like real movies, which wasn’t the case a few years ago, when it was a feat just to get a digital image look like a legitimate film image. The Canon 5D has democratized filmmaking.
The entire film crew tonight consisted of six people, including me. There was Craig the director, a sound mixer, a make-up artist, Geraldine, her acting partner Sonadie, and me. Two portable pocket lights one could obtain at the French version of Home Depot made up the entire lighting package. We shot at night, mind you, so not sure how two hand lights would be effective enough to light an entire set on a practical location, and certainly not what I’m accustomed to, having been in the professional film industry for over twenty years. But I didn’t care. I was happy to be there and offer my logistical and storytelling expertise any way I could. It was a very amateur shoot — student films in Los Angeles are usually much more elaborate — and a bit disorganized, but I was still intrigued to see these Parisiens excited to make art despite the lack of resources, tools and experience. It was purely about the fun and not outcome-oriented like it is relentlessly in Hollywood. Looking back on my career, I’ve rarely had that kind of laissez faire experience. My filmmaking beginning was a professional studio focus right from the start. I started as a production coordinator on a series of Energizer Bunny commercials and soon after, as a Directors Guild of America trainee, I started working on studio / network shows and have never looked back. I’ve never had a lab or a safe school environment in which I could experiment and just tinker with my creative voice.
I was overly conscious that my work would be regarded as sub-standard, and then I’d have to face the music that I was a shitty creative, and then would be laughed out of town. I was deathly scared about that.
There’s something paradoxical about having access to the top of the rungs in professional filmmaking and learning to be creative from this vantage point. While it was valuable to know straight away how to approach filmmaking from top-notch professional filmmakers, it may have stunted my growth as a creative person. It established such a high bar from the beginning, so when I finally made my first attempts to write scripts or direct films, I unreasonably expected myself to meet the same standards in which I was working professionally as an assistant director.
I found it difficult to show my work, because, well, I wasn’t an official student in an official film school. I was a professional in my own right — maybe not as a creative, but I’ve worked with actors like Johnny Depp and Mel Gibson and Hugh Laurie and Emmy Award winning directors and craftspeople. I found it daunting to show my work to, say, a TV director with whom I worked alongside for many years, but was very well-accomplished and wouldn’t go easy on me. I was overly conscious that my work would be regarded as sub-standard, and then I’d have to face the music that I was a shitty creative, and then would be laughed out of town. I was deathly scared about that.
To exacerbate the pressure — making films takes a lot of resources — money and people and locations and costumes and make-up and hair styling and equipment rentals and editing and props and food to feed people, so whenever one embarks on a project, it’s a big fucking deal, every time. Not to mention the effect of seeing my bank account dwindle and the crushing realization that I didn’t get a good return on my investment. It’s difficult to have fun and experiment with this mindset because instead of having fun just trying stuff, I incessantly second guessed myself. All of this wreaked havoc on my creative growth and evolution, and as such I don’t have a large body of work. I walk around everyday feeling like a failure.
I wish I could be kinder to myself or to huddle in some lab or to go to the filmmaking version of Bruce Wayne heading over to the Himalayas to hone his craft before coming back to Gotham City to fight crime.
Greg’s short film — technically my first French film — probably isn’t going to be very good, but the spirit of it all, the willingness to just go for it, the simplicity of the shoot, the fun everyone is having without having to bear the burden that this thing is going to make everyone famous or rich — I want to be a part of that simple joy and hold on to this new feeling for a little while.
Thank you very much for reading this memoir I’m workshopping. Looking for publishers! I’m a writer/photographer based in Burbank, California. Some of my work is visible on my Instagram.
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