You can see it here:

The reason I thought Isabel would be such a great subject was that I saw her in discussion with the writer Estrella de Diego, and at that discussion there was a section of audience questions with some truly terrible questions. You could see Estrella and Isabel almost freezing at some of them but the way that they turned them into interesting experiences for everyone there felt pretty inspiring.

There’s a generosity and skill to being a good answerer. To make an answer revealing and insightful and not just a regurgitation of past anecdotes is quite the art. And helping the stumbling questioner get to a deeper understanding is a subtle act of benevolence.

But the questioners don’t always deserve that.

Often terrible, ungenerous questions ruin what should be an amazing experience.

These sessions should be exciting and change not only how you feel about the film yourself, but give you a depth and enlightenment.

So often they are not that.

So often they are at best the brief summary intro in a populist magazine

I’ve kind of always felt that they should be playful and a bit of a willing dance. A match between the openness of the speaker and the curious perceptiveness of the questions.

A Q&A session is a responsibility to other people. And your job is not to be interesting but to be interested.

(I generally think one of the most important thing you can tell a young person is that if you are interested, interesting will follow.)

Some basic rules.

(These are of course rules for Q&As when I’m attending. if you’re coming to a Q&A with me then ask whatever you like. I’m just delighted you’re there.)

• Don’t start by saying you are an actor a filmmaker or a writer.

• Don’t ever lead with a statement. If you can’t fold your statement into a question then you need to spend more time working on the structure of your sentences before you think of standing up and taking the microphone.

• Don’t ever announce that it’s a two part question. Make the two parts feel like one question, otherwise it’s telling the rest of the room that you are doubly as important as them.

• Don’t come to a Q&A with predetermined questions that aren’t about the subject at hand. Especially if they are totally off theme, and totally predictable.

• Don’t ask easy bio questions that are available online, could have been read before, and to which the artists can only give performed answers we’ve all heard before.

And filmmakers, when answering don’t retread the same stories and worn responses. Try and engage with the moment and the people in the audience.

Make it a unique, personal experience for everyone there. Be thoughtful and listen, don’t make a politician of yourself.

A Q&A is a special place to me. It should be a place to ask a special question.

Do your research and have a question that really really responds to what’s happening in front of you. Go deep!

When I was a teenager in Devon, England I invented a pretend film magazine. And I wrote to some publicity people in London working on films so that I could get occasional press invites to film screenings with directors. I would buy one train ticket and see how many journeys I could make it last for. (There were no automatic barriers then so as long as I could avoid a ticket collector by hiding in the toilet, or walking up and down the length of a train pretending I was just on the way to my seat or even breaking out my journey to avoid them, then I could get to London and back pretty cheaply.)

And a 6 hour round trip was always worth it to see a perceptive director speak.

I once got to see Robert Altman talk because of this. I went to London on my own just to go and see the press screening of Kansas City and see Altman go deep with a journalist. I saw David Cronenberg too. That was very cool.

Because to me then, as it is now, seeing a new film with the director is an incredibly exciting experience.

(And not only directors! I saw Rodrigo Teixeira speak recently. He was fascinating and specific and thoughtful. And made the talk feel specific for who he was speaking to. He mentioned Paul Mazursky’s Show Me the Magic and it felt like a personal recommendation.)

It makes it an individual specific event. And the Q&A carries that responsibility. It should be specific and relevant to that individual moment.

It should be relevant to the time and place that the film is being shown in.

So can we all vow to make Q&As feel magical and unique? Both questioners and answerers?

Thanks.

I’m genuinely interested in how we elevate these experiences and naming the terrible ones, so I’d love to hear from you.

• What awful questions have you witnessed?

• And what was the most exciting Q&A you’ve ever been to?

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I’ve never made a Little Scraps of Paper about a director before.

Have I not wanted to? Been scared that if I did, I would just start making films about other filmmakers? Worried all my friends would ask me to make one about them? Or is there some kind of self-shaming denial going on?

As ever, I have no idea.

But when I heard Isabel Coixet take part of a discussion with author Estrella de Diego recently, I thought she was such an open, inspiring presence that I’d ask her to be part of the series. That she spoke about Agnès Varda so frequently was extra alluring.

Isabel is an incredibly prolific filmmaker. She’s made narrative features (favourites include Un Amor and My Life Without Me) documentaries (I still need to ask her for the link to this) and TV series (like Foodie Love).

Turning up at her office in Barcelona, I was a little nervous. I’m always excited and kind of tingling before a short, but for this one I was a bit more than just that. Would she notice my odd choice of camera placement? Would she think my questions were too obvious?

Well, if she did, she was kind enough not to mention it.

She let me explore the space whilst she got on with some writing. I found her life-sized Varda cut out, books and prints that reflect a curious mind, and mountains of little scraps of paper.

I always ask participants to have their notebooks, or papers at hand - Isabel’s response was “Believe me: you’ll have A TON of little scraps of paper 😂”.

I’ve mentioned before how much I love making these short little glimpses of how someone else works. And spending time with Isabel was extremely insightful, playful and personal. And she teased me when I talked about therapy, which means I really liked her.

One moment that didn’t make the film as it’s a bit off theme is that she operates camera on all of her work. That I found truly inspiring and made me think about the intimacy I feel when shooting my feature docs and if that is transferable to narrative work.

And I love to be behind the camera. I really love it.

I feel like in a way, I transform myself into the hypothetical audience.

I’ll post that clip (and some of the other extras) on our Instagram or in the notes here.

In the meantime, enjoy the new Little Scraps of Paper:

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Notes:

Isabel’s collages - https://www.museothyssen.org/en/exhibitions/isabel-coixet-collages

I’ve been giving more talks and workshops recently.

It’s become an increasingly important part of the multitude of different strands that being a filmmaker now involves, outside making the films.

I’ve always loved giving talks, or classes. But now I’m consciously folding it into my working practice.

For me, they are a great opportunity to define what you think, and how you work. They sort of sharpen up my working method. But with an audience, who can lead them in all kinds of unexpected ways.

The audience has been really varied. From corporate to student via cineastes. And structuring what I’m talking about in a way that gives all of them a way in has been like a fresh storytelling challenge.

The blend of sharing transparently, playful interaction and just teaching is something exciting for me. (I once went with my daughter’s class on a school trip as a chaperone and was told by the teacher that I was a ‘natural primary school teacher’. I was secretly really quite proud).

Seeing as it’s so hot in Europe that my fingers feel swollen and disinclined to type, I thought I’d share an extract from a recent talk instead. This was an online one, so I have the video handy.

It was about organising creativity. Research practices, routine and where we keep and order ideas.

This piece I’m sharing is dead on brand - it’s about notebooks and process.

I’m also starting to host some of the classes and resources on my site. PDFs for research organisation structures, a reading curriculum and more.
With more downloadable courses on their way.

And if you’d ever want me to come and give one of these to your studio, your students, whoever, get in touch.

Next week subscribers get the newest Little Scraps of Paper film.

So subscribe if you’d like to hear more insight into process and ideas.

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I only spent a few days, but I did a lot of walking and some retrospective understanding.

The 80s and 90s was not a glorious high point for England and English culture. And growing up in small-town Devon was a particularly closed-minded place, a poor place, and the place where thinking differently was ready to make your life a bit harder. It felt like the way to do well in this town at that point was to stay in your lane. And do that I largely did, with alcohol, music, clothing, ways of speaking. My accent got noticed for being more Devonian in my teens, just because I went to a school where the kids there spoke those strong accents.

