By Sean Durkin
I started writing this post to ask for help with a kickstarter campaign for our new film, “James White,” but what I began to explore became much more personal to me. I started to reflect on the past 10 years and how my partners and I got to this point. Josh, Antonio and I started Borderline Films in 2003 while students at NYU. Our goal was bold, but simple – we would all be directors and we would each make our first feature films exactly the way we wanted to. And so the journey began with us only knowing one thing for sure: that we couldn’t do it alone.
It was a blind, naive ambition, and 10 years later, almost to the day, we were in principal photography on Josh Mