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Sydney Morning Herald , Australia
July 30 2011
>From gestation to realisation, lessons of a novice film-maker
by Dani Valent
The creation of Here, a road movie, was something of a road movie itself.
TEN years after I started writing Here with New York filmmaker Braden
King, I arrived on set in Armenia: a puddled driveway, a crumble-down
hotel, a gleaming church backed by a shy rainbow. As I was introduced
to the 40-person crew, the script supervisor, Gaby Yepes, hid the
script from me. ''You don't want to see this,'' she said, letting long
hair fall over her clipboard. ''There's red pen all over it.''
Her job was to record what happened as the film was filmed.
The script, the document that I knew intimately, every comma, every
nuance sweated over, was victim to reality: actors changed lines,
night fell so shots were rethought, sheep didn't dart across the road
the way they were supposed to. I could have felt devastated,
protective, outraged at the licence being taken (naughty sheep!), but
I felt excited: how amazing to create a template for all this
activity, close attention and each clapperboard call of ''Action''.
Later that day we drove to a field where lead actor Ben Foster put on
a yellow raincoat, picked up a surveyor's tripod and became Will
Shepard, the cartographer we created on the page years before.
''There's our guy,'' I said to Braden, marvelling at the magic of the
process: we wrote him and there he is, walking around, being real.
What seemed less real was the scene around me. There was our lead
actress, Lubna Azabal, having make-up applied on a stool in a paddock.
Standing in the long grass like an apparition was a high-ranking
priest, a beatific black-robed minder assigned to the production by
the Armenian Orthodox Church.
Around us, pale mountains drew a jagged horizon, a backdrop for tiny
Armenian hamlets where history and ruin are written in the buildings
and roads and in the faces of the villagers with their donkeys,
sunflowers and doughty Lada cars.
Here is a road movie and a love story about an American cartographer
and an Armenian expatriate photographer. But Braden and I didn't start
thinking of it like that. We met in 1999 while I was working in New
York travel writing for Lonely Planet. We got to talking at a party,
discovered a mutual obsession with maps, threw bits of narrative at
each other and they stuck. We ran out, found a bar, started writing on
napkins (just like in the movies!), and when I came home to Melbourne
we continued by email and phone.
A bit later - diverted by babies, years and a million words of
journalism - we had a script.
Early in the process I warned Braden that I wasn't a real filmmaker
like he was, scarcely knew my crossfades from my jumpcuts, and hadn't
updated my favourite film since Wings of Desire in 1989. He told me to
shut up heaps of times but that feeling persisted.
In 2007, we took the script to the Sundance Institute Screenwriters
Lab, an intensive workshop that matches writers with industry mentors.
I flew to the wildflower-dotted mountains of Utah, anxious that I'd
walk into conversations that I wouldn't understand. And, in fact, that
did happen, and I stamped the ground looking for a hole to swallow me.
What also occurred were meetings with smart and accomplished
filmmakers (Atom Egoyan, Walter Mosley, Susan Shilliday, Howard
Rodman, John August and Gyula Gazdag) who asked difficult, energising
questions about the world we'd created with our writing.
Octogenarian screenwriter, the gracious and penetrating Stewart Stern
(he wrote Rebel Without a Cause), led an automatic writing session
that sent my hand racing across the page and my mind traipsing into
the mountains. We were asked to write what our films were really
about. In a scrawl I wrote about ''layers of meaning, darkness
unwrapping itself into expansion, understanding that things sometimes
need to change, truth as conjecture ...'' Later, I walked in the hills
until I was lost, coming upon a deer dismembered by a mountain lion. I
let myself own the notion of being a screenwriter, at least for now.
Most of the writing I do involves me in a room. I write, I press
''send'', it gets published. It's clean. Filmmaking is incredibly
unwieldy and difficult. We wrote, we pressed send (and send and send)
and after years of work by lots of people, mostly by the director,
Braden King, there's a two-hour film. It's called Here, the script is
covered in red pen, and it's about a man, a woman, maps, travel and
truth as conjecture.
Here screens on Wednesday at 6.30pm and Saturday at 4pm. Dani Valent
and Braden King will participate in a Q&A at both sessions. See
miff.com.au.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/editorial/from-gestation-to-realisation-lessons-of-a-novice-filmmaker-20110730-1i5e3.html
July 30 2011
>From gestation to realisation, lessons of a novice film-maker
by Dani Valent
The creation of Here, a road movie, was something of a road movie itself.
