"One Must Combat
Vague Ideas With
Precise Images"
Friday, May 17, 2013
Galore Post Script #3 - Gifts
Getting to make a film in itself is a gift. It's possible to convince yourself that you've earned it after a long period of slugging it out with investors and redrafts and doubters and hardship. But when you have a cast and crew assembled around you, all working to help you realise those ideas and images sketched out in your brain long ago, you quickly realise that being able to helm a film is the greatest gift. And hidden inside that gift are an endless parade of more, not the least of which are the people you get to share it all with. But in the making of Galore, there were more gifts. So fucking many gifts. Here are a few that come to mind from the recent months of production and post production (in no particular order).
Books.
An old friend of mine Darren Richmond is a crazy great graphic designer, artist and backyard tattooist. We've worked together for a while now on a number of projects but we don't get to cross paths enough. In Galore, he designed all of the beautiful note books in Galore and his images and words helped to inspire Danny's approach to the world. I don't know how he channeled the 17 year old aspiring artist, romantic and skater but he fucking killed it. The book itself has become this incredible cherished object for me since the end of the shoot and, fuccck, I have to make sure I never lose it!
Words.
One of our central characters 'Laura', played by Lily Sullivan, writes obsessively in her journal. To help with her character, she filled the journal with thoughts and notes and favourite song lyrics and quotes. Between takes, she would often go and scribble something new. In the madness of shooting, I rarely had time to look at the notebook and the things that she had written. But hidden in those pages was a surprising insight into the character and the world of the film. So many of these pages were a gift in ways they glanced light back onto the things we were hoping to capture. I've already featured a photo of my favourite page on the blog... but here it is again:
T-shirts.
I've ranted about her before but I love the words, work and design of Portuguese artist Rita Gomes AKA Wasted Rita. Partly, the reason I love her work is out of gratitude because...
...but mostly I love her work because it's full of fire and lyricism and wisdom in the most simple, distilled forms. She prints her shit on t-shirts and posters and walls and it always feels epic and resonant and funny and hectic. So, it was a kinda amazing gift that she agreed to let us put her work on some of the T-shirts worn by one of the characters in the film - Danny, played by Toby Wallace (who is certain to take over the acting world at some point very soon). Due to the intimate way the film was shot, you don't often get to see her work, but I fucking love that it's there...
Stories.
Some of the stories that are passed to us are gifts, others are burdens. We have to know which is which… Sometimes it is difficult to know the difference between the two. One makes us feel a lightness that can make us love and laugh and invite others into our worlds. The other drags us down and makes us twisted dirtbags with bitter thoughts and broken hearts. Both offer themselves to us in the beginning with infinite possibility but we don't know the paths they offer up to us. The stories we get told when we're trying to tell our own are the true gifts. This happened too many times to count while making Galore. People whose houses we used, actors connecting with their roles, crew members killing time, passersby trying to make conversation. Bigger, stranger, more complex stories than the one we were murdering ourselves trying to bring to the screen.
Songs.
What better gift than being able to include one of your favourite songs by one of your favourite bands in a heartbreaker scene in your flick? Hope you get to see the flick at some point so can you hear it...
Frames.
Every frame should have a heartbeat. One moment that pulses through it and activates it. When that happens, those accidents - a flutter of an eyelid, a hesitation, a breeze kicking up, an accidental flare of the sun against the lens, a stutter, a passing car, a dog bark, a bird that wheels and dives through the sky - form the pulse of the film. They make a moment live within the frame and, then, when edited, the rhythms of those pulses forms the heartbeat of the film as a whole. We had a lot of those on Galore. On a couple of occasions, when we needed to evoke a blustering heat, the wind kicked up or a gust of dry earth scurried past. When a character was taut with emotion, some intrusion or other would interrupt the tension of the frame. These moments became so tied into performance that it seemed like a couple of our actors could control the elements (which wouldn't have surprised me) so that, on the moment that an emotional beat hit hard, the wind wrestled with their fringe or disturbed a tree behind them. These accidents - pure chance offered up as some kind of orchestrated environmental bliss - are the purest gifts to the achingly slow mechanics of filmmaking.
