On Filmmaking as an Undergraduate (2017 - 2019)

(above) A photo taken during a layover in Guangzhou in the summer of 2018. I struggled to find any meaningful depiction of the past few years and settled on this one. I remember being quite tired during the brief stay at this airport. We had just travelled 10+ hours from Los Angeles and still had many more (counting in exhaustion) before reaching our destination in Manila. A port of calm between grand escapades. Gazing beyond the world.

Now over a month removed from what (during my last year) seemed to feel like an endless conquest as a film undergrad, I possess strong inclination to sit down, reflect, and shape the very thing that was my day-to-day life for the past four or so years. To wrangle and organize my headspace, at this age and period of living, before it inevitably permeates out into nonexistence over time. In this entry, I recount my 'purgatory' years from 2017-2019 before I actually begun my formal film education at UNLV.

At the current moment, I feel almost more like I've lapsed from some major traumatic event than successfully completed an educational tract I had longed romanticized of embarking upon when in high school. Perhaps it's an organic reaction, because what truly sets one apart from the other in all actuality. When one's set their sights towards the ever approaching wall for so long, gradually shifting closer and closer as to be blind to perception, the jarring shock that comes when suddenly having emerged on the other side of it is surely to trigger difficult thoughts and feelings, as is the case for me. It's not so much that I desire to still be in the midsts of that containment, but that it's just flown by with the most unusual of chronological percept. For the first two years, I toughed it out taking prerequisite courses in community college with motives, both personally oriented and economical, to sort out all the necessary noise first before finally divulging to a full time film education. Strangely, I don't seem to have retained much in terms of the academic laboring itself, not to be confused with the contents of said laboring which I've preserved the highlights of. What I mean in terms of "academic laboring" is the act of partaking in classes and doing the physical work of learning. Taking notes, frustrating with a pencil and eraser, or even staring off into the granular textures of the ceiling and floor. It's all but a hazy blur in my current recollection. A gradient of beige nothingness, without a single trace or composite of co-inhabitation in sight. On the other hand, what I do remember, and quite vividly, was the routine preceding or succeeding to time spent at school itself. Getting up daily, hours before dawn, sipping coffee as I curiously browsed various film sites for news and criticism, leisurely commuting by city bus, and then that very thing again in reverse order after class. Aside from the occasional freelance gig, I was privileged to have my time and schooling paid for, which allowed me to focus on a key few things each semester.

Expectedly, this afforded ample time to indulge as a cinephile, which at that time, was literally the most important thing in the world to me. During high school, though I had brushed with some of the world cinema canon (at least in my definition) with films like Eyes Without a Face (1960) and Belle de Jour (1967), admittedly rather obtuse ones at that, my predominant study and viewing regimen was attributed most to Classical Hollywood, of the AFI Top 100/TCM Greatest Hits sort. No rhyme or reason to it really, but the films, like those of Hitchcock, Wilder, & Chaplin, merely compelled me most. So coming into college, overdosed on pre-60s American studio filmmaking, I felt it right to begin seeing literally everything outside of this metric. Though one might've expected me most to contrast my previous assignment with the prominent French, German, & Japanese productions made in that same timeframe, I not only did that, but expanded beyond to just about every wave, national movement, and genre advancement throughout all of film history. A welcome chaos, and one that's set the precedent for my viewing approach ever since.

Eclecticism I find is key when attempting to chip away at over a century's worth of filmmaking, and more so in its ability to vitally keep one's eyes (and ears) fresh. Burnout is largely avoided when exposure is in constant flux. One day its Last Year at Marienbad (1961) then the next its The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and after that, perhaps a Brakhage or Martel. The best formula I've found is to have none at all.

