rejection

Another day, another rejection. This iteration from a film festival rejecting my feature film the black sea. So empty and meaningless on the one hand and so impossibly hard to take on the other. Backstory: I've been directing in earnest for about 5 years. Made several shorts and a feature and received exclusively rejection from festivals. This followed 7 years in Los Angeles during and after film school, peddling spec screenplays that never found takers so there is a history here, a pattern of NO. My natural internal response is to build a narrative made of equations, if this then thats, something to the order of my screenplay rejected = my screenplay sucks; my short film rejected = my short film must be terrible; my feature film rejected = my feature film was ill-advised and I should have hung it up years ago and now I'll just be left w/ the crushing financial debt of making the film as an endless reminder of my talentlessness. The longer I continue, the more calcified this narrative becomes, the more definitive, a self-serving poisonous loop reinforcing its own existence. The problem with these equations are the factors they omit - the particulars of the spec screenplay marketplace, the variables and machinery of film festivals, the artistic aim/intent of my projects fitting into some digestible, commercial construct - and the reduction of these complex omissions into a yes/no couplet that ties directly to my infantile need for approbation (which should not factor in to artmaking but which invariably is a drive for some, okay, for me.)

Let me re-iterate some basic points I've made before, primarily for my benefit:

1) I did not make 'the black sea' to find commercial success, I made it because I had to tell/expell the film. (note: I am not rejecting commercial success here b/c I'd love some)
2) Acceptance in a film festival is not the same as making a good film.
3) Rejection is a vital component of any artistic enterprise
4) Remember this lojong in perpetual, eternal white flashing loops:
Don't Expect Applause.
5) On to the next one.
6) when in doubt see 4 and 5
7) Film history is rife with films that were scorned/ignored at release but that time has been kind to. Is the value diminished? Better yet should the value be tethered to audience response/interaction at all?
8) the artist is fed her/his own equation across a lifetime, both in and out of artistic pursuit: hard work = reward. if this then that. if you pour yourself into your work, if you slave and scrimp and sacrifice and sweat then it will all be worth it. If you just write one more spec then that will be the one. If you make short films then that will lead to great things. If you just make a feature then you will be in a different place. If you work hard then it will pay off. I submit that this is still true (perhaps evidence of my mania) but the definition of 'pay off' has morphed and mutated over the years, into something like #9
9) the work is the reward is the work is the reward is the work is the reward is the work is the reward is the work is the reward is the work is the reward is the work is the reward is the reward is the reward is the work
10) Don't Expect Applause.

63 eye-blinks

I have been surprisingly flattened by the news of Robin Williams' death. The particulars yes are horrible and dark but the mere fact of him not existing any longer is what caught me off guard. I did not revere him per se or track or follow him or hold him in some high celebrity esteem. But what I've learned in 24 hours or so after I discovered he died is that he occupied a bigger place than I knew. I ache with his passing and I cannot figure out why or better put, I cannot articulate why. There is something in here about a collective mourning, something about my (our) own mortality reflected back to me, something about my memory of seeing DPS at Perimeter Mall in Summer 89 - 25 yrs - with Carmen and Amy and Will (who was visiting from Charlotte) and me absolutely losing it in the "O Captain My Captain' scene, something about cinema when it functions as intended on a deeper, molecular plane where things - ideas, emotions, people - are fixed and inviolable like air, planets, stars, and lastly something about how all this - good, bad and in-between, has a shelf-life. Sixty-three eyeblinks. Not so different or far from my forty-two eyblinks. Not so far from the twenty-five eyeblinks ago where I am sitting in the dark in Atlanta with my friends, watching Robin W on screen. I don't know what it means or how to source this sadness. All I can say definitively is that I am unspeakably sad and that I and we are the poorer for his absence.

exciting news via Portland Film Fest

Portland writer/directors @brian_padian & @AABlatt both are finalists in the screenplay contest. Live reading 8/29 2:30PM @prophotosupply

— Portland Film Fest (@portlandfilm) August 7, 2014

honored to be panelist at @portlandfilm panel 8/27 on Screenwriting & Indpt filmmaking. 730pm. http://t.co/gUQX5hqLaC

— Brian Padian (@brian_padian) August 7, 2014

podcast

Honored to be here ! RT @needmore: Now #OnTheJob, @brian_padian of @TheBlackSeaFilm fame. http://t.co/LY5rDfREb3 pic.twitter.com/kmhmagRdvM
— the black sea movie (@TheBlackSeaFilm) August 1, 2014