Books.
“Crying all the time had made her more beautiful. Grief will do that sometimes. Not for me. Loretta had left months ago and I still looked like hell.”I love the short stories of Junot Díaz. I read Drown when it was first published in Australia and, to be honest, it blew my mind at just the right time. I've gone on to read just about all of his published words, essays, novels, stories. But Drown was a heartstarter for me in its combination of casual lyricism, emotional asskicks and the way it loped between lofty ideas and the casual desires and dreams we tangle with at street level. So, I wanted one of the characters in the film of Galore to give the book as a gift to one of the others.
“It would have broken my heart if it hadn't been so damn familiar. I guess I'd gotten numb to that sort of thing. I had heart-leather like walruses got blubber.”Somehow it felt right. The worlds are a thousand miles apart but something inside his perfect words is the everyday lyricism we've been striving for in the film. So we wrote to him to see if that was cool. His gift was a casual fuck yeah and a breezy warm wish for it all, casually noting that one of his first stories was about a bushfire in Australia; one of the central images of our flick. What greater gift can you get from someone you admire from afar and whose words have given you so much. Fuck yeah.
“They sounded a lot like me and my old girlfriend Loretta, but I swore to myself that I would stop thinking about her ass, even though every Cleopatra-looking Latina in the city made me stop and wish she would come back to me.”Notes.
An old friend of mine Darren Richmond is a crazy great graphic designer, artist and backyard tattooist. We've worked together for a while now on a number of projects but we don't get to cross paths enough. In Galore, he designed all of the beautiful note books in Galore and his images and words helped to inspire Danny's approach to the world. I don't know how he channeled the 17 year old aspiring artist, romantic and skater but he fucking killed it. The book itself has become this incredible cherished object for me since the end of the shoot and, fuccck, I have to make sure I never lose it!
Words.
One of our central characters 'Laura', played by Lily Sullivan, writes obsessively in her journal. To help with her character, she filled the journal with thoughts and notes and favourite song lyrics and quotes. Between takes, she would often go and scribble something new. In the madness of shooting, I rarely had time to look at the notebook and the things that she had written. But hidden in those pages was a surprising insight into the character and the world of the film. So many of these pages were a gift in ways they glanced light back onto the things we were hoping to capture. I've already featured a photo of my favourite page on the blog... but here it is again:
T-shirts.
I've ranted about her before but I love the words, work and design of Portuguese artist Rita Gomes AKA Wasted Rita. Partly, the reason I love her work is out of gratitude because...
...but mostly I love her work because it's full of fire and lyricism and wisdom in the most simple, distilled forms. She prints her shit on t-shirts and posters and walls and it always feels epic and resonant and funny and hectic. So, it was a kinda amazing gift that she agreed to let us put her work on some of the T-shirts worn by one of the characters in the film - Danny, played by Toby Wallace (who is certain to take over the acting world at some point very soon). Due to the intimate way the film was shot, you don't often get to see her work, but I fucking love that it's there...
Stories.
Some of the stories that are passed to us are gifts, others are burdens. We have to know which is which… Sometimes it is difficult to know the difference between the two. One makes us feel a lightness that can make us love and laugh and invite others into our worlds. The other drags us down and makes us twisted dirtbags with bitter thoughts and broken hearts. Both offer themselves to us in the beginning with infinite possibility but we don't know the paths they offer up to us. The stories we get told when we're trying to tell our own are the true gifts. This happened too many times to count while making Galore. People whose houses we used, actors connecting with their roles, crew members killing time, passersby trying to make conversation. Bigger, stranger, more complex stories than the one we were murdering ourselves trying to bring to the screen.
Songs.
What better gift than being able to include one of your favourite songs by one of your favourite bands in a heartbreaker scene in your flick? Hope you get to see the flick at some point so can you hear it...
Frames.
