Words to Remember(This blog post is for you Phil!!!)
A year ago from this month (December) a friend of mine named Phil Cronin died. I had met him while touring with Amnesia. He heard about the film in the summer of 2008 from a newspaper. When the tour ended, he contacted me and watched the film. He was impressed with the film and was inspired to help me find the funding to shoot my next project The House. We pursued every idea we could come up with, but to this date we couldn't make things work out with that project.
I kept pushing to get Amnesia out there so that people would notice what I had done. I wanted people see the work I, and others, had put into the project. I worked every marketing idea I could come up with. Wore myself out ragged. I had turned my focus from the reason I had started this crazy thing called filmmaking. I remember one day having a very long conversation with Phil about pursuing the funding for The House, where he kept saying, "don't forget the story".
On the internet the one thing filmmakers keep talking about is marketing and distribution. Usually it is in a negative light. I know things became very rough for filmmakers in 2008. I know that the Indie Filmmakers got a bad deal in the mess related to the fact that few people got any good distribution deals. But in the middle of the pursuit for the best marketing and distribution plan on the planet is there a possibility that the filmmakers "forgot the story".
You can make a pile of money, receive dozens of awards, but if we "forget the story" we still fail as filmmakers.
I want to go back to my first filmmaking love. If I'm going to be pouring hours of my time into this thing called filmmaking than I want to make sure it's about the story.
Many people will ask "what movie inspired you to get into this business?". My answer is simple: none. I got into film because the stories that came to me since I was seven. I didn't know it at the time, when I was a kid, but what I was seeing in my mind were scene segments. It wasn't until I was twelve that I tackled my first screenplay. This was why I got into filmmaking... the stories.
Looking into next year I want to spend my time focusing on storytelling. If I end up in conversations with people on the internet about the film business I want to spend most of my time talking about story telling and telling the best story possible. If filmmaking isn't about storytelling... then why even do it?
Thank you Phil for your many words of wisdom. And reminding me, even a year later, to not "forget the story".