Being exposed to all this previously unseen cinema for the first time, I began to develop a cognizance for my own personal taste and in turn a shifting sensibility for how I wanted to pursue it myself. Previously, I had originally thought (out of sheer ignorance, though the good earnest kind) that the most apparent career path I'd end up in was as a star auteur in Hollywood, directing the projects I was only most interested in, with a gun for hire gig eventually here and there (you know, for compromise sake, just to be nice 'to them.') Of course to those reading this now who are knowing, this is all just the starry-eyed lamentation of a young & eager novice and nothing really achievable in today's studio system. However dreamy this half-assured ambition was, I find this kind of mindset almost necessary in the earliest stages of any growing artist, regardless of medium, for the sheer energy boost it provides in getting through what I find to be the most challenging of developmental stages. And that is in finding one's artistic oeuvre, of which I possessed none of. Reasonably, my time creating films in high school acted more as a messy canvas for experimentation than anything serious or even too focused. All I knew is that this is what I wanted to do.

As I began making my way through film history, I was swiftly enamored with the giant umbrella of photographic realism. For some added context to this elementary phase, I sense that much of it could be traced back to my appreciation for William Friedkin commentaries, of which I became affixed just a year or so prior. Already a fan of The Exorcist (1973) and The French Connection (1971), imagine my unbridled amusement to find the director of those classics to be equally if not more chaotically unyielding (in the best way possible) as a public conversationalist and earnest sharer of his experiences working in the industry. As to keep myself from raving on any further about how much I wholeheartedly enjoy ol' Hurricane Billy as a personality overall, his methodologies regarding spontaneity in drama & cinematography (though not so much about how he might've achieved some of his results) I found to be personally compelling to my developing interests and something that firmly seeded itself for long-term registry. Back to realism, it was in this generalized ideology and in my discovery of the films of Lynne Ramsay & Andrea Arnold, primarily Ratcatcher (1999) for the former's case & Wasp (2003) for the latter, that kickstarted, for the first time, a real impassioned drive within me as a filmmaker. Though I had already previously directed two shorts in my first semester of college in Breathe (2017) and Scenes from a Park (2017) (extensions of my initial feeling out period), it was really in 2018 where I stumbled into some figment of clarity as to what I should really be doing with my work. Also being greatly influenced by my recent love of The Florida Project (2017) and Sean Baker at the moment, I sought to imagine my filmmaking as a corollary of sorts from the aforementioned bunch.

My fascination with the appearance of so-called realism came from its unfeigned transmittance in the image, and the lack of adornment in the sound mix, often ditching any kind of score or non-diegetic track with organic sound instead. In social realism of the post-Loachian or Dardenne-ian breed, one would incline themselves to associate an induced documentary flavoring, of destabilized handheld kinetics and some systemic identification of working class miserablism to visually enforce notions of 'realness' to an audience. And when one looks at Ratcatcher, Wasp, & The Florida Project, the description applies fairly across the board. So when producing my third college short The Green (2018), featuring a quietly accomplished lead performance by my younger sister at age 7, following this tradition felt only right. The film plays as a moody, almost dialogue-free synthesization of the three films referenced prior, detailing the after school life of an earnest, but lonely seven year old girl. As the film loosely charts her daily routine, a disturbing portrait is revealed of closed-off domestic turmoil. The titular 'green' is in reference to the lawn located in her backyard, of which she holds a close, but esoteric connection to. It's been a couple years since I last viewed the short in full, but what was clear in that latest viewing was my apparent lack of narrative maturity in writing drama with hidden anchors scattered throughout. The entire thing leans too much into a couple paramount ideas, thus making the work so evidently 'about something' rather than something, or many things, emanating out from the construction of the material itself. Clearly I was working from a false sense of an internalized rubric, and it shows. For as much as the film marks itself as one made from a dilettante, it proved to be another case similarly pertinent to my previous efforts, where even if the finished project did not yield the high artistic achievement (at least in my eyes; mutual reactions were a little more generous) I'd hoped for, the invaluable experience gained from merely laboring through the production cycle, conceptualizing and applying ideas, did return some useful measure of fruitfulness. Most importantly in post-production, where figuring out the edit finally registered to me as being more of an interpretive exercise over a dogmatic one. Here, I can assuredly trace a crucial origin to something that is now not only ancillary to my overall methodology, but majorly pivotal in how I'd eventually read and think about cinema. But more on that in the next entry where its formation is finally congealed.

