#5: While it renders...

2 and a half years ago I went to Paris to shoot a short film.

2 years and a half years (and a lot of frustration) later I´m finally looking at a Final Cut project called "Paris In Parts".

On the screen a small box says "Writing video. Estimated time: 4 hours" and I suddenly remember I haven´t written a blog entry for 8 months.

I think I can just make it...

First Up: Applying to Super16.

The only film school I would ever want to attend is Super16*. Because even though they have the word "school" in their description it´s not really a school. There are no teachers, only the ones they choose to have. They go out and find their money in the real world. They learn their craft the real life-hard way, and not under secure environment. They know what good promotion and marketing, means plus: Their office is at Nordisk Film.

I decided to apply about 1 week prior to deadline and found that I already had most of the things I needed for the application. I sended them Little Man (a short film from 2009), a page of thoughts on creative decisions made during the making of it (which was really just a bunch of clever bullshit), a biography, a page about future projects and 15 pages from this very block about the making of "Need Action".

"Now, I´ll be damned if I´ll let the waiting for their reply take control over me"- I thought. I just didn´t want to go "Oh what will that do to my career?"

What it´ll do is that if I´m not accepted, it´s the perfect sign that I´m not supposed to attend any film school whatsoever. If Super16 didn´t think I fitted right in there, I´ll do fine on my own. End of story.

What Super16 could do to my career was to speed it up a great deal. I would get 3 pretty good looking films out there sooner that I would on my own and I would get my name out a lot faster.

But of course, nervousness took over and I found myself thinking "What I´m not accepted" etc. And I hate that. It´s the whole idea of "acceptance by someone else" that bucks me. They might be, but if they´re gonna act all snobbish and like smart asses, I prefer not to be accepted.

I think it comes from the fact that I believe pretty strongly in myself plus I´m insanely stubborn when it comes to film making.

And that agenda will bite me in the ass later, I´m sure, because in every meeting with executives and studio heads I´ll have to say and do the right thing, for making them believe in me.

They replied and wanted me in for second round: The Conversation.

I must admit: I wasn´t really surprised. I would have been had they not wanted to see me. It just seemed obvious that Super16 was perfect for me and I was perfect for them.

Without knowing exactly what they wanted to talk about, I entered their office and what do I see? They´ve placed my chair in front of a very long table and their chairs on the opposite site. It´s like a fucking exam! I suck at exams. Exams are in no way an effective tool to find out what people can or cannot do. They put an insane amount of pressure and spotlight on the person they´re gonna tortue and the exam will only show what that person is capable of that day, that hour, that minute.

Which is ok really, all meetings with strangers are like that in the real world. But if you don´t get the job, that´s life. You stand up again and move on.

Exams and schools are not real life, so that whole arrangement bucked me a great deal.

But we talked, they asked questions, I blabbered on and 30 minutes later, I was out the door.

I think I said some pretty goods stuff and I got a lot of nodding and "Cool, cool" from them.

One thing that I was eager to find out was their reaction to something that I will write more about later on: That I´m going to NY and LA for a month to do some more networking. I knew that they would also start school in september but I didn´t knew how they would react to it.

I got a lot of advices about this: "Don´t tell them, you´re never gonna get in" and "Tell them, honesty is important".

I found out that telling them was a very effective way of testing them.

See, if they had a problem with it, that shows they think more in terms of school-structure.

If they didn´t have a problem with it, that means they think more in terms of film making-structure, and then it would definitely, oh absolutely, be the right place for me.

So if they had said "You´re in...if you cancel that NY/LA networking-trip" I would say "Thanks, but no thanks" and off to NY/LA I would go.

I´m just not spending anymore time in a classroom where they teach you how to make a good film.

So I told them about NY/LA and they had no problem with it at all. In fact they had a producer working in New York at the time, so that wouldn´t affect anything, they said.

* Actually, that´s not true. I would love to get a one-year degree at NYFA. (The one in NY, since it has the entire city as their back drop). But it´s just too much money. If I had 18,000 $ I would probably use them to make a film anyway AND live off of them in NY or LA.

One of my friends attended a 3 months acting course and got me a cool leather bag with the NYFA logo on it. I was so happy. Now it would almost be as if I had been there. But I felt I couldn´t walk around with it. So I wrote: "I couldn´t afford NYFA but make movies anyway" on it. The only justification for me using it and a way of feeling as cool as one can fool not having ever attended any course.