This feeling, this energy around me, always gave me the sense that I wanted to go somewhere else, discover other things. I like new things. I like challenges, finding out what’s beyond where I am. I think I had a pretty strong sense of that even when I was a kid.

Travel journalism was one of my great fascinations, along with sport. I would write out imaginary football teams from around the world to play computer games with. A birthday present from my brothers to me was once a guide to the Trans-Siberian Railway. Both were ways to understand the world. Both spoke to a variety of cultures outside my hometown, and both took me away from the small minded bit of little England.

Which of course is the crucial element. What I had and didn’t have, through the necessary friction of youth. And what I yearned for and pushed against.

Being back in England made me think of everything that made me want to travel in the first place.

Going home is such a challenging topic for me. Ripe for a film that I’ve tried and failed writing. Well not failed maybe, just not quite nailed. Maybe I’ll give it another go. There’s this itch of a feeling, a harsh reflection that’s thrown up on you in the town you’re from. It’s always rich with inner challenges and reframing of who I am versus who I want to be.

On these long walks this past week, I spent time thinking about what the place around me makes me feel and what it felt like to a young me.

Flashes of all the strange and wonderful places I’ve been to in the over 25 years since I’ve lived in Devon. The situations I’ve put myself in and lived in kept rising up. Not quite with pride or satisfaction, but a sense of wonder at the choices I’ve made, and my willingness to go along with and force things to happen.

A list started forming.

I love a list. Especially as a way to reveal character. Autoportrait by Édouard Levé, which does this brilliantly and I return to it often. It’s an incredible self-portrait built from seemingly unconnected sentences.

These kinds of lists, unlike stories, are little glimpses and fractions of places I’ve been and things I’ve done. As I was walking around Devon, I started collating them in my head to get more of a sense of what they mean to me.

The first big trip I really took was to South America when I was 19. Whilst I was there I took a 36-hour bus ride in Chile. Just before I got on the bus I’d washed my clothes so that I might feel fresh, but about 30 minutes into the journey I started to realise that the washing detergent was making my skin come up in big red rashes everywhere, from head to toe. I decided to just strip down to my underpants and do the entire bus journey in my pants.

I was born and raised a vegetarian, so I’ve never really had meat or fish. When I was making a film about beekeepers in Yugoslavia, I did a research trip on my own and stayed on the floor of a guy I’d never met. I went out into the country and met beekeepers. One of them made lunch for us and decided to make a fish soup with all the heads. As a guest I had to serve myself first, which meant I could tell by their gestures that I was supposed to choose the juiciest heads for myself.

In my second year at university I wrote a short film about a lighthouse keeper playing chess via post against someone from Finland. We needed to find a lighthouse. I can’t really remember if needing to find a lighthouse came first or the film idea, but touring around all these lighthouses felt like true filmmaking. Scouting still might be one of the best or worst things to do, depending on the locations you find. Somehow the British lighthouse organisation were totally okay with showing us tonnes of them, and when we chose one on an island for our film, they gave us the key.

Somewhere in the middle of this walk I start thinking about Scotland and my commercials…

The best commercial shoot I ever did, where we got to travel the UK finding out different people’s idea of what they thought of as home. As part of that we got to go to Ben Fogle’s favourite beach on Harris. Which took freaking ages. When we got there it was so brutally foggy and windy that we couldn’t see or really stand, but then the sun cleared for about 20 minutes and we got the most glorious shots with this incredible water in front of us. Then Ben, and the advertising agency, got on a private jet and went home.

That’s just pure joy though. Going to beautiful places you might not otherwise go to. There’s no great challenge to that, just a bit of determination and good production sense.

There are other times, especially when I was younger, where it took this sense of drive and not quite bravery but well-filled selective ignorance and single-mindedness.

I’ve never sought out danger of any sort, but I also need to be dissuaded quite hard if I think something’s a good idea. When I started researching a drunken horse race in Guatemala, I wasn’t that put off that some people had been burned alive for taking photos there a few years beforehand. We turned up in the town. The Mayan council wanted to vet us, so we were led into a little hut in the dark, where I had to explain what I wanted the film to be. After about 23 hours of travelling. They put potatoes in the fire and and I sat with this circle of elders, telling them what I thought the film would be. I was 27.

These places weren’t really linked in my brain. It was more like a tumble of situations, places, and people.

I filmed the last person in the UK who made handmade glass eyes. About once a year someone writes to me trying to find a way to get in touch with him. Lots of these situations I put myself in take on different meaning when I learn more, or think more, about what the person I was with actually meant to me or to the world. It’s a particularly niche, particularly beautiful thing that is obsolete.

I once got to interview Franco Battiato in his house in Sicily. If I had known and appreciated who Franco was and his music as much as I do now, I might have flipped out. Instead I just got to do a very focused interview and have lunch in this really charming man’s house. In fact the main thing I took away from him, for years, was that he gave us a herbal liqueur which was un-f’ing-believable and which he told us they only made in a small store around the corner from his house.

I don’t know what this teaches me about myself as a filmmaker or as a person. The best I can understand is that I have a high tolerance for discomfort, a lot of patience and I can stand still for ages.

These are the the things that flooded in as I walked and remembered and tried to get a sense of perspective on ideas of home and where we come from and what that means to me.

And the joy that filmmaking has given me. And the bravery. And stupidity.

Does any of this mean anything? Who knows.

Don’t you also lose your mind when you return home?

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I try and actively learn from cinema. From filmmakers and films that long pre-date me. I feel like we are sometimes too fixated on the ‘now’ and could do with a dollop of history. Too many filmmakers can rant about Spielberg but have never seen Dreyer or Ophuls or even Edward Yang. The idea that contemporary painters wouldn’t look at Caravaggio is impossible.

I just read the fairly new translation of Diary of a Film by Jean Cocteau, written whilst he was making Beauty and the Beast.

And it might be one of the best books about filmmaking that I have ever read.

Not technically, or conceptually, (although it has plenty of both) but in terms of what it feels like to make a film. I felt so utterly calmed and connected to Cocteau when I was reading it. His ambitions for cinema, his struggle, his reluctance to do what was expected.

His writing is so open and intimate, yet poetic and thoughtful.

It’s also funny and French.

For example:

M. came all the way from Paris to get a wet sheet in the face. There’s cinema for you.

or

I am snatching this tale out of the void, by surprise. If fate blocks me, I will fight it. I’ll invent some card trick to use against it.

I loved the book, and took notes of so much of it that I thought I would share some favourite pieces here.

Illness.

Cocteau was suffering from carbuncles (don’t look them up if you aren’t sure. I did and felt a bit sick), hives, boils and all sorts. At the end, he also gets jaundice.

I’m woken by unbearable pain and since I can’t sleep or pace back and forth, I relieve myself by picking up this notebook and attempting to cry out my pain to the unknown friends who will read these lines. They exist. I know them without knowing them. I can just see them in the shadows.

A savage beast (the Beast) is racking my neck with powerful claws. The carbuncle has reached the period when it’s developing its crater and the armies of enemy microbes surround it and defend me. This relentless battle is fought over one night for me and over years for the microbes, over generations of microbes who build a Great Wall of China around the diseased area. I’ve just taken Pyrethane. Despite how brave I’ve decided to be, despite how certain I am that I’m paying the price for the too-great-joy of making a film I’ve been dreaming about for months and months, it’s difficult for me to live through these minutes

And then gives us a bit of a jolt of insight into treatments at the time:

Grips suffering from this problem treat it by applying grated potato to their faces.

