A friend of mine — an accomplished director and writer — once said to me that you have to write eight screenplays before you can actually write one. It is a well know adage that writing is all rewriting. Yet do we really yet get to incorporate that in our filmmaking.
The analogue era was about completion and perfection. You made it and put it out and that was it: it was part of the world. Yet the digital era is about something quite different; it is about evolution, transformation, iterations, and versioning. Not only can it change everywhere, but we can do it in ways that weren’t possible several years back. We can shoot a film on the cheap, and then revise it, or connect to it, or pull from it subsequently. Some artists are already adept at quoting themselves.
Watching Bruce Sprinsteen perform from over 40 years back, it’s sort of thrilling to hear elements of his later work in his early songs. I know that there are artist making movies now that will be doing just that same thing with their films of today when they make their films of tomorrow.
