Here We Are #3

After many months of doing the rounds of releasing a film, preparing DVD releases, becoming enmeshed in the relative horrors of distribution and exhibition, tangling with release events, social media promotion and, step by step, losing the shine and inspiration of all the amazing people who bleed to make your film as you fall into step with the cynics and misery-peddlers who sit around at the end; after all this, it's easy to forget the bliss of shooting.

A couple of months back, we filled my brother's van with a bunch of friends whose abilities traversed acting, cinematography and production design and, for three days, we hooned around town and shot this clip on the sly for an old and inspiring friend, Joelistics. These were the people with whom there exists an easy shorthand and where the ability to create something ephemeral and difficult to articulate is possible because there exists a shared sensibility and understanding of what we're all reaching for.

The last story I told with this crew and these actors was one of a love destroyed just at the instant that it happened, so it felt right to create a story that is more like those loves that we experience; one of duration and hardship, or one where the love takes a different, albeit more wary form, after heartache, disappointment or deception; but one where there still exists tenderness and beauty and moments of levity. 

There are moments in here - the woman played by Lily Sullivan, casting her eyes back over her shoulder as she walks down a rainy street, or the man, played by Aliki Matangi looking up to the apartment where he knows his future might lie - that make me as proud as anything I've been involved in. This seems, after Small Mercies and Galore, like a footnote of heartbreak with, at last, more hope than hurt.


 

The Time The Place

A while back, we made a feature concert film for Motor Ace, the well adored band of a friend and collaborator of ours, Patch Robertson. Patch composed the music for our flicks 'Love This Time', 'Muscle' and a few other bits and pieces along the way. The film, picked up for distribution some time back by Liberation, has finally been released on DVD. Now, Motor Ace fans can stop emailing me, demanding and pleading for copies. We're happy the little fella has finally been released into the wilds. You can buy it here if that's your bag.

This is the trailer:

Rule #2

The second rule of documentary is to respect your elders. If a little too much.

A few years back, T and I started our production company and named it Daybreak Films partly in honour of the many dusk til dawn sessions of talk, booze and excitement but largely in honour of this film - Daybreak Express by D.A. Pennebaker.



I've never even been to New York but if this film doesn't capture, with brevity and lyricism, the energy and excitement of making pictures move then I don't know what does.

Pennebaker wrote of this perfect 5 minute film:

"I wanted to make a film about this filthy, noisy train and it’s packed-in passengers that would look beautiful, like the New York City paintings of John Sloan, and I wanted it to go with one of my Duke Ellington records, “Daybreak Express.”

I didn’t know much about film editing, or in fact about shooting, so I bought a couple of rolls of Kodachrome at the drugstore, and figured that since the record was about three minutes long, by shooting carefully I could fit the whole thing onto one roll of film. Of course that didn’t work since I couldn’t start and stop my hand-wound camera that easily so I ended up shooting both rolls and even a few more before I was through. It took about three days to film, and then sat in a closet for several years until I figured out how to edit it and make a print that I could show on a projector.

I took it to the Paris theater to see if they would run it. By pure chance it ended up with the Alec Guiness comedy, THE HORSE’S MOUTH which ran there for nearly a year. Since I had a large collection of jazz records, I figured I’d found a way to break into the film business with music films, and it did get me started, but I was never able to make another film like Daybreak."

D.A. Pennebaker