TEN years after I started writing Here with New York filmmaker Braden
King, I arrived on set in Armenia: a puddled driveway, a crumble-down
hotel, a gleaming church backed by a shy rainbow. As I was introduced
to the 40-person crew, the script supervisor, Gaby Yepes, hid the
script from me. ''You don't want to see this,'' she said, letting long
hair fall over her clipboard. ''There's red pen all over it.''
Her job was to record what happened as the film was filmed.
The script, the document that I knew intimately, every comma, every
nuance sweated over, was victim to reality: actors changed lines,
night fell so shots were rethought, sheep didn't dart across the road
the way they were supposed to. I could have felt devastated,
protective, outraged at the licence being taken (naughty sheep!), but
I felt excited: how amazing to create a template for all this
activity, close attention and each clapperboard call of ''Action''.
Later that day we drove to a field where lead actor Ben Foster put on
a yellow raincoat, picked up a surveyor's tripod and became Will
Shepard, the cartographer we created on the page years before.
''There's our guy,'' I said to Braden, marvelling at the magic of the
process: we wrote him and there he is, walking around, being real.
What seemed less real was the scene around me. There was our lead
actress, Lubna Azabal, having make-up applied on a stool in a paddock.
Standing in the long grass like an apparition was a high-ranking
priest, a beatific black-robed minder assigned to the production by
the Armenian Orthodox Church.
Around us, pale mountains drew a jagged horizon, a backdrop for tiny
Armenian hamlets where history and ruin are written in the buildings
and roads and in the faces of the villagers with their donkeys,
sunflowers and doughty Lada cars.
Here is a road movie and a love story about an American cartographer
and an Armenian expatriate photographer. But Braden and I didn't start
thinking of it like that. We met in 1999 while I was working in New
York travel writing for Lonely Planet. We got to talking at a party,
discovered a mutual obsession with maps, threw bits of narrative at
each other and they stuck. We ran out, found a bar, started writing on
napkins (just like in the movies!), and when I came home to Melbourne
we continued by email and phone.
A bit later - diverted by babies, years and a million words of
journalism - we had a script.
Early in the process I warned Braden that I wasn't a real filmmaker
like he was, scarcely knew my crossfades from my jumpcuts, and hadn't
updated my favourite film since Wings of Desire in 1989. He told me to
shut up heaps of times but that feeling persisted.
In 2007, we took the script to the Sundance Institute Screenwriters
Lab, an intensive workshop that matches writers with industry mentors.
I flew to the wildflower-dotted mountains of Utah, anxious that I'd
walk into conversations that I wouldn't understand. And, in fact, that
did happen, and I stamped the ground looking for a hole to swallow me.
What also occurred were meetings with smart and accomplished
filmmakers (Atom Egoyan, Walter Mosley, Susan Shilliday, Howard
Rodman, John August and Gyula Gazdag) who asked difficult, energising
questions about the world we'd created with our writing.
Octogenarian screenwriter, the gracious and penetrating Stewart Stern
(he wrote Rebel Without a Cause), led an automatic writing session
that sent my hand racing across the page and my mind traipsing into
the mountains. We were asked to write what our films were really
about. In a scrawl I wrote about ''layers of meaning, darkness
unwrapping itself into expansion, understanding that things sometimes
need to change, truth as conjecture ...'' Later, I walked in the hills
until I was lost, coming upon a deer dismembered by a mountain lion. I
let myself own the notion of being a screenwriter, at least for now.
Most of the writing I do involves me in a room. I write, I press
''send'', it gets published. It's clean. Filmmaking is incredibly
unwieldy and difficult. We wrote, we pressed send (and send and send)
and after years of work by lots of people, mostly by the director,
Braden King, there's a two-hour film. It's called Here, the script is
covered in red pen, and it's about a man, a woman, maps, travel and
truth as conjecture.
Here screens on Wednesday at 6.30pm and Saturday at 4pm. Dani Valent
and Braden King will participate in a Q&A at both sessions. See
miff.com.au.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/editorial/from-gestation-to-realisation-lessons-of-a-novice-filmmaker-20110730-1i5e3.html