Greetings friends,
Writing this from my Brooklyn garden, where I am sunning myself and admiring my flowers.
It’s not until Year 3 of any garden I build that it really comes into its full glory, and I’m right on schedule here. There’s one year patience-testing hardscaping and scaffolding as you lay down the (literal!) groundwork. Another year of feverish and obsessive activity: editing, plotting, and a LOT more planting while I work out what’s working and what’s not. Then, in Year 3, I begin to finally see the results.
Each film project I do takes around the same amount of time.
Metaphors be with you.
Relaxing at home in between tour stops!
Next up: TODAY I have yet another encore Q&A at IFC Center, moderated by the wonderful Sam Green. We are held over for a 5th week! Today I’m also doing an intro at New Plaza Cinema for a screening whose Q&A will feature NOT me, but the lovely David Lei and Jacqueline Emery. Later this week, I’ll drive back upstate for a Q&A at the Crandell Theater in Chatham and another one at Community Theater in Catskill.
Today, I find myself reflecting on how much I LOVE doing Q&As, and how much I learn about my own film in the process.
Every film develops its own Frequently Asked Questions.
It’s never exactly what I expect, either.
As I have said before: films are living things.
My proof is how much they surprise the people who birth them, once they are born!
This is one of the weirdest — and most rewarding — things about finishing a movie: I spend years (usually 3) making it, watch hundreds of rough cuts, argue over individual frames and words and musical cues, while processing thousands of pieces of feedback. I get to know the film in a way no other person on this Earth will ever know it. But all of this work is kind of in utero. Once the film is born, it’s ALWAYS like: Oh, hello film, nice to finally meet you!
(Yes, I am aware I have now mixed my metaphors by using both gardening and childbirth — but hey, how else will you know I’m not ChatGPT?)
So! After a month of traveling around with Wild Inside, I have collected the Top 5 Questions audiences are asking, and what trying to answer those questions has made me see differently about my own film. The good, the bad, and — as always — the mildly embarrassing.
Plus: a bonus 6th question that keeps coming up but I still have no idea how to answer, AND a bonus 7th question that should ALWAYS be the first question at every single Q&A. Yes, all of them!!!