The times and connection to it

He made the film immediately after the Second World War. Power outages, shortages of food, people, sanitation - all of this is a constant backdrop for the making of the film. And what I really loved was that Cocteau is not separate from the outside world. He and the film are deeply connected to it, and reflective of it. Something that I feel is somewhat being lost today.

Whatever unreal and private world I lock myself away in, it’s impossible for me to lose interest in the Nuremberg trial.

This is the last day of 1945. Whatever happens to us here in France, we must constantly tell ourselves that we are in France and that the worst internal quarrels are better than an occupation. I know a thing or two about occupation. I am occupied by microbes. These red patches torturing me make me think of the gray froth that has vanished. How grateful I would be to those who could rid me of these microbes. Praise those who rid France of hers. The rest is just malaise.

I admire the fact that France does not take note of itself and that it denigrates itself. For a poet, to take note of yourself is to live poetically. For the prince, to take note of yourself is to live historically. Two failings that lead to ridicule and for which one pays a high price. Erik Satie used to say: you cannot be and seem. And he added the line I always quote: “The essential thing is not to turn down the Legion of Honor. It is to not deserve it.”

Incredibly French

And he is incredibly French. Not only does he treat some of his boils with lard (er, what?), but he will drop a big sweeping statement about the ideology of a people and it will feel absolutely just.

On the eve of his execution, Ravaillac said: “It will be a hard day.” It was a hard day. Rain. We leave.

It would be tedious if every night I wrote down: I filmed my seven shots. I finished such and such a scene. The main thing is to make the young people who will read me one day understand that heroism is the very condition of the poet, that the poet is nothing but a servant under the orders of a force that commands him, and that a true servant does not abandon his master. He accompanies him to the scaffold. Today I was working in such virulent pain that I was constantly afraid I would black out, but I continued, I directed, I invented, I received visitors as if I had endless resilience.

Several times I felt the symptoms of nitrous oxide: the commotion of our work suddenly seemed to have an incredible quality of coarseness and unity.

We’re rushing headlong into a world of multiplicity, subtlety, and secrets, compared to which our machinery looks like a meager farce. I suppose this is the blackout coming on. But our world exists and it demands our modesty. I was continually deciding where the camera would go, directing the artists’ performance, going to get them in their dressing rooms, checking the screen tests, speeding up Alekan and Aldo when their respective slowness added up. I persevere against the court that sentences the exceptional to torture. I will accomplish the exceptional. That is the only privilege France still has.

And poetic…

Cocteau was a poet before a filmmaker and some of the writing is sublime.

The film was unspooling, gravitating, sparkling outside of me, as solitary, impervious, and distant as a star. It had killed me. It rejected me and lived its own life. All I found in it were the memories attached to each foot of film and the suffering it had cost me. I didn’t suspect that the others could follow its story. I thought they were all immersed in what I was imagining.

Great on cinema.

And Cocteau comes alive when talking about cinema. It’s always revelatory to me how bold and experimentally great directors were thinking about cinema and its form more than 70 years ago. We have become a filmmaking culture that is dominated by story and narrative rules. Despite having audiences that are supposedly media-savvy, we are more predictable and safe than ever.

I spent my Sunday correcting the cutting of the opening in my head. I think that cinema must cheat with space and time.

By removing the music over certain passages, I will ensure we create these syncopations that make the imagination stumble and wake up.

I think that the crime of not paying attention, of which no one considers themselves guilty, is the worst of the crimes against the mind and participates in the general unraveling of intelligence. Egotism is at the root of this disorder. “I get to the theater, I look for my seat, I disturb the audience and the actors, I scorn the play—what does it matter, since other people do not exist or only exist to suit the pleasure I’m after.” A strange pleasure! Any beautiful work of art remains incomprehensible if you skip a single line of it. And this audience that judges, that dares to judge, shows up at the end of the first act.

And when he talks about directors and directing, he is so precise, so clear.

I suppose it’s the obligation to appear sure of themselves that ultimately gives directors such self-confidence.

Yet the additional numbers, the on-the-spot finds, nourish a film and make the editing much richer. I haven’t shot a single indifferent image yet. Each one pleased me and added to the film’s meaning.

And the battle of making a film

Of course, no good film (or film book) has it easy. Each film must be wrestled from the abyss. Cocteau combines his poetic nature, his insight into cinema and filmmaking, his illness and his french-ness into some superb passages.

The only perfect take is destroyed by the laughter of a kid from the village. The light, the artists’ performance, their gait, the smoke, the tops of the trees crowned with sun—everything was collaborating to give us a chance. And in one second that chance is destroyed. You never get it back. You have to let it go and make sure you don’t allow yourself to get caught in the bad dream of running after it, of hammering away, of trying to purposely create a group of harmonious circumstances produced by happenstance.

I wake up this morning after a night of dreams that roiled like dirty water, shimmering absurdly. My neck hurts. The boil coming up on the back of my neck yesterday is swelling. The sickness is looking for the sensitive spot and wants to defeat me. I’ll fight the microbes until the last minute, but they are stronger than us. We work from nine to four thirty. The workmen stop work for a union meeting. On Saturday, sound, which is paid stupidly little, is going on strike. I’ll shoot silent match shots of the deer and Josette feeling unwell. Internal struggle. External struggle. Everything is in league against this film.

This is my last set. Poignant sadness. All the exhausting work of a film vanishes, leaving us only with its reflection. The places where we struggled, fought, suffered together become new places, inhabited by tenants who treat us like visiting foreigners.

What is this film I’ve drawn from my substance worth? I wonder. It’s too entangled with me, too bogged down in memories, for me to be able to tell.

Constant wonder

But amidst this battle for life and art, Cocteau has a constant sense of joy. Joy at the wonders of cinema, joy at the camaraderie and creativity. He is constantly praising his crew, his cast, his producers. He is constantly revelling in finding solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems.

I ask myself: I wonder if these hard days might be the sweetest of my life. Full of friendship, affectionate arguments, laughter, and control over fleeting time.

On my way to Saint-Maurice, I felt happy, lifted by some unknown joy. There is nothing more beautiful than to write a poem with people, faces, hands, lights, and objects you place wherever you like.

Why does the notion of “the traveling players” and “the actors on a tour stop” enjoy such prestige? The sight of all the behind-the-scenes stuff in the open air is astonishing. I never tire of it. It makes up for constantly having to wait. Words fail to describe the exquisite atmosphere at our hotel (Hôtel de Bordeaux) despite the lack of comforts. It’s high school, vacation, travel. For me, living together, working, and talking about the work is the height of luxury.

And what he is trying to do makes me wish we were trying more like this now. I found this book like a challenge to me and a call to arms. It felt like it fit perfectly with what I have been thinking about and writing about and trying to make.

A film is writing in images and I try to give it an atmosphere that corresponds with feelings more than facts.

Last week I even wrote whilst thinking about earnings that nothing I spend money on is sensible. And that making films is not sensible.

M. tells Paul: “Why is Jean making a film? It’s not sustainable.” What an astonishing thing to say. As if anything at all were sustainable, starting with the world.