4 weeks later I got their reply. "Dear Jonas. We´re sorry to inform you that...".

Oh well...That´s ok.

And here´s some reasons why:

Then: The Tourist

It took me forever to finish that 2nd draft. Forever. And I must admit: It was the embarrasment of not writing that made me sit down and try to finish it. I would be highly optimistic, saying "Oh we will still be able to make it this summer", even though the script wasn´t done.

Boy, was I naive. Even if I had finished the 2nd draft in time, it would be so incredibly stupid to even attempt making it during the summer. The movie would have suffered from production stress tremendously and no good would have come from it.

I have realized that postponing the making of a movie is never a bad thing. It won't suddenly turn itself into crap and it won´t mean less to you in the future. It will grow with you new ideas will come at their own pace. Not because you sit at your desk, drinking coffee trying to stay awake and fix something. But because you let it take it´s time.

Writing The Tourist was my own little class in screenwriting. I tried to be tough on myself, asking the hard questions as I was writing.

"Would could she say that would proppel the scene forward?", "Is there something missing in the structure?", "This is quiet good, what would make it better?", etc.

I learned that I usually write the dialogue spot on. I write the subtext as dialogue and often too much of it. I think this is a common mistake writers do (except soap opera writers, writing spot on dialogue seems to be what their supposed to be doing). 

But I found that it was a huge help. First: What I write is never the finally thing, until I put "Final" on the front page. Second, writing the subtext in the dialogue would help me to figure out what the characters where really saying, and third: How to hide the subtext and what NOT to write. Whatever I had written, I had to find a new way to say the same thing, but with different words.

Plus I learned about cutting dialogue. Sometimes only half of the dialogue was needed and thus making what was be more simple.

Other times I would write half sentences all over the place. People rarely speak in full sentences. They slice it up, taking a new direction for every new sentence, they often at times make it up as they go.

I´m not the kind of writer/director that will say to the actor "The script is the truth, say exactly what I wrote". Sometimes a certain line will be important but other times I will go about it as I went about the subtext-dialogue, telling them "Forget what words I used, but say something that goes in the same direction, that gives the same idea".

I feel very lucky that I´m not so protective of my written lines. I can´t wait to be in rehearsal, throw away the script and say "Let´s see what comes up if...". That´s the exciting part. The script is only the guideline, until something better comes up. The ground work where we will build something on top of it.

I didn´t write the script using any structure-paradigm or anything like that. I´m a big fan of Syd Fields back-to-basis books (especially The Screenwriters Problem Solver). I think the idea of a beginning, middle and an end is a fairly build-in thing in us as humans. We want to be intrigued in the beginning, be fascinated and to see more. We want something dramatic to happen, something we can´t predict and urge for the rollercoaster ride in the stomach. And we want it all to finish off good and nicely in the end. Luckily there are thousands of ways to do this.

After finishing the 2nd draft I tried to, for the fun of it, apply it to Fields story paradigm and holy! It fitted right in there! Pretty weird, I never tried to hit those marks.

One thing that was a huge help in my writing was my new iPad. I couldn´t wait to take the writing with me, instead of just sitting by my iMac. I felt so stuck. Now I can suddenly sit in café´s and write on the screenplay itself, instead of just making notes for it as I did in by walking abouts.

But the main impact was really in my writing. Normally I can just vomit over the keyboard because I´m a fast typer. But with the iPad I was kinda limited. It takes some concentration to write on the thing and I became more aware of what I was writing, since every tab was more thought out somehow. And not in a bad way. The iPad created a filter where most of the crap would be detected and what was put on the "page" was more to the point.

As I write this, I´m 4 days away from the starting on the 3rd draft. The 2nd one have been in about 10-15 peoples inbox for over a month and 6 of them have been nice enough to give their critique. Most of them are about The Girl-character. Why she reacts as she does in the script and what motivates her. And others are logistical stuff.

And I gotta remember: The thing about critique...it´s only feedback.

One of the people I sended it to was Ole Christian Madsen. He is by far my favorite danish directors, next to Nicolaj Arcel. They dare to think in CGI, cinemascope and they´re getting danish film productions out of the apartment and away from narrow minded storytelling.

