Sunday, July 26, 2009

I hate film shoots

I love movies. Everyone knows that. I consider myself a filmmaker and I like to think that all of you know that, too. I just got home from a two day shoot and I'm exhausted. Like every other shoot in history of film, a lot of shit went wrong. I don't know why this always happens but for some reason it's just never easy. The apartment we were in was sweltering hot and the lights made it worst. Most of our actors went AWOL and nearly every shot took longer than expected.

Don't get me wrong. I'm most certainly not bitching. Why? Well, because this seems to happen on every shoot I have ever done. Maybe it says something about me as a filmmaker, maybe it says something about filmmaking in general but I accept that it's hard and that shooting sucks. 

Yes, you heard me. I said shooting sucks. 

See, somewhere between sweating off the last 20 pounds I gained this summer and trying to find a misplaced Shotgun mic I had a conversation with a few people on set. I realized I have never said this out loud to anyone and that most artists and filmmakers would be upset to hear this.

Frankly, I don't enjoy shooting. I love coming up with a film, I love writing it, I love planning it, I love editing it, I love showing it and I love talking about it but I really, really do not enjoy actually making it. I only make it so I can enjoy doing all of the other steps. 

Does that make me a bad filmmaker?

I don't think so. I think it just makes me an honest one. 

More importantly, I had a breakthrough as to what sort of films I want to make over the past few days. All I can say is tomorrow I'm going to go on a Maysles binge. More on that later.

4 comments:

Carlos Galarza said...

Theres nothing wrong with that, man. It takes a very hardworking group of people to make a film set fun. Every single person not only has to know what they're doing exactly but want to do it. And these film hobbies doesn't create that atmosphere. Also as someone who has stress problems, film making is a horrible event for you to partake in.

Emily said...

Maybe you are destined to be an editor/designer, not an on the set person. Nothing wrong with that and there is usually air conditioning in edit suites.

daniel said...

ya know ben's working for maysles?

LudwigLongPlay said...

you know whats funny, ive decided the same thing with music.

producers are cooler anyways.