Each shot was snatched by force. And I’d be so bold as to say that I did the things I wanted to do. No shot left me with the nagging anxiety of the clash between what is and what should be. If there are mistakes, they are mine and I can’t blame anyone else for them.

And finally, as I linger in occasional mid life crises:

The uglier we get with age, the more our work must get beautiful and reflect a childlike version of ourselves.

It really is a special book. The sense of the world around him and the world he’s trying to create puts what we are living now in perspective and I found solace in that.

And brilliantly, he can barely watch at the end. He writes that at the first screening he is holding Marlene Dietrich’s hand, not realising he is crushing it.

Growing up with three siblings, games are a huge part of what I do. Probably to a ridiculous extent. Once my youngest brother and I both sunburned the inside of our armpits, on the same arm, because we spent so long at the beach throwing stones into a cup in a very precise, predetermined order.

When I talk about games I don’t solely mean competition. Yes, I am competitive. Yes, I will sometimes pretend I’m in a race with a person who has no idea of my existence whilst I’m walking down the street. But this isn’t about competitiveness. This is about games and creativity.

I think games are an absolutely essential part of interacting with the world - and a really vital element of storytelling.

When my daughter was young we decided to make our own board game, because we didn’t want to play the ones we had. She was very young, possibly three. We just got a big piece of paper and started thinking about what the game could be. We made squares, decided you needed a dice to roll along, and then decided to make the bad bits in the game crabs and sharks - because she wasn’t fond of crabs back then. It made sense that if you got pinched by a crab you missed a turn, and if you got eaten by a shark you went back to the start.

We made it a little bit of a story: your boat had shipwrecked and you had to get to the deserted island. You could only do that by jumping on different things floating in the sea;

• an octopus

• some seaweed

If you jumped on a shark, back to the beginning. If you jumped on a crab, he pinched you, held on, and you missed a go. And if you were lucky and jumped on a whale, it spout-powered you forward to the next whale.

After we’d drawn it out and tested it for a bit, we realised it was a little too simple, and that you needed a few other elements. She went to bed, and I decided to paint it all to make it look good. The other elements we added - which turned this game from quite fun, and a bit too hard to actually finish, into something demonic that makes you question your own place in the world - were:

• a shark card, a crab card and a weather card for each player

The shark card sends the other person back to the beginning, even if they were one square from the end. A crab pauses them, so you could catch up. Weather makes them slip backwards a spot — almost always into a shark, and back to the beginning.

A game that’s only about 40 squares long usually takes about 30 minutes to finish, by which point you are cursing, laughing, and wondering whether you shouldn’t have made a more solvable board game.

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Thinking of that game, and others like it, and using that part of my brain, has always helped me massively with storytelling. It's world-building. It's storytelling in its most refined, simple sense. You want somebody to get the rules of the game immediately and start finding their own, personalised way in.

It feels similar to when I’m making my Little Scraps of Paper films. Watching someone work out the rules of their own world and find the play inside them.

I’ve written before about giving people gateways into your story. That information you load them up with at the start of a film - and how you release it to them at crucial points - is you giving them the tools to navigate this world you’re building, this world you’re exploring.

A game feels like a discovery you’re inside of. There’s an elegance and a self-teaching to them. There’s a sense of wonder as it happens, as you become part of it.That feeling should permeate filmmaking.

On set, I like to maintain that sense of playfulness and invention. Look - here’s me looking about as happy as I ever look, because I happen to be holding a giant water pistol on set. I’m not really sure why I’m holding a water pistol on set, but it certainly made it joyous. And to me, a set should be a joyous place.

For me, games are an even better starting place than the written word for helping children begin creating their own stories. They have all the same elements world-building, a narrative arc, a goal, challenges and obstacles - and they’re sometimes less encumbered with narrative constraints than writing or story invention is. After all, that’s why children’s books are so hard. The simplicity of language combined with the depth of idea is extremely hard to pull off.

And the benefit of playing games with kids and adults together is that you can get more loose with the rules. Which leads you to inventive places.

Like last Christmas, when we were watching a quiz show on television with my daughter’s Spanish granddad, who’s a little bit deaf. I was whispering the answers to my daughter, who would then shout them out loud as if she’d got them right, and kept getting very impressed nods and well-done’s from her granddad.

Now, trivia isn’t really a game so much as a mental challenge - but you can make your own game version of anything.

Me and two of my really good friends once decided to play Trivial Pursuit and turn it into a drinking game. We were staying at a friend’s house who had an insane collection of liqueurs and drinks, and we realised there was one for each colour. We started the game with the rule that you had to take a drink every time you got a question wrong - which inevitably led to the downfall of the game.

That’s what I really love about games, and why they feel important to how I think about filmmaking. The problem-solving, the world-bending, the narrative - and, above all, the joy of making something.

I think that’s what filmmaking is, really. You’re just making a game and hoping people want to play. So I think I’d advocate for the idea that filmmakers should all be playing games, and sometimes even making them.

After all, even if you find it doesn’t help at all, at least you’ve had fun. And maybe even beaten, or got to start a particularly pointed argument with, someone you love.

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I’ve done a few interviews here before (Christopher Barrett and Elaine McMillion Sheldon for example) but I’ve never really wanted to just add to the incredible pile of general interviews there are out there.

So these are going to be ultra-specific. About one theme specific to that particular filmmaker, and getting into detail about that.

To kick off this new cycle, I thought Frédéric Da would be perfect.

Fred and I met when our daughters were in the same pre-school, became friends and started biting each other. We both had to practice our best apologetic parent face when one of them had bite marks on their arm again.

Fred is a huge cineaste, his newest film played LA Festival of Movies and he made it all on a phone. I knew he’d have lots to say about the format and how shooting on a phone impacts directing.

For those who prefer to listen, the recording of the Zoom is posted below.

TL: Loved the new movie. It’s quite a step into the phone in a way that Teenage Emotions wasn’t.

FD: Absolutely. It was kind of the idea, which was that with Teenage Emotions people were like: “wow, it’s so pure, it almost feels real. It feels like you’re so close to kids” — and that was the charm and the gamble of the movie: What do I do with no money? How do I make this work?

This is always how I think: How do we do something where the entire charm is the formal proposition? There is this thing I’ve been kind of messing around with, which is using five or six phones to do a single take and film people in close-ups in conversations and then edit down that 45–50 minute single take to about four minutes to keep the pure essence — just entertaining and fun to watch, and it makes you feel like you’re immersed in the thing. And for me, the phone was perfect for that.

TL: Were you already doing those?

FD: I was.

There’s a story behind Teenage Emotions: that summer I made a movie using the phone as a regular camera — a feature — but I hated it. We ended up throwing it in the trash. But there was one scene where I tested out this thing with all these cameras, and that scene was awesome. A bunch of kids on couches talking about the different guests arriving at the party. I spent so much time watching it and editing it. It was really dynamic and fresh.

When I was at the school, I thought: wait, some of my students are talking about school drama — this would be a really good thing to use that style on. It felt different, felt fresh, and it felt like you’re very close.

Keep in mind, it’s all students filming other students, so there’s this other layer: the students being filmed would then film the students who were filming them, and create storylines like that. They’re all kind of filming each other.

And then Teenage Emotions came out and I was in this place I’m always in — what do I do next? Can I pull this off again? The question was always: am I really just going to teach my classes? I always need to do something else.