Madsen hasn´t replied with his feedback. And I don´t know if that IS his feedback. But he will get the 3rd draft his way when the time comes. I just want to get to know him and have him be sort of a mentor.

Some thoughts on needing a mentor:

I could really use a mentor, one that is aware of that role. I have many people I seek for advices and such. But I need a mentor to really take me under the wing.

I have plenty of rolemodels. I guess rolemodels are people you don´t know but look up to. A mentor is a person you look you look up to and get to know.

Having said that, I have some fucking awesome role models! Spielberg, P.T. Anderson, Bay, Ridley Scott, Cameron, Tarantino and Nolan, there you go.

They´re the ones I look for guidance in film making: what stories they tell, how they structure sequences, blocking of the actors, their visual style, their way of directing, handling the production and there going about things. Plus I admire them deeply for who they are as people.

And for a long time I thought the reason for having them as role models was because I wanted to be like them. But not untill recently I discovered that the reason why they give me strenght is because I can recognize myself in them. And it gives me confidence: if they made it, so can I. It´s a kind of weird acceptance of who are you.

Oh, and did I mention that The Tourist has now grown into a feature film?

80 pages. Something that suits me quite well. I want to paint on bigger canvases now.

Second: Showreels

This was an idea I got from when I was in LA 2 years ago, where I helped Jay Holben and Jamie Neese out with the shooting of some scenes that was to be used in an actors showreel.

You´ve always wanted an action scene in your showreel, since most of them are talky scenes and you want to show more diversity. 

Make ´em yourself.

It would be nice to have some more stuff on my Vimeo and Youtube page to show people in NY and LA.

So I wrote two scenes. One where the starting point are two people sitting in a restaurant, one where a woman suddenly finds herself taken as a hostage, without her knowing about it. With these two scenes I want to show people that I can write good dialogue, direct actors, do proper and interesting blocking and that I can make people laugh and go "Oh shit".

That´s basicly it.

The actors are Jesper Zuschlag, Charlotte Uldall, Tine Pohl and Jesper-Ole Feit Andersen. My DP will be David Rohde and we are all gonna go crazy on the 31 of july and 28 of august.

I´m right now in pre-production frustration, since we´re having some trouble finding the right location etc. 

But we´ll find it.

Then: L.A. Networking, Round 2

I thought about what I should do this summer and for some reason it felt like the most natural thing to do was to flight the 9000 km to the other side of the world. Mostly for the reason I can think of (meet more people), but mostly for the reasons I can´t think of.

Last time I was there alone for 2 months and I got to know Jay Holben (former DP/Director/producer), Zach Hammill (screenwriter), Kasper Graversen (producer) and Jamie Neese (director).

This time it will only be for 3 weeks but to make it a new experience from the very beginning my friends and partners Joel Hyrland (actor/producer/musician) and David Rohde (my DP) is coming with me. Originally I wanted more people to come with us, people who wouldn´t go there to take a vacation but who wanted something out of it, career-wise.

It ended up only being the three of us but travelling with two of my best friends is fine by me :)

Even though I had set up a few things last time I went to LA, I wanted to more this time.

And I thought a cool thing would be to have these Private Consultation meetings, where me and someone I can learn from sit down over dinner and talk.

So far I´ve set up meetings with David Brooks (Actor/Acting teacher at NYFA/Life coach) to talk script analyzis and about the director/actor-relationship. Jay Holben to talk director/DP-relationship. And either Moreno or Grieco from The Writers Store about structure in screenplays and to give The Tourist a little hollywood make-over.

That´s it so far, but I hope to find more people to talk to once I´m over there. Since I apparently won´t every attend any film school, I might as well create my own classes :)

We will also be shooting a music video for Joels new single. We´ll shoot the main stuff sporadicly over the weeks in LA. But we have a small section with 5-8 dancers dancing in the ocean and in the desert. We want to make it consciesly a bit over the top and try to take the piss out of all the corny and crappy music videos normally produced. It´ll be nothing more than utter fun.

We´ll also be going to the Round Table Meetings, which I also attended 2 years ago. It´s a very cool way to meet some nice people, since everybody attending wants to help each other out.