Every frame should have a heartbeat. One moment that pulses through it and activates it. When that happens, those accidents - a flutter of an eyelid, a hesitation, a breeze kicking up, an accidental flare of the sun against the lens, a stutter, a passing car, a dog bark, a bird that wheels and dives through the sky - form the pulse of the film. They make a moment live within the frame and, then, when edited, the rhythms of those pulses forms the heartbeat of the film as a whole. We had a lot of those on Galore. On a couple of occasions, when we needed to evoke a blustering heat, the wind kicked up or a gust of dry earth scurried past. When a character was taut with emotion, some intrusion or other would interrupt the tension of the frame. These moments became so tied into performance that it seemed like a couple of our actors could control the elements (which wouldn't have surprised me) so that, on the moment that an emotional beat hit hard, the wind wrestled with their fringe or disturbed a tree behind them. These accidents - pure chance offered up as some kind of orchestrated environmental bliss - are the purest gifts to the achingly slow mechanics of filmmaking.
Galore Post Script #2 - Things that suck
People in the film world can be accused of taking themselves way too fucking serious. Here's a few gentle reminders that that attitude kinda sucks and all the best know how to stay playful...
Picasso dressed as Popeye:
Gauguin playing harmonium with his pants off:
Monroe as a water fountain.
Connery as a bride.
Picasso dressed as Popeye:
Gauguin playing harmonium with his pants off:
Monroe as a water fountain.
Connery as a bride.
Galore Post Script #1 - Darkness
Delayed post... forgot to put this up a couple of weeks back. My brain is broken.
I arrived late in Sydney last night. This morning we walked into the sound mixing stage at Deluxe for two weeks of mixing 'Galore'. And, for the first time in months, my mind seemed clear enough to write some new words. This massive, beautiful dark space allowed some of the tangles of thought - looped around the block of mind totally filled with all the layers of making 'Galore' - to clear out for the first in months.
These past months have been like a process of distillation. I have no doubt there may have been infinite things to reflect on here while shooting, cutting and finishing 'Galore'. There have been all the anticipated highs and lows and battles and dances and moments of levity and transcendence and glimmers of agony and bliss and terror. But, because all the constituent elements were poured into the distillery months ago, I've felt like I couldn't add anything new to the mix. No new thoughts, new writing, new reflections. No space to step back or think or critique. Just constantly bubbling away with those same elements, refining and purifying.
Here, hopefully is the point all that returns again.
So, here's what happened. Over a summer that was scorching everyone outside, we sat in a dark room, surrounded by whirring, straining fans, sweating our arses off, moving swiftly towards a fine cut. Every now and then, there would be a moment to run to the pool, or sit at the bowls club and clean up a few beers, or catch up on elusive sleep. But mostly it was a density of Galore world emotion and images. For the most part, it was bliss. There were lessons learnt and experiences traversed that are for another time and place, there were some insane challenges; but the final film is closer to what we set out to achieve than I ever thought would be possible. That alone, whatever happens, has to be a beautiful thing, ey?
Original compositions were scored, existing music was licensed, foley was created, dense layers of sound and atmosphere were created. Shots went to FX and were moulded into entirely new images.
At the same time, family life continued on. Things fell apart and were placed back together. Long nights got longer the more self destructive and exhausted we all got. There were salsa parties and sleazy nights in the usual bars, music festivals and afternoons on the hot concrete of the Fitzroy pool. There were feasts whenever an actor came to town, or when we were all feeling a particularly strong yearning. There was a shitload of wine, denial and madness.
And that, I suppose, is post production in an independent film. Don't know how my internal organs are coping or whether my family are all that keen on me anymore or whether I'll work in this town again (does anyone?)... but we did honour what we set out to achieve and, hopefully, stayed true to the ideas that so many people put so many long months and so much blood, sweat and tears into realising.
Fuck, it looks nice to see it on the vast screen of the mixing stage while I sit here and write and try not to say dumb things while they work. Rob Mackenzie, who is mixing our little flick sits in front of me. He's most recently come off sound editing Wong Kar Wai's 'The Grandmaster' so his halo is glowing in my eyes. And the ever incredible Emma Bortignon, Galore's sound designer, who has spent weeks and weeks creating a rich complex design, sits alongside me, so I know all will be fine, just fine.