It’s very strange. You’re 25, before you know it you’re 34. But the kids around you are still 15 and 16. After a while it makes you think “I have to do something.” You want to capture the kids, because you get attached to them and they grow up so fast. And then they’re very different from the kids you captured.

TL: So this came out of a restlessness — I’ve done this, I need to push the form further, or be bolder with the story.

FD: It was both. But first and foremost: what’s the formal proposition? Why is this cool? And how do we make a movie where the fact that it’s $0 is not hindering the film — it’s actually why the film is good, it’s doing the heavy lifting. That is always the question when I’m making a low-budget movie. It has to be answered. You cannot skate around it.

For Isaiah’s Phone the radical thing became: what if we made a good vertical movie? What if we made a movie that’s actually a social drama — vertical, found footage — and it’s a way to get even closer to the kid, and make Teenage Emotions actually look as fake as I knew it was when I was making it? Where the phone is a character in the movie.

There were other movies I had in mind. One of the main ones was David Holzman’s Diary, by Jim McBride. This movie is about a guy who decides to make a diary of his life and gets a 16mm camera. It’s potentially the first real found-footage movie. It’s purely a character portrait of this guy using this tool. It’s a detail, but it’s the little details that get you excited when you’re thinking: where does my movie fit in the movies?

TL: Yeah, that’s a really important point. Because I think a lot of people are invigorated to make something on a phone now, but just make a quote-unquote regular movie — just going to shoot it on the phone.

FD: Yeah, I don’t like that as much.

TL: I can tell. And that’s an important differentiation — what’s the formal proposition, what drives this? If you’re starting from that formal proposition, how does it change how you construct the movie? We’ve both lived through years of development on scripts. Do you go: the formal proposition is different, so I don’t need to write a script in the same way?

FD: It’s pretty close. I am going to write a script, but I’m going to write it with the images. If you broke it down classically, Isaiah’s Phone actually has quite a classical structure. I was like: everything I do in screenwriting, I’m going to do it now physically. So we would reshoot things a ton of times based on me rewatching the footage. It is written — there’s just no physical typing.

When you have a kid like Isaiah — he was working behind the scenes on Teenage Emotions, I’ve had him since fifth grade, he was just obsessed with movies — I got really close with these kids, because they were slightly awkward in high school, so the motivation for a lot of them was to be part of something, to have something to do.

He didn’t really have a phone at 15 or 16, so I asked his dad: can I give him a phone for the purposes of this? For most of the movie, I’m not actually there. I’m there for the bigger scenes.

TL: How were you directing those things? Are you sometimes saying: Isaiah, let’s redo that, put the phone here — are you making those choices?

FD: Absolutely, all the time. I’m doing it based on the drafts. I’ll say: hey, show me your room. So he’ll shoot it and upload it to Dropbox. Then I’ll watch it and say: I don’t like this, but I liked this and I liked that — let’s focus on those. And can you turn it horizontal here? So we can have 10 minutes of vertical and then a break of horizontal. That’s also constructed.

TL: I felt that, and I enjoyed it — because once you get too comfortable understanding a movie, you stop questioning it. And I think you don’t want this film to feel like a gimmick. It’s easy to dismiss something so formally constructed as one.

FD: I agree.

TL: Unless the film shows it’s aware of its own construction.

FD: Which was a huge debate — and still is, in my mind — about the opening title card. This was a big internal and external struggle, with my buddies I’d show it to, with Roxanne, who I work with super closely. Even now: is that the right choice? I’m still not 100 percent. But I’ve shown it enough — in LA, New York, and France — that I can objectively watch it and go: I like it. I think this is good.

TL: I love hearing about filmmakers losing battles within their own movie — even with themselves — because that’s the reality. You’re not sure. You just go: OK, I’m going to live with this.

FD: It’s the eternal tension between making movies for yourself and making movies to be seen. That’s the constant fight, at least for me. David Foster Wallace talked about this in writing terms - he said once you get the second one, you lose the first, so you always have to protect the first.

TL: And the way you think about your own movie changes, because it’s also about what responsibility you have to the proposition of the film. If that title card was doing more — or if it’s the only moment outside the world of the phone —

FD: Yes and no. There’s one other moment at the other bookend — the a cappella sound of him drumming. I’m a little split on that too.

TL: You’re giving the audience something — even if you fight them, it’s like the Buñuel thing, a fight within a narrative.

We’ve both got a pile of movies that need money to be made more traditionally. But what’s the freeform side — you’ve pushed it quite far twice now. What’s the next iteration?

FD: I don’t know if this is it, but: putting myself in a movie. Which is the thing I want to do the least. My brain goes: how do you make that work without it being self-centred or narcissistic? And then my brain goes: well, maybe that’s exactly what it needs to be — the most self-centred, the most narcissistic thing. An autofiction, something closer to Kiarostami. Maybe the final piece of this trilogy is about a teacher who is basically a wrinkly teenager, made by him, everyone playing themselves.

It’s not because it’s in the US, either. The last one there, in ’94, was brilliant. I was 16. England hadn’t qualified, so me and my friends decided to support Ireland. We watched the games at different people’s houses, drank too much, and then went outside to play football in the middle of the night. One night we ended up in the orchard near my house. It was pitch black. We couldn’t see anything. We spent the entire time running into trees.

Football is unequivocally the greatest game on earth. It is both incredibly simple and infinitely difficult. It’s the only sport you can grab pretty much any object in the world (socks, bottle top, pebble, for example) and start playing football with it around wherever you are. I love it, both playing and watching. (I might claim to have all kinds of very excellent cineaste favourite films, but the VHS we used to have of the greatest goals from the World Cup might secretly be number one).

The World Cup is the pinnacle. Every four years it’s a celebration of football and the way it reflects culture and identity. From the age of eight it’s been a pivotal event. It’s in the summer, there’s always a game on my birthday, and I get swept away in the emotion of it all.

I am fervently, genuinely anti-nationalist. And yet when a tournament comes around I’ve got a George Cross painted on my cheek, I’m wearing an England shirt, playing World in Motion constantly and crying because we’ve lost on penalties again.

The World Cup was also an education for me. Through international football I learned about the dictatorship in Argentina, the fall of Yugoslavia, Spain emerging from under Franco. The intersection of sport and politics and society that I never really understood from doing history at school. Football helped me pull together all the things I was interested in.

And I think that window onto the world grew into my filmmaking career.

That fascination with the intersection of sport and the machinations of the wider world led me into some of the great non-fiction writing about football. When I was 17 I read Football Against the Enemy by Simon Kuper. Kuper travels through fractured states, using football as a lens to examine shifting geopolitical landscapes. It’s a brilliant bit of journalism and kick-started a wave of non-fiction books about sports. Most of which I devoured. This book had elements of travel, big picture politics and intimate human stories - all rooted in how what happens on the pitch permeates through everyday society, and back again. That book made me wonder - could I do that? Could I travel and write about football and life and use one to understand the other?

At some point I realised journalism wasn’t quite right for me, because I loved images too much. I was really getting into arthouse cinema, through Wong Kar-Wai and Kiarostami and Angelopoulos and more. Then I saw Leon Gast’s masterpiece When We Were Kings in the cinema, and I understood that a great sports documentary could do everything that book had done, and yet also be expressive and emotive. It could place you inside an event, with sights and sounds that made you feel what it all meant. Not just tell you about something but make you live it.