Through that meeting I met with John Rhys-Davis for 15 minutes, to ask him questions. To walk next to this giant, with his deep voice, and hear things like "You know, Spielberg always said..." and "What Peter Jackson did on Fellowship was...".

I´ll never forget that.

For that I made some new, shiny and cool business cards. For some reason, I put my old website on the old card I had. That site is gone now and now I got 250 business cards, which can´t even be used as toilet paper.

So what I did on this new one was to only have the words "Phone:, email: and website:" on the back. I will fill some out with my excisting info and hand them out, fill some new out, etc. 

The invention of the wheel, ladies and gentlemen.

And last: Future filmography.

I did this pretty radical thing the other day: Writing down the movies I want to make during the next 8 years.

Because I´m starting to have ideas for some pretty big movies in my head and I thought the first step to make them become real was to write them down, in correct order.

I gave myself two years in-between every film, since I already know what they´ll be about.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my climbing to the top of Everest for the next 8 years.

It looks like this:

(The titles are only working titles) 

The Tourist

Surprise. We have planned to have it done by january 2012.

It will run about 80 minutes.

Monster-film.

I got the basic idea, but without the always troubling act 2. I´m building the story up by the pieces I get from "somewhere", while doing something completely else.

And I want to start writing the script during post on The Tourist. Probably not alone, but haven´t found the right writer yet.

The reason for making it in 2014 is to get out of my head and to show the brilliance of The Tourist wasn´t a chance of luck. (Sarcasm, you know)

It will run about 60 minutes.

From Ashes To Ashes-film.

Got almost nothing but the rather complex structure. I know it´s about a mans life from birth to death, but that´s it. I know it will be a mix between Forrest Gump and Magnolia though.

With that in mind it seems rather weird to even have it on the list, but this is going to be a 2-3 hour film and I know the story will contain a lot of tricky stuff that I will need to have experienced before I can even attemp to make my...

Epic Sci-Fi-film.

I love sci-fi films but have never thought I would be making one. The only reason for my passion in this project stems from an idea for an opening sequence I´ve had in my head for ages. And all of a sudden new things started to emerge in my head and I know got the basic outline for it.

For some reason, I keep thinking of The Abyss (James Cameron, 1989) as inspiration. Not sure if it´s the mood, the structure, the way Cameron mixed the real science and fiction, the characters of that film that keeps popping up. I grew up watching that film, admiring it to death. Maybe that´s got something to do with it. But I want it to be a clever sci-fi film and not an unrealistic, unlogical thing.

And to sound like a complet jerk: I´m not going to tell you what it´s about. It´s THAT cool, alright? So you´ll just have to wait untill 2018.

And I need to make that sci-fi film, with the million dollar budget and all, to handle the 2020 project:

The People Inside

Since it happened that september morning, I´ve been wanting to make a film about the people living and working at the World Trade Center and suddenly find themselves trapped, with no way out. It´s the end of everything normal, my fascination with scenarios that once was, how people delt with the last goodbye and the decisions these people were forced to make that appeals to me. The size of it is just too big for me to understand. Maybe that´s why I want to make a movie about it.

But it WON`T be a comment or investigation in why it happened, politically.

Because I will ONLY tell the story of the people that was in the towers. And it won´t show anything about bombs being placed, because I don´t believe in it.
(My believe of why the towers went down? The infrastructure was clearly damaged by the explosion, making 5-10 floors into debris. And even though the towers was ment to survive a hit by an airplane, it wasn´t structured to hold up the 30+ floors and tons of metal that suddenly was left dangling in the air.

The collapses looked like a series of explosions? A skyscrapes contains 70 % air, it needs to get out, along with the ashes and debris.)

Obviously, I have to earn my right to make this film. If I got offered the job today, I would turn it down immediately. I´m simply not skilled enough. This will be my Titanic, my top of Everest. And I don´t want to take the easy way up there.

So as you can see, being dumped by Super16 is not such a bad thing after all :)

.......

The rendering is done. That means "Paris In Parts" is done too. 

Don´t know if I did good on this one.  But as soon as it hits vimeo and youtube, it´s not mine anymore.

It´s everyone else´s.

Watch

Hope all is well.

Jonas Thorbjørn


Ps. Now go leave a comment!