A Filmmaker’s Awareness « Making the Movie

16Jun/060

A Filmmaker’s Awareness

On the set of Untitled Zak Forrest Film...

A few days ago, I was sitting in what is known as a back yard in Park Slope, Brooklyn, watching Lillian's 19-month-old nephew experience his new sandbox. To him, each grain of sand seemed equally valid. They each had to be carefully examined. The resistance of a pink plastic scoop in the wet and dry areas compared. The sensation of sand escaping between fingers had to be experienced and re-experienced until the nature of it was unconscious.

Watching a filmmaker like Zak Forrest at work, I see for the second time this week that same naked awareness. He stalks around the room with his heavy-ass Arriflex 35 BL3, making a pit stop every few minutes at a box of Zeiss primes to exchange lenses. His subject is Ukelilli, Lillian Parker's ukelele-playing alter ego, who has been summoned from Los Angeles, California, to Chevy Chase, Maryland, to perform in a "crucial" scene in Zak's film.

Tonight is a location scout of sorts. The whole session is being recorded through a wireless video tap onto miniDV, from which it will be replayed tomorrow. For the sake of the recording, Zak sometimes makes comments like: "That last part was the 50mm." Along with angles and lenses, he tests how Lillian's costumes interpret the colors of the antique paintings behind her, and what placement of the microphone gives the most "echoic" sound.

Time is a filmmaker's greatest convenience, and Zak remarks more than once how happy he is to have it tonight for experimentation. The movie is being re-written as it is being shot. While Zak carries at all times a thick notebook with many pages that resemble the conventional screenplay format, many details remain locksafe within his head. As filmming has progressed, he has become more convinced that 'found' moments are superior to anything he has preconceived.

Hence the elaborate exploration of the space. It is hard to be spontaneous with film. Film is the opposite of point-and-shoot. But Zak's workflow is surprisingly lightweight and digital. The video tap (custom from Wolf Seeburg) is key. Its results will be examined tomorrow, perhaps even edited to give a preliminary look at how the scene will cut together. More details will yield themselves to the filmmaker's awareness.

Zak's goal seems not to be to take conventional shots and add a twist, but to avoid convention altogether. He is most displeased when a closeup he's composed looks like "every other jank closeup in film ever." It is not enough to have total awareness of the moment -- like the baby in the sandbox -- but the filmmaker must add historical awareness. In the ideal scenario, a simple scene of a ukelele player singing a young man to sleep will take on the monumental, experiential weight of a first sensation. Because the filmmaker's awareness is the foundation of the audience's awareness. And it's fun to play in the sandbox.

UPDATE 6/16/06: Shooting was delayed tonight because Zak was feeling ill. More about how he shoots like a digital filmmaker -- but with 35mm film! -- in the next post.