Ever since, I wanted to make a sports documentary. I kept trying by pitching ideas, or getting in touch with sports journalists I loved. I wrote outlines, proposals and pitch decks and totally failed to get any of them going. Finally I convinced Martin and Gotham at Religion of Sports and they let me make my film about the baseball team inside San Quentin prison (here’s an extract). Sport as the way in to everything else: institutional violence, redemption, who America locks up and who it doesn’t.

The best sports documentaries work because sport encapsulates society and interpersonal dynamics and puts them in a decisive chronology. You use a game, a tournament, a team, a player - to look at ideas and themes that help us understand ourselves and the world around us. That’s the power of the form.

Recently a friend showed me rough cuts of a series he’s making about Johan Cruyff. It’s breathtaking. It rejects chronology almost entirely. Most of what happened is public knowledge, has been rehashed, was lived clearly at the time. Instead it puts you inside Cruyff’s head. What he was exploring, what he was testing in terms of boundaries, what he believed about the game and what the game revealed about everything else. It’s all ideas. It’s not really interested in the timeline, so much as the conceptual threads that underpin it all.

It is a total exception nowadays.

Granted, there are few people like Cruyff. And no footballers like him now. (Are there any sports people now?) But sports documentaries removed ideas and the power of allegory or metaphor from themselves. And instead became about telling the story of what happened. Not why, or what that meant, but just what happened.

They’ve settled into a grammar of triumph and redemption, a pursuit of the universal that has made them utterly bland. When did you last watch a sports documentary that seriously engaged with a political idea? A social one? That used sport as a window rather than a subject?

This is partly because they aren’t really documentaries anymore. They are corporate vessels - essentially branded content. If the person it’s about is an EP (ahem, like goldenballs himself), then it’s basically an advert.

It’s all corporatised to remove any sense of culture, politics or the greater world.

Which, of course, is exactly what’s happened to the World Cup.

Three host countries and 48 teams are too many in each category. A 980 sticker album? The tournament has become so obviously about money, so bloated, so lacking in any coherent identity, that it bears almost no relation to the thing it supposedly is - a global celebration of football.

Watching this World Cup is like watching the Rolling Stones now. Ageing, hugely corporate, full of faces very present in the Epstein files.

The World Cups I watched as a kid felt — I know this is romantic, I don’t care — more like watching the Rolling Stones in a pub in Brighton in 1965. That’s still pretty commercial, but full of local flavour and immediacy and idiosyncrasy.

What’s next for football after this? Is there a saturation point? At some point you wonder if the thing breaks under its own weight, or if we just keep watching anyway.

Oh and just so we are clear, I reserve the right to delete this entire post if England make it to the semi-final. And I reserve the right to fly to New York, and to get a Harry Kane tattoo if they get to the actual final.

But I’m still gonna be snooty about it.

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Part one is about building sustainable creative careers. Part two is on shooting things alongside your projects. Read them here:

There’s this line in The Usual Suspects:

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

That film is so unsettling to think back on now, because at the time I thought it was amazing. But now I see it as emblematic of a certain period of Hollywood. Brilliantly made, extremely clever and utterly hollow. And a film made and released by reprehensible dickheads.

So let’s do the opposite of what it suggests is the greatest trick. Let’s tell the world we exist.

I’ve recently redone my whole website. It’s now my entire filmmaking world in one place - you can watch, read and book me all directly on the site.

The films I’ve made (including links to rent and buy) are there. The best branded work I’ve directed, the talks I give, my consultancy, a store with products like this book I made, and highlights from this Substack.

It’s now all in one accessible, coherent place.

Want to buy a poster from one of my films? You can. Book me to give a workshop on interview techniques? Yes. See my trailers? Certainly.

This shouldn’t really be revolutionary, I know. And it isn’t. But so much of my career has felt fragmented, or in service of others. I’ve been so focused on trying to get films made that I haven’t nurtured my audience well enough. And not only that, I haven’t made it easy for people to get to what they do want.

To make this site, I had to merge a few domains, build a structure out of a very spontaneous process of offering consultancy and talks, and make new products.

I haven’t spent ages designing it, because it was more important to make it accessible and available. This site does not have the graphic beauty of the titles for The Brutalist.

But it is clear, and clean, and aesthetically coherent.

And that makes things possible that just weren’t easy enough before. Or, that the world didn’t know they could do. In all the thinking about how to keep surviving as a filmmaker now, I’ve realised that I need to make it a bit easier for the world to access the parts of me that I want the world to access. And that process helps nourish and build my audience.

So the site is a world of me, written by me.

It’s built to grow, too. I’ve got some digital courses that will be downloadable for people who don’t live near where I can give workshops. Can I build a financing model? An eclectic, profitable store? I don’t know. But everything I do will be mainly there from now on.

My film series Little Scraps of Paper will live there and only there, for example.

All this is not an argument for sharing your life or for sharing everything, everywhere (all at once). It’s an argument for sharing what you want to share and letting the world know you exist.

Thinking of ideas for how to do that in between making films — things that aren’t Instagram, ways to keep the site feeling like an organic, evolving place — has led to some creatively fun things. Like this book called East 10th Street we released.

I have this archive of 35mm negatives and transparencies that I shot whilst making my film with Saul Leiter. I thought now might be a good time to share them, along with some stories. So we made a book and people can now actually buy it (it’s almost sold out). That makes me happy — it’s in some book stores I love, and I’m giving a talk about it soon. That’s not a new film, but it’s all part of my world of making films and allows me other ways to be creative and engage with audiences.

I have always thrived off this combination of willing things into existence, and making things for the joy of making them and getting them out into the world.

Even if it doesn’t lead anywhere, you’re learning and expressing and growing. And you never know who is paying attention and what becomes possible. Sometimes all the world needs is for you to tell them that you do this thing.

Part of all this is my kind of contract with the world. Saying what you’re doing and making becomes a promise. I like that pressure. It’s how I’ve made anything I’ve dreamt up become a reality. As soon as I shift the tense from ‘I’d like to make’ to ‘I’m making’ then I get a blast of confidence, and whoever I’m talking with is engaged and expectant.

It locks me in and it starts to build a positive feedback loop. Because I’ve been going on about it for a while, with all sorts of people, I can’t NOT make this bird film. I would have nobody left to talk to.

And let’s remember that that is the point of all this extra stuff.

I’m doing it and exploring this because I want to continue to make films, to make them financially viable and to live off them.

I get it, it’s a lot. It’s a lot if not making films, just to be able to make films.

I used to always think my spirit animal would be a fox (doesn’t everyone say something like that — because who would say Tiger and mean it?).

But maybe I’m actually a duck, frantically paddling under water, just to look like I’m not moving forwards. And trying to keep not letting things affect me like water off my own back.

Do we really have any choice though? It’s insanely hard to finance films and it’s insanely hard to make a living off them.

Maybe I just need to reframe all this work mentally so that it feels ok and vital and vibrant. If I think of it as having my own cinema where people come to watch my films and chat to me, buy my books, ask for advice and be part of my community — then maybe it all feels positive and full of future potential.

It’s my space, I’m in charge of programming and everyone who wants to come is welcome.

(Apart from Trevor, he’s a dick).

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I think I’ll make the next episode of this series about physical media and having things people can hold.

But for now, I’d love to know - how are you sharing your work, your world?

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To get some kind of control on the idea and to make sure that the films had a clear purpose, I wrote a mini set of Dogma-style rules for them.

