My Time as a Human

It had been a long time since I had been around old school guy guys. Despite the amount of time spent discussing sex around my house, it’s usually in mixed company and of a certain flavor. I climbed into the van full of filmmakers and they paused long enough to say hello before launching back into the continuous outpouring of raunchy patter and boob jokes that had already been in full force. To his credit David did turn to me and say, “oh, right, I probably should have warned you.” By the end of the night, as we left our first dinner together, I found myself in a group hug with this same crew, talking about opening our hearts to the experience before us and giving Jef the space and support to be truly vulnerable. Somewhere in this mix, this seeming dichotomy, was the essence of our next few weeks of filmmaking.

The idea was to create a film that was a mixture of storyboarded narrative, documentary style interactions and improvisations. The structure from which the film hung was that “David” (the character) had just turned thirty and was writing a letter to himself on his deathbed. Knowing that this future self must have worked his way through the existential crisis he was now facing, he continually asks questions and describes his process as he surfs along on borrowed couches, pull out beds and floors through Portland and Seattle where the stories that shaped him once played out.

In practice, this meant that we had a thin skeleton of a film and a whole lot of space that might, through the act of placing ourselves into the hands of god and the universe, be filled with amazing moments. Or go nowhere. We frequently made reference to the moment in Hearts of Darkness, a documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, where the film has degenerated into a slow slog upriver through the jungle and the cast and crew are given daily shot lists containing only the words, “scenes unknown”.

We did have a daily list of locations and people for our lead actor, Jef, to interact with. Many were people with incredible stories about spiritual awakenings, tragic war stories, or personal loss, like a man who’d lost his twin baby girls just weeks after they were born. Others were representative characters from David’s personal history. Having just watched, Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman’s latest ultra-meta film, I was well primed to enjoy the beauty of watching Jef, the actor, playing “David”, the character, based on David, the writer/director, who sat watching as Jef kissed David’s former crushes and ex-girlfriends, who were often playing the roles of other, different ex-girlfriends from David’s past. Most of the people Jef was to interact with were non-actors and so through their interactions, they would ask questions probing into who he (David, the character) was. This would prompt Jef to improvise and feel out the character that was emerging, and occasionally ask David (the director) to give him a story or talk about how he would respond to a given situation.

While I (and many others) originally questioned why it was that David didn’t simply play himself in this journey, it quickly became clear that he had made the right choice. Jef was unburdened by David’s ideas about what he could and couldn’t discuss with the people who had great personal weight in his life. There was also room for David himself to step back from the situation and see the interactions in a new light, as well as have enough distance to make decisions about what to cut and where to dive in deeper.

To Be Continued…

Next Episode: It Begins!

I rarely remember to sit down while I’m eating, and this morning was no exception as I wandered the house munching a bowl of fresh oatmeal, almonds, and bananas. As I strolled into my bedroom I saw, as though for the first time, a stack of CD cases that had been stashed under an end table for years. They’d been left there “temporarily” by some wandering buddy or ex-girlfriend so long ago that they belonged to the bookshelf, or the world, more than either of us. They were clearly waiting for their chance to have meaning again.

I wandered over, eyed them for a moment, and then tipped out a random case with my thumb, grabbed it, and held it up. It was a John Prine collection. Now I know someone reading this is thinking to themselves, “ah HA! That’s where it’s been you son of a…” and, very likely, their initials are those scrawled in blue sharpie across the front: “CAS”. What grabbed me was not that this had been there so long that I’d forgotten who CAS was, but rather that suddenly, for little reason at all, I was standing with a two disc collection of John Prine tunes in my hand.

About ten years ago I began my first feature documentary project, joining director Kevin Triplett on what turned out to be an epic journey that I’m told is, no really, actually nearing completion this very day. This project about the itinerant musician Blaze Foley has shaped my life in a way that no other project ever has. It kept me in the U.S. several times when I would have otherwise fled. I met countless incredible people as we tore through Texas, Colorado, Louisiana, Georgia and more to visit cockfighting farms, dilapidated trailers, mansions, and hippie communes. At least one marriage formed because of this project. People we’ve spoken with, or wanted to, have died. One day I’ll sit down to write out my own “making of” story, but suffice it to say that it’s been a huge part of my life.

Despite all of this, I had never actually sat down to listen to John Prine, one of Blaze’s idols. And yet here it was before me, my thumb leaving a print in the thick dust, clearly containing some kind of powerful message that was waiting for just this moment to emerge. I handed one CD to my laptop to consume for later ambulatory listening, and put the other onto the waiting tongue of my old black CD player. The room filled with John Prine’s voice.

I listened, eagerly waiting to see if this was the song. It was about a little boy being sent away to work on a film project tour. Apt. But it didn’t ring with me. I tried another. It was a terribly banal collection of rhymes that didn’t have enough to say. Click. Click. I pulled out disk two and dropped that in. I immediately skipped to song seven. In my experience, one, five and seven are the ones to hit first. Sadly, nothing, and in fact my old loathing of the sound of country music began to stir again within me as his sound got twangier and the lyrics refused to engage and sooth or inspire me past the sound. I stabbed the eject button with disappointment and my CD player stuck his tongue out at me again.

It took me a few minutes, but eventually I caught the lesson of the moment. I keep my life so full that it is overwhelmingly rich with magical moments of synchronicity. I long ago gave up caring whether a god, gods, a muse, statistics or my own brain, trained so well from years of literature study, created these moments. But I had come to expect them. I had come to expect them so much so that I was now disappointed when a moment so thick with possibility failed to give up the goods.

It was then that I realized that, ironically, I had just imparted this realization in a phone call before going to bed the night before. There was a guy I used to live with who refused to open up to me. The way people have been able to share with me, feel comfortable with me, and have great revelations in my presence has been nothing short of magical. But it took having that magic stop, break, end to see it for what it was. I was tormented by my inability to make this person see. He was clearly so hardened, broken and distant that he was unable to face even himself. I had to learn to let him go on that way. I had to learn that I couldn’t expect the magic every time. And it helped me see those former moments for what they were. Beautiful. Uncommon. Magic.