45. Starting Artists
How To Be A Person -- The Newsletter for November 19, 2024
Somehow with all that’s going on the pressure is off. I’m reminded not to be surprised. Dogs are going to bark, baker’s gonna bake and humans are going to treat each other terribly. What’s important to you? For me, for now, it’s blood.
Tonight I made some fake blood. Two tablespoons of chocolate syrup, one cup of corn syrup and some red food colouring. This is for a short film, a Western, I’m making with my old friend Mike and my new friend Shelly. There is nothing going on in Film & TV so there are a lot of people and equipment just sitting around Ontario.
Last Friday we went out to the BadLands of Caledon. I thought it would make an excellent location to shoot a Western but I was outnumbered. It was too muddy and too hard to get to. Shelly will be directing. She and I bonded briefly over how we were both equally annoyed by the Left, a group we both count ourselves members of. The Left these days spends all of the time getting angry at each other for not being the same kind of Left and in the meantime the Right are winning elections by the pant load.
We got back into our cars and drove to Kerncliffe Park in Burlington. It’s an old quarry. We met Laney there. I’ve known her for ages. I met her on commercial shoots back in the day. Now she’s a DP whereas before she was pulling focus. It was so good to see her again. She is a real pro. And she said she is going to bring a fancy camera for this shoot because it’s available. She also mentioned getting a jib or a crane. I said nothing because my mouth had begun to water. A crane?? Are you kidding?
I mean, it’s slow. The equipment is just sitting around.
Kerncliffe looked a lot like one of my favourite movies, Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm. A movie my children saw far too early in their lives. But if you’re going to show them inappropriate content that includes teens like Christina Ricci and Toby McGuire exploring sex and drugs while their parents Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver hang out at key parties you might as well do it via Ang Lee. It could be worse. It could have been a Marvel movie.
I’m sure someone has measured what we learn from Film & TV. As a child how much of my dialogue was cribbed from the shows I was watching? How was my sense of humour informed by SCTV and Family Ties? Did I get my love of the theatre from all those Muppet Shows on Sunday night? Certainly anything with Bill Murray, John Candy and Rick Moranis in it had me mimicking them, trying to figure out how they did what they did. While a show like Alf showed me the power of subversion. He was an alien from the planet Melmac living with a family in the suburbs. He spent his time hitting on the wife and trying to eat the cat. Wit Stillman taught me you can make a film where people just sit around talking. Same with Mike Leigh.
Later Michael Haneke showed me the power of the wide shot when it isn’t muddied with coverage. Lucrecia Martel taught me you can go the other way and forsake an establishing shot for a close-up. She also beat cancer, turned down the job of directing Marvel’s Black Widow and is married to the world’s most singular voice, Julieta Laso. I’m not into heroes but if I were Lucrecia would be at the top of my list.
Every six months a longtime friend of mine, Denise, sends me an old photo of my ex-comedy partner and I, in character. We were Chris and Bev, two suburban divorcées that had moved in with each other after their marriages ended. We had a popular monthly show called It’s Good to Know People which in addition to being the truth was also a study in making people laugh without making fun. This was in 2006 I think — at the height of irony.
There is a part of me that thinks, look at those two idiots. And both of them are still making things and looking for an audience all these years later. And shouldn’t they have learned their lesson by now?
Or are we the persistent ones? The ones that will make our art no matter what. I mean, what else are you going to do with a life? My friend Rebecca (who makes her own theatre) once said “It’s a pretty good way to spend the time before you die.”
Pretty good is pretty much the right yardstick. There is no Hollywood effusiveness here. No vocal-fried gratitude signalling from the insta grid. It’s just pretty good. Keep your expectations low.
When we left each other in the parking lot of Kerncliffe I thanked Mike for connecting me with even more self-starting artists. Having left Vancouver 12 years ago I miss the actors I came up with. Now I am finally making a community of creatives here.
So I stay up late making fake blood. In the hopes they’ll want to keep me in this new village I’ve found.