Each one needed to have a written title.
Each one could be filmed in the mornings.
They could each be edited in a day.
As soon as I was done, I posted them online.

It had started as an idea of something that would make my reel a little more interesting. Rather than waiting for the right project to come along, I thought I could just create it. After cup four of the coffee I thought making one film was pointless. What was it for? Why did it exist? Better to create an entire series.

For the first couple of films I got my friend Ben Todd to shoot them but on the second shoot he said, “You could just do these yourself,” which was actually a fantastic gift. I realised I could shoot things myself and that would allow me to make films in a very spontaneous way. I think it also got him out of shooting another 25 films that I had in mind… but I’ll let him off.

Occasionally I would get some help. Someone else would make a film for the series, or a friend of mine would cut an episode because I was giggling too much during the interview, or a friend would compose some music.

The series actually ended up being pretty successful. Lots of people watched it. They played at design festivals and film festivals and we did special series for exhibitions. I got to film such amazing people as baker Lily Vanilli, screenwriter Tony Grisoni and designer Peter Opsvik (he designed the Tripp-Trapp chair that feels omnipresent in artsy homes).

The Tate wanted me to make some for them, as did the British Library. The Guardian, Monocle and It’s Nice That wrote about them. The films had a real identity.

After two years and about 40 films we had a big exhibition, a big party, and I decided to retire it. After all it had mainly started as something to make in a singular sense and as an excuse for me to nosy round fascinating people’s studios. I’d had my fill and I really wanted to make what I thought would be a real film.

I was feeling this kind of internal pressure to make a feature. So many short-form pieces were great, but I wanted something that allowed me to go deeper. Not only did in the storytelling and filmmaking craft sense, but in the career sense - I felt like I wasn’t a grown-up filmmaker until I did so.

My commercial career was getting busy. I wanted to write and direct features. There was no way I could keep the series going.

I took all the energy I had for this Little Scraps of Paper project and directed it toward making my first feature. Everything I’d learned about shooting myself, about being self-sufficient, about willing the project into existence, really helped me make In No Great Hurry.

I really miss the spontaneity, connection and lightness of touch that making this series was for me as a filmmaker. Making them was quick and meaningful, like a great dinner with a new friend.

So I thought I’d relaunch them.

The core of the films is the same. They’re glimpses into the magic of ideas and the process of keeping them, about creation and what that does to us as human beings.

As soon as I did the first shoot a couple of weeks ago, I realised how empowering and enjoyable making them is. It feels like a playful version of filmmaking with lots of the pressure off. And it feels very collaborative with the artist that I’m portraying. So much of the doubt that long-form filmmaking brings is removed because I can control the destiny of these films. They feel purely expressive, inquisitive and open - I’m making them as little delights.

Here’s a quote from Patrick Vale, who was the first person I filmed when I was in New York. Pat is an old friend, a brilliant illustrator, and someone who talks to me about sketchbooks and what they mean to a human being.

I know every drawing I’ve made. I know which books they’re in, and by looking at that drawing, it does trigger what you remembered about that person in that moment. So I do love that all of those drawings can serve as trigger points to access what I saw at that moment.

This iteration of the project feels even more human and tender than before. Organic and curious and very very much me. I would like to think that I’m a better filmmaker than I was first time around. Hopefully I can make these just as fun, just as inquisitive and find the human depth that reflects everything I’ve been doing in my career.

I’ve already filmed three. I’m going to be relaunching the project at the end of June. There will be a live event and then the films will roll out.

I’m loving the openness that comes with thinking about making them. And part of that openness is being open to who might be good as a subject.

Want to suggest someone? Want one for your gallery or release? Get in touch:

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My way of thinking about releasing them has also opened up. I don’t think YouTube is the way to go for almost anything short form anymore. I want to personalise how we do it. So, where the series lives is still up for discussion. Events for sure. Direct downloads? Tie-ins with galleries? Publishing launches?

Or maybe I’ll just release them here for subscribers?

I don’t know and that feels like pure, excited possibility.

And yet still, sorting through the photos on my phone feels like an impossibly vast task. There’s no way to get a sense of distance or time, just a constant scroll of memories to get lost in.

I needed to find a set of behind the scenes photos for a workshop recently and just got constantly lost and distracted.

For a start, I find it very easy to get distracted by a picture I haven’t seen for a few years and to notice the changes. Like when I see my daughter when she was small and I melt into marvelling at life. Or if I see a great shirt and wonder why I ever got rid of it. Not that I am equating those two things, of course. Friends, colleagues, someone I worked with once. Each picture a kind of excuse to wonder about that person.

I use my phone for references and reminders and inspirations too, so there are constant images of things that I’ve wanted to look into, or learn more about. Fragments of text I found some kind of joy in, pictures from a show or a bit of text from a book. A curated minefield of work I love.

But where I really stumbled in this search was seeing pictures from projects that never fully happened. Pictures from trips I’ve taken for research,

Portraits of people I’ve gone to meet to see about making a film with them.

I lost half a day to this photo search because of all these ghost projects. I found all the BTS I needed, but then I went back through every photo of unfinished, or unstarted, projects.

What do they all add up to? Do I describe them as dead things? If I go and meet someone to make a film about them and the film never happens, what is that meeting in my memory?

If I scout a specific location that never gets shot in, what is that place to me?

So many projects that were taken further than the idea stage, through research and discussions, yet never to actual filming. What do these threads amount to? What did they give me? What am I meant to understand by their cumulative weight?

I see every part of what I do as nourishing and feeding the whole, yet these aborted worlds do sit somewhat uneasily for me. Sometimes they feel like failures on my part. If only I could have worked them out, or forced them into existence. Then they wouldn’t just exist in the depths of my phone and the back of my brain.

(And if this becomes a ‘journey not the destination’ type post, you can nail my testicles to the floor of the Red Square, like Pyotr Pavlensky - which was one of the reference photos I saw on this search).

1. ELIOT WEINBERGER

Let’s start off easy. I love Eliot Weinberger’s books. They are a blend of non-fiction, poetry, translation, history and humour that I find really special. His books manage to be both utterly mundane and mythical, silly and sublime. Which is a kind of high bar for me.

I wrote to him, to see if he would be interested in having a film made about him. And he graciously agreed to meet if I was in NY. Seeing as that kind of offer was the genesis of my most successful film, I felt like I had to travel there to see him.

We met in the West Village, which felt apt. And for about half the morning before I felt like I was some kind of 70s intellectual. And then just before we met, I realised I didn’t have any clue what kind of film I would actually want to make. Elliot was warm and interesting and open, but I had no way in. How to make a film about this kind of writing? How to adapt any of this material, or document a writer who spends his time looking for fragments of connectivity in historical documents?

This all sits OK with me. There’s no act of god stopping us, I just couldn’t work out how to make any kind of film. But at least I got to meet a fabulous writer.

2. JUN ENDO

I am much less at peace with this project.

I really did know what I wanted to make with this film. A short, kinetic portrait of Jun Endo. Her origin story and how she became such a special footballer.

We even booked a shoot date, with a producer and team lined up. But it fell apart.

Jun is a Japanese footballer who plays for Angel City. And the first time that me and my daughter saw her play, we fell in love with her. Her style, her game - all of it. And when I researched her story, and read how she grew up and learned to play like she did, I knew it would be a brilliant short. I went to a talk at Japan House to introduce myself to Jun and to start the conversation.