And in the back corner, lingering in the dark are the composers, my oldest, shadiest collaborators, Christopher O'Young and Flynn Wheeler who have written music that seems to have come from the page.
So all, again, surrounded by the hum, surge and shatter of the sonic world of the film, feels for a while, perfect. Perfect.
•
I arrived late in Sydney last night. This morning we walked into the sound mixing stage at Deluxe for two weeks of mixing 'Galore'. And, for the first time in months, my mind seemed clear enough to write some new words. This massive, beautiful dark space allowed some of the tangles of thought - looped around the block of mind totally filled with all the layers of making 'Galore' - to clear out for the first in months.
These past months have been like a process of distillation. I have no doubt there may have been infinite things to reflect on here while shooting, cutting and finishing 'Galore'. There have been all the anticipated highs and lows and battles and dances and moments of levity and transcendence and glimmers of agony and bliss and terror. But, because all the constituent elements were poured into the distillery months ago, I've felt like I couldn't add anything new to the mix. No new thoughts, new writing, new reflections. No space to step back or think or critique. Just constantly bubbling away with those same elements, refining and purifying.
Here, hopefully is the point all that returns again.
So, here's what happened. Over a summer that was scorching everyone outside, we sat in a dark room, surrounded by whirring, straining fans, sweating our arses off, moving swiftly towards a fine cut. Every now and then, there would be a moment to run to the pool, or sit at the bowls club and clean up a few beers, or catch up on elusive sleep. But mostly it was a density of Galore world emotion and images. For the most part, it was bliss. There were lessons learnt and experiences traversed that are for another time and place, there were some insane challenges; but the final film is closer to what we set out to achieve than I ever thought would be possible. That alone, whatever happens, has to be a beautiful thing, ey?
Original compositions were scored, existing music was licensed, foley was created, dense layers of sound and atmosphere were created. Shots went to FX and were moulded into entirely new images.
At the same time, family life continued on. Things fell apart and were placed back together. Long nights got longer the more self destructive and exhausted we all got. There were salsa parties and sleazy nights in the usual bars, music festivals and afternoons on the hot concrete of the Fitzroy pool. There were feasts whenever an actor came to town, or when we were all feeling a particularly strong yearning. There was a shitload of wine, denial and madness.
And that, I suppose, is post production in an independent film. Don't know how my internal organs are coping or whether my family are all that keen on me anymore or whether I'll work in this town again (does anyone?)... but we did honour what we set out to achieve and, hopefully, stayed true to the ideas that so many people put so many long months and so much blood, sweat and tears into realising.
Fuck, it looks nice to see it on the vast screen of the mixing stage while I sit here and write and try not to say dumb things while they work. Rob Mackenzie, who is mixing our little flick sits in front of me. He's most recently come off sound editing Wong Kar Wai's 'The Grandmaster' so his halo is glowing in my eyes. And the ever incredible Emma Bortignon, Galore's sound designer, who has spent weeks and weeks creating a rich complex design, sits alongside me, so I know all will be fine, just fine.
And in the back corner, lingering in the dark are the composers, my oldest, shadiest collaborators, Christopher O'Young and Flynn Wheeler who have written music that seems to have come from the page.
So all, again, surrounded by the hum, surge and shatter of the sonic world of the film, feels for a while, perfect. Perfect.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Why I'm Alive
''I want to know why I'm alive. I want to understand; it's like exploration, it's like someone being interested in a place and its history, digging into the earth and looking for it, searching...''
Juliette Binoche
Ready. Aim...
*too long in the dark, too many hours in front of the editing suite, may or may not lead to lengthy image searches whose titles and search fields could make for a freewheeling beat poem. Sometimes, the image searches lead to rare moments of gravity like Anna Karina taking aim to shoot you down... but mostly they lead to darker and stranger places.
