Friends.

I’m a ridiculously slow reader. For a long time I didn’t even finish reading books, because my attention span was so short. I’d be on page 445 of a 450 page book and I wouldn’t finish it. Last year I made a new year’s resolution to actually finish books cover-to-cover, and I’m happy to say that for once, I made good on a new year’s resolution. I read almost nineteen books in their entirety, which, given my glacially slow pace of reading and my attention span, may as well have been my reading the entire Library of Congress.

For the past few months I’ve been making my way through Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody. It’s an exhaustive tome, and at 700+ pages it is without question the longest book (that wasn’t a textbook) I’ve ever tried to read. While the progress has been slow, it’s been a refreshing and insightful read, and I have to admit reading about something you have complete, 100% interest in makes things all the easier.

I’m a huge fan of Godard’s work and much of my experiences with Godard have informed many of my own artistic choices, and I find myself at times relating with many of Godard’s life choices, many of them not positive or constructive. One thing, however, that I’ve been at conflict with Godard and the large part of the New Wave was the assertion of the auteur theory, that cinema was the singular creative expression of the director, and that the camera was the pen with which the director scribed her works (camera stylo).

While I do think that the unifying vision of a film is the director’s responsibility, and that each director places her ‘stamp’ or ‘signature’ upon every frame of the film, it is, in my opinion, presumptuous for us to adhere to the thought that film is the creation of a single perspective. We work in a collaborative medium, and the perspectives of many are what informs the director’s final choice. Godard may contend that it is his final choice, but it gets into semantics and perspectives from there on out.

But one of the most fascinating aspects of Godard’s extremely compelling life was his relationship with Francois Truffaut, a good friend who at any given stage of Godard’s life served as a mentor, a guide, a competitor, a critic, a muse, and as a dear friend. Their relationship was equally respectable as it was tempestuous, but they would often provide fodder for each others’ ideas, support one another professionally by sharing contacts and talent, and they would provide honest, bare-knuckle and at times barbed criticism of each others’ work. In the end it seems that Godard had pushed Truffaut to the limits of their friendship, but I’ve yet to reach this point of the book so I’m not yet qualified to write about it.

I bring all of this up because in the last few days of writing Lilith, I came upon a debilitating case of writer’s block for a specific scene. It was a pivotal scene, a very difficult scene that I had been putting off until the point came where I had no choice but to face it. I was stuck. I wrote thirty-three versions of the 10-page scene, and all of them fell flat. Nothing was working, and I was just tapping keys for the sake of making a noise that resembled productivity. I was stuck, and losing interest fast.

And seemingly out of the blue, I received a phone call from a friend who is also making a film. For the sake of privacy I won’t mention his name, but I’ll tell you this much - when his film comes out we will all know his name, and I’ll talk about it when the time is right. Anyway, he gave me a call and asked me how things were going, and if I needed any help.

Now, when it comes to writing, I’m not one to share. I find it an intensely personal process and I often hole myself up and hammer out the words in the company of my thoughts and influences. But I was stuck, and I think my friend could sense it. It took some self-encouragement to open up to him regarding my frustrations about the scene, and he listened patiently, and what he told me afterwards got me off my hump and allowed me to blast through my crippling writer’s block.

We never really discussed plot points or ideas or mythologies, rather we talked about process. About character beats and how everyone, in every scene, requires an objective. He had me ask what my characters wanted in that scene, what they wanted out of each other, and how they would go about accomplishing that goal. I came to realize that one of my characters didn’t really have an objective, and because of this, anything I wrote for her came off as mindless chatter, as hollow. After our conversation I took a pen and pad to bed and wrote down a list of verbs and adverbs - the basic blocks of character beats - that described what my characters’ objectives would be. It was a magical experience, like opening a hidden treasure chest of images and ideas, all of which were pertinent to the characters. The next morning I powered through the scene with a new conviction, and emerged with something that still might need some work later, but at its core was honest, straightforward and compelling. And it was true to the characters and my overall intent.

The value of good friends never fails to impress and humble me. I am fortunate to be surrounded by people who legitimately care for my success and my vision, and for that I am blessed a thousand times over. My only way to repay them for their kindness and generosity is to care for them as they would me, a responsibility that I am proud to shoulder. It with this guiding philosophy that I now enter the next stage of making Lilith, and this is the single most important stage of the entire production, the selection of my cast and crew.

sr.