And I tried, doggedly, to make this happen. But it hasn’t. And each time it fails, I sink a little.

I still cling to the idea that we can make it someday, but the world keeps telling me otherwise.

3. FLIGHT RULES

Ok, now we are in truly painful territory. Flight Rules is a feature that I wrote 6/7 years ago. It was the first narrative film I tried.

It’s about an astronaut who returns to earth and decides to disappear into the wilderness.

At some point, pre pandemic, it looked like we were going to be able to get it going. We had some money in place and a potential shoot window. But then got covid-ed.

For a while, it looked like it might revive itself, but casting then proved impossible.

More recently, I decided that maybe I could force it into existence.

I sent it to Clayne Crawford (who is amazing in The Killing of Two Lovers, which is a modern masterpiece), and he was very into it. We talked over several weeks about making it small and nimble and I got excited.

I went to Alabama to workshop it with him and to scout potential locations. It felt invigorating and palpable. Like it might finally happen.

But no. Not enough money, nobody else forcing it into existence apart from me.

All that it is currently are these location pictures on my phone, and what my DP friend keeps calling the most beautiful script she’s ever read.

This bit of filmmaking is hard. The project is really good - so many people who have read it, love it. The people who have come in and out of its life have been good.

But it hasn’t happened.

Are all these projects (and the others like them) just baggage? incomplete parts of my life? I enjoyed almost all of the process of taking them as far as they got, but it was all supposed to be in service of making a film. If I get too comfortable with incompletion, then I become one of those people who is always going to make something amazing but then never does.

I make films to put things into the world, and these never made it. Are they still mine in some meaningful sense? Do they count as projects? When I look at my imdb page there’s just finished work. These all feel a bit like someone saying ‘I was going to get you a birthday present, but didn’t know what’ to me.

I tell myself everything feeds the whole, but I’m not sure I believe it for these ones.

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But I desperately wanted to get to the city, and the train wasn’t until late that night. So I accepted.

This other artist and I had been at Yaddo together (an artist’s retreat which has a ludicrous list of alumni which includes Annie freaking Baker). But we hadn’t had the chance to speak that much. Conversations at these kinds of residencies can be pretty… shall we say eclectic? I thought it would be readings of great writers, midnight walks and emotional revelations. There’s way too much surface-level small talk, or performative niceties. Not enough spark and wit and acidity. Some of that might be that artists and writers constantly feel like they must present themselves to the world.

Which I’m just not that interested in doing in this context. (Is this a reaction to the current dominant model in filmmaking? That you should be pitching your idea in snappy 2-liners with everyone you meet? A generation of filmmakers told by agents and screenwriting books that this pitch has to be rehearsed and polished has led to a load of filmmakers who don’t know how to have conversations or show fragility).

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At Yaddo my favourite conversations were absolutely fantastic. Life changing, invigorating, exciting, silly. Genuinely inspiring moments with people who I thought were talented and funny and inspiring.

But the ones who were not that really pissed me off. You meet people at residencies and events who are so desperate to talk about their project by delivering an onslaught of information, and ‘aren’t I amazing’ anecdotes that don’t actually leave any cracks open for discourse. I usually feel the opposite - I just don’t want to be fucking going on about my project. I want to be confessing my fears and doubts about it. Or talking about how you live as an artist nowadays.

After a few days there I spoke with a new friend about this (this person being one of those examples of brilliance) and said that I was over these kind of chats, and was only going to be fully open and talk about things I cared about from there on in. Almost like a challenge to myself and every conversation.

Having made such claims, it felt like accepting a ride to NYC was necessary, and that spending it talking extremely openly was a must. (Thank god this essay has the useful device of a car ride to centre it because these digressions are unruly).

Between short bursts of the audiobook of Pale Fire by Nabokov, we talked about curiosity. About the value of being interested, not interesting.

The driver asked me about my work and pointed out that my films are curious about people who are curious about the world. That they might even be about people searching for something, and me searching for something through them.

That was the second time that someone new to me defined me and my work better than I can. The week before I was showing an artist I love some rough sketches of a new film and she said the film is you - I see you in it everywhere. Which might be the first time that I really realised that not only are my films about me, they are me.

I want to embrace that in almost everything I do. Let that line between me and my films get hazier and hazier.

Back in the car, somewhere north of the George Washington bridge, we got onto family. I think it must have been sparked by a blur of talking about curiosity and being raised as the eldest kid and making a film about beekeeping in Yugoslavia and being attacked by a whole swarm of bees as a child. She asked at what point did I start asking questions? I had no idea. I just knew that I had joined adult conversations fairly young, and that I have always been spoken to like an adult. This led us onto my mediumly-complicated family.

We were talking about the idea of asking people questions trying to understand them and how much that is part of who we are. And the times to not do that. We talked about our roles in our families and how that shaped the way we do those things. I talked about my relationship with my parents and my siblings and how we navigated my parents splitting when we were young.

And then she said that she wondered what my Mum’s perspective on it all was. What she had felt about things that happened and what had led her to do certain things. And I confessed that I’d never asked. In the context of this claim to be fully myself and making films openly, this seemed like an admission of failure.

I was once in Arles, at the photography festival (it’s brilliant, let’s all go together one year) and bumped into someone I had been at Fabrica with. He’d made a great photography book. We sat down to share a beer and catch up. Within minutes we were talking about our mothers, like two little artist cliches, and wondering if asking the questions to things we didn’t know or understand was important. Or whether leaving them unasked was a more caring, more loving way to be. What if asking causes pain?

What right do I have to do that, just because I want answers which may be impossible anyway?

I think about that all the time in filmmaking - do I have the right to ask this question? If I’m opening up a part of someone’s life, will I handle it with care? Is it essential to what I’m doing and even if it is, is what I’m doing good for the person who is in it?

And if I’m asking contributors and audience members to go deep, be open and ask questions of themselves, do I have a moral imperative to do that in my own life?

So what responsibility do I have to ask the questions of my Mum?

At this point, we had pulled in Rivington Street and I was unloading my bags. And the driver had several more questions. So I left her wanting more information from me, which I think is a delightful way to leave anything.

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I’m writing this on a train, which is both a little bit romantic, and an absolute waste of a train journey. A train journey should be for looking out the window daydreaming whilst resting your head against the glass. Possibly listening to music, or playing a game of spotting things out of the window with a child, and for swaying down the aisle looking for the direction of the cafe car.

It should not be for writing.

It’s one of those special spaces for thinking and they’re so precious few of those that I should be enjoying it.

But this sense of motion always shakes a few things loose in my brain and today it’s shaken through the thought that I haven’t finished the series I am writing about what we can make alongside making films to earn money. (I say ‘we’ but I’m definitely thinking of myself first. Of course if you want to adapt/copy/get inspired by this I’m all for it, but I want to be transparent - this is all for me to work out what the hell I’m doing.)

And at the moment what I’m doing is drawing in all these strands of things that I do in and around films, and seeing which of them can help contribute to the larger act.

One of those things is shooting and creating whilst on a trip for a different purpose.

I’ve written about one time where I did this before - where I made a short film in the middle of a commercial shoot.

It’s always been something that I think has way more potential than has been explored. Whenever I have resources, I feel like I should be using them. If I have the luxury of great team members on a commercial shoot, we should also be creating something. But what about the other way around? What about when I’m making a documentary with almost no crew? Can I also be shooting something for financial gain?

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