Saturday, January 26, 2013
Whimsical #2
I've kinda waxed lyrical in the past about my love for the whimsy, heartbreak and visual rapture of Michel Gondry. So I'm excited to see this first look at his new film 'Mood Indigo'... Plenty more heartache and bliss to come, it seems.
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Favourites #3
Most months, some weeks, some days, I acquire a new favourite photographer. There is often something linking the majority of the photographers that I throw myself at like some horny teenager. A left of centre approach to documentary photography is usually the bottom line. An instinct for capturing intimacy, secrecy, moments of shared emotion. This week, my new favourite photographer is Olivia Arthur. Her work, particularly her images taken in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Georgia, are such a rich and strange insight into worlds that are often hidden behind doors. She is also involved in Fishbar, a pretty incredible photographer's space and small scale publisher. This week, she's got my heart.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
I'm Trying
“You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for.”
words: Roberto Bolaño
image: Maxime Ballesteros
Oshima
RIP Nagisa Oshima.
"the charm of cinema is from the continuity in the discontinuity"
one.
two.
three.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Songs That Should Be Films #7
As ever, there are songs that are, for me, more cinematic than most cinema I see; that evoke stories and emotions and characters that I want to live on screen somewhere; places I'd rather spend a couple of hours of my life, sitting in the dark, senses, heart and mind alive, fucked up, yearning, celebrating and desiring.
"The Healing" - Bloc Party
"Born into a Mess" - International Noise Conspiracy
"Lover I Don't Have To Love" - Bright Eyes
"Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" - Public Enemy
"While You Wait For The Others" - Grizzly Bear
"Coattails" - Low
"Trouble Man" - Marvin Gaye
"Breathless" - Nick Cave as sung by Cat Power
"Save Me" - Tea Party
"Güero Canelo" - Calexico
"Rewind" - Nas
"Anthems for a 17 Year Old Girl" - Broken Social Scene
"Christmas in New York" - The Pogues
"Folsom Prison Blues" (obviously!) - Johnny Cash
and, always, always, forever:
"Sweet Thing" - Van Morrison
Because:
"The Healing" - Bloc Party
"Born into a Mess" - International Noise Conspiracy
"Lover I Don't Have To Love" - Bright Eyes
"Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" - Public Enemy
"While You Wait For The Others" - Grizzly Bear
"Coattails" - Low
"Trouble Man" - Marvin Gaye
"Breathless" - Nick Cave as sung by Cat Power
"Save Me" - Tea Party
"Güero Canelo" - Calexico
"Rewind" - Nas
"Anthems for a 17 Year Old Girl" - Broken Social Scene
"Christmas in New York" - The Pogues
"Folsom Prison Blues" (obviously!) - Johnny Cash
and, always, always, forever:
"Sweet Thing" - Van Morrison
Because:
And I shall drive my chariot
Down your streets and cry
Hey, it's me, I'm dynamite
And I don't know why
A Roar In The Heart
"In the immediate world, everything is to be discerned..with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is."
words: James Agee
image: Sebastião Salgado
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Luck
"Many people, even some good photographers, talk of the ‘luck’ of photography as if that were a disparagement. And it is true that luck is constantly at work. It is one of the cardinal creative forces in the universe, one which the photographer has unique equipment for collaborating with. And a photographer often shoots around a subject, expecially one that is highly mobile and in continuous and swift development--which seems to me as much his natural business as it is for a poet who is really in the grip of his poem to alter and realter words in his line. It is true that most artists, though they know their own talent and its gifts as luck, work as well as they can against luck, and that in most good works of art, as in little else in creation, luck is either locked out or locked in and semi-domesticated, or put to wholly constructive work; but it is peculiarly a part of the good photographer’s adventure to know where luck is most likely to lie in the stream, to hook it, and to bring it in without unfair play and without too much subduing it. Most good photographs, especially the quick and lyrical kind, are battles between the artist and luck."
James Agee
Polaroids
Dogs and drains and sun and drizzle. Stunts and kneepads, radios and sparklers. Dawns and sunsets. Beaches and rushes and rivers and tyres. Dams and downtime, driving, drinking and adoring.
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