My biggest takeaway from making The Green was primarily in the importance of photographic validity in one's captured images. That is, coupled with aspects like dramatic performance and technical logistics, the ontological representation that is ultimately photographed is above all else, the most consequential thing when producing a movie. Seems almost obvious that for a film work to be considered legitimate or even artistically impressive in one's eyes, that a high production threshold should be met, but that does not cover the nuance in my met conclusion. If lofty production values were enough to make good, if not just decent or competent cinema, anybody with money to invest would be contributing worthwhile films left and right, but you and I know that that couldn't be any farther from reality. In a speculative relationship that involves the fiction/narrative at the center of one's work, how that informs everything that comes subsequently is a dynamic, sculpt-able stream of consciousness to be reacted to. If one can visualize contents being reduced through a strainer, that analogy would best fit my (then) newly brandished understanding of cinematic construction. It is about what's left, thus achieved when every sector of production has been pushed through the fiction.  In that, there remains a sort of documentary element in the cinematographic record. Sketches of reality to be gleaned from the fictional appearance it attempts to abide to. As a filmmaker and film viewer, this lightbulb moment liberated my cognition of cinema away from the doldrums of artistically limiting appraisal & trivial convention. And instead towards appearance & interpretation.

Moving away from some pseudo-intelligent codification about how movies ought to be and examining them alternatively for how they're being, my perception and relationship to cinema drastically shifted to one of greater appreciation from the possibilities rooted in every variable. Also coming to terms at this point that what I found to be most instinctually pleasing, both as an observer and more crucially participant, was not in fact based in any commercial sensibility, consideration for how to maneuver forward with my work aided further illuminance to the blinded path of what my career in film would be at all. With how much I adored and admired the output and career models by those of the international festival circuit, it only made sense that I position myself for this world and brace for all of its unique challenges. Unlike those who grind it out in independent film with the hopes of crossing over to the mainstream as soon as granted, this was and still is not applicable to me. Unless some magical, sweeping reformation occurs to Hollywood and the majority of audiences within my lifetime, there is nowhere else I can be to make & show my work than the universe of Cannes, Berlin, Locarno, and the like. Not just the dedicated act of independent filmmaking, but independent arthouse filmmaking. The distinction matters.

The next project I embarked upon after The Green came to me out of complete happenstance, and looking back on it, proved to be something of a major little accident. With my close circle of filmmaking cohorts and overall friends bored to death with nothing much to do in the summer of 2019, we impulsively made the choice to chase the same high of run-and-gun style filmmaking we consistently practiced during our time in high school together. The initial result of this was a contemporary attempt at Dogme 95, abiding to 9 out of the 10 established rules in the very amusing Vow of Chastity (transference to printed film was simply out of the equation). Arming ourselves with two dissimilar types of MiniDV cameras (not required but a flattering callback to the movement's tech) and a loosely assembled plot about a flamboyant sociopath who searches the city in hopes of forging a forced friendship with an unlucky individual, we hit the streets on a Saturday and shot and shot and shot to our heart's desire doing anything that felt good to us in the immediate moment. Much like freeform jazz. Locations included a massive public park in the Green Valley area, one of our homes, and a basketball court we somehow convinced two patrons to act for us impromptu (and actually I remember them playing their roles shockingly decent). At the end of Sunday, no real plans on when to conclude were formed, but we just casually presumed that shooting the film's end was imminent whenever we were free again. That second day of shooting turned out to be the last. Whatever quick rush for filmic exercise that got us up on our feet was abruptly satiated and motivation to finish from 2/3 of us was gone. However disappointing, I remained that 1/3 still bent on completion.

