Losing everything

Ok, the trains are delayed this evening so I'm using it as an excuse to have some beef noodles, a pint and to wax lyrical on risk.

I've been thinking about a comment a mystery contributor made to an earlier post. They said that being honest in this blog was brave and that if they did the same they'd likely lose what backing and financial support they had managed to drum up.

I remember watching a program years ago about a short film director who couldn't make the leap to feature films. Nobody would finance him, everyone told him his ideas were great but nobody would put their money where their mouths were. So he convinces himself there must be some trick, some technique to finding funding that he's missing. He went to a Hollywood producer to find out what it was and to get advice.

The Hollywood producer gave him short shrift. 'You want to get into feature film production?' He said. 'then make a feature length film.' And that was that, that was his advice. That had a profound effect on me. In order to get into the business of making films you have to first be in the business of making films.

For that film producer there were absolutely no barriers to stop someone from making a film. Just excuses. I believe in that totally and I think that digital camera technology has made that possible. I think now anybody can make a film with no money, no financial support. If you can't then its because you haven't figured out how to marry your ambitions to your reality. I'm not saying that looking for money is wrong, or undesirable. But its no longer the only way. People will work for free if they believe in the project. You have to create a story that people believe in. The rest is logistics.
Which brings me back to the comment about being brave. The truth is I can afford to be brave because I'm in the wonderful position of having nothing to lose. I'm treating this film as my calling card, I have no ambitions for distribution although it would be nice. I'm making a film to show what I can achieve with no money.  And I have absolute confidence in my ability to produce something from nothing. And hopefully that will lead to bigger and better things. I have nothing to lose and everything to gain from my honesty.

I may piss some people off along the way. But I'll try not to. I promise not to be mean, or spiteful, I won't go out of my way to say hurtful things because its not in my nature. But I will tell the truth in the interests of making progress.

However, that doesn't apply to any judges who have failed to shortlist my short films for competitions in the past. I hate you with an indescribable passion, and if I find out where you live I will burn your houses to the ground.

Later gaterz.