Today’s guest post continues yesterday’s from producer Cotty Chubb.
A memorable dream
Two years ago in the middle of the night I woke up heart hammering. I’d been having an argument in a dream. Actually, I’d been screaming. Screaming at a director, I don’t know who. We were standing alone in the front row of an empty movie theater. “You think,” I ranted, gesturing up at the blank white screen, “you think that what’s up there is the movie, and you think that it’s your movie, you made it, it’s yours. But you’re fucking wrong [I told you I was screaming, right?]. That’s not the movie. The movie… the movie… the movie is what happens in the air between up there and down here. That’s the movie, you moron.” And then I woke up.
Maybe I’d eaten too much supper, like the boy in Winsor McKay’s Dreams of A Rarebit Fiend. Or maybe I was sick of narcissist auteurs. 2008 was a bad year for that.
Kubrick’s advice
In the mid-eighties Stanley Kubrick went to Michael Herr, one of the great writers of the Viet Nam War (Dispatches, check it out) who also wrote the Martin Sheen monologue in Apocalypse Now. Kubrick said “I want to do a Viet Nam movie and I want you to write it.” And Herr said, “I don’t know how to write a screenplay and I’m not about to learn how to write a screenplay writing for the best film-maker in the world.”
But Kubrick said, “It’s not that hard.