Completely enamored with the lo-fi intersectionality between hyperreality and nostalgia that primitive digital encased, I continued on with the motive to shoot on DV (with just one camera this time around) and retooled the original premise of our short (which I haven't yet mentioned was to be titled Best Friend) to shed all of its quirky eccentricities in exchange for a much more severe and morally detached tone. I quickly penned together a script within weeks still somewhat abiding to Dogme rules and after a short little debacle concerning casting, I began shooting this new version of the film only a couple of months after the previous iteration died. I titled the film It Happened in Your Neighborhood, eponymously lifted by the notorious Danish film directed by Remy Belvaux, Benoit Poelvoorde, & Andre Bonzel (other than names, the two have nothing to do with each other). With gained wisdom regarding documentary naturalism and its passage through fictive stratas from my last film, I handled my direction with a contrastingly laid back candor this time around. I sought to see what should arise when my actors and locations be filtered through the shapes and conditions of my written fiction. And how the two would dance together, creating relative temperance as one informed and reacted to the other. The only hurdle, and one I was ill braced for, were the natural difficulties arisen from my casting of non-trained actors. But the rampant retakes revealed to me something rather salient in my study of behavioralism, which is the onset of fictive variation. Found out during editing, the amassment of enumerable takes for most scenes opened up infinite scenarios for how scenes and subsequently the entire movie should appear, enact, and feel like. Though this revelation may appear as rudimentary knowledge for filmmakers, under the guise of my abstract percept for the dichotomy of fiction and documentation, this (for better or worse) truly initiates the cognizance for God-like control of the universe one is looking to assemble. In essence, that (to me) is what filmmaking is fundamentally about. An ability to disassemble and fragment the world, then getting to put it back together again in the way one chooses. One may be reasonably concerned about this actualization of the form in its potential implications reflecting back to the creator(s), but largely its a harmless and totally dignified channel of artistic expression, even if unhinged to some honest degree.

Getting back to variation in post, it was knowledge to me then that in "sculpting" a performance, one should aim more or less for filtering takes that abide most loyally to the script or an actor's consistency, but at that moment, I sought to test the waters of going against this very principle to see what would happen. Yes, there is some strong degree to which one's fiction should be used as a heuristic for how to decide the appearance of characters in a work, but I view this more fluidly and more like a ratio of sorts between that aforementioned dichotomy of fiction and doc. How an actor behaves, and what evocations arise from the objective differences in their mannerisms and physicality, is one that can be entirely severed from any constructed notion of fiction. If you were to watch dailies of a Scorsese film, say most recently The Irishman (2019), and particularly that scene of Al Pacino chewing his scene partners out in Jimmy Hoffa's introduction. You wouldn't need the context of his portraying Hoffa berating his administration to be able to discern what worked for you and what didn't. And Scorsese of course recognizes this as he noticeably includes an obvious faux pas in which Pacino's tirade is abruptly paused as he forgets his lines. Before that take presumably was called off, Pacino continues on with utter self-humility in the moment, acknowledging his blunder by simply making a face in full acceptance of his dramatic immobility as he repeats his previous line over and over in hopes of finally remembering to complete the take. It then cuts to a reaction shot of De Niro as another take is jarringly stitched in. It's an all-time great scene. And one that favors spontaneity over everything else. The gold is filtered from the grain of expectation. For actors, the 'document' of their being being is allowed to ratio back the dominance of fictive stratagem, even if it creates some esoteric conflicts in continuity. It's about retaining substance over form.

While I as the filmmaker of my own short cannot further comment on its effective quality, the realizations illuminated, big and small, continued an education most personal and only accessible through conceptualization and exercise. Though both films now remain difficult for me to sit through in all honesty, as my various ineptitudes and creative disagreements appear in larger spades as time passes, they hold as necessary passages in me learning more about not only the procedures of how to make a movie, but in turn how my first-hand experience of production informs my experience of watching and critiquing them as well. Decisions, who it's dictated by, and why or how.

It Happened in Your Neighborhood was completed and released in the Fall of 2019, which also marked my final semester completing prereqs at CSN. My next would finally see me begin my full time film education at UNLV for my Bachelor's. With two lifelong years of cinematic self education in the can, bringing with it unquantifiable growth, I was ready to test my skills and ideas where I'd long aspired to. Little then did I know what massive bullshit was coming my way. 

To be continued.