I appeared on the great podcast The Job recently, talking about the black sea movie and a bit of my life in Portland and Los Angeles and here and there. I am not a fan of listening to myself talk (despite my wife's contrary opinion) so I have trouble hearing it but I know I am not alone in issues of self-regard. Check it out and let me know what you think

day job merits

I am not lucky enough to have a trust fund or a pool of cash. I am not fortunate enough to laze around all day musing about films I'm going to see, ponder, make. There are bills. There are kids. Sometimes one hears that the pursuit of lofty creative goals requires diving full in, leaving behind the constraints of daily life, and rising seemingly automatically to the station of fully-formed artist by virtue of doing so. But I've met people without day jobs or kids who aren't necessarily any more productive. (And yes some who are.) A day job gives me money and health insurance - vital w/ my backstory -  but also a structure, a rock to push off from, and at times to rally against, to urge me forward creatively. Its merit lays in its implicit artlessness.

My day job has zero to do with my creative pursuits. I have an MFA in Screenwriting but I don't want to pursue teaching*. For me a day job that is related even partially to filmmaking is a trap, just close enough to what I want to do to get me stuck, to trick myself into thinking I'm doing the thing I want to do or that it somehow feeds/serves the thing I want to do but ignoring the massive time/energy demands of doing so. I don't want to teach. I don't want to make videos or commercials. I don't want to read other people's screenplays and/or guide them through a series of screenplay principles that won't necessarily impact their ability to find marketplace success. I only want to write and direct feature films. Thus far I've managed one, the black sea.

Has day job impacted my ability to put projects together? Possibly but I need it. Or at least I have up til now. It gives a rudder to propel me away from listless ocean dead zone where nothing at all would get done. Given the opportunity to do it over I would probably do the same thing.

As such I am very interested in reading how others navigate these waters. I mean, I have always been drawn to the mundane elements of the artist's daily life - negotiating bad relationships, buying groceries, paying bills, standing in line - all the seemingly meaningless tasks and endeavors that one presumes don't concern the artist. [Undergirding this is a question I haven't been able to confirm: is it possible to be a good person in life and in art or is it either/or?]

related:
this piece from Filmmaker magazine
this interview with w/ actor and filmmaker Rebecca De Ornelas

*Note: this is only for me. Plenty of people are able to teach and do their creative work with no repercussion.

yes, this

Linklater // On Cinema & Time from kogonada on Vimeo.

Huge fan of R. Linklater and nearly his entire body of work. So very excited to see Boyhood in a short time. This will do in the interim.

"...a bridge to be traversed later..."

Been digging through some old journals recently, not merely for nostalgia's sake (though I admit to having a kryptonite-like weakness for such) but for a future film project (or more specifically to aid with the rewriting of a screenplay for a future film project.) Said future movie is set in college and features characters based on some I've known, some I've been, all with the requisite amount of self-concern appropriate to that age. I was both entertained and shocked at my pages - a document of booze, coupling, aspiration, bad jobs, academia, malaise in a small college town in Northern California in the early to mid 90s - at how it captured what I was doing but also what I was feeling/thinking and primarily consumed with: getting over seismic heartbreak and navigating through new people and scenarios with a profound level of self-consumption, self-aggrandizement, self, self, self, self, self.

My opinion of my own (past) self and where I was headed and what I would do is both funny and sad from this current viewpoint, looking backwards 20 odd years, watching steam and vapor trails and abstractions of my (imagined) self coalescing, settling, and hardening even though the me of then thought I was further along and more finished than the me of now does. My behavior in several instances was not laudable - I'll spare the details - but driven by what I can only classify as a sick sort of entitlement. Who the hell did I think I was? I kept asking as I read. And then my eyes fell upon this passage, a ripple of prescience:

which says, if you can't decode my scribbling:

"It's quite conceivable that I'll look back upon 
this portion of my life, many years from now, and find myself sickened at my self-involvement. Alas, a bridge to be traversed later." 

Well BP, I'm traversing that bridge now. (Though does a person excoriating themselves for being too self-involved on their own self-involved blog mean anything?) Here I am. There you are and here I am. Don't get me too wrong, this is all wonderful for the sake of the future movie - which will share some things in common with this person/place I once was - but I do wish it didn't come bundled with shame, regret, misgivings, error, misstep. And so on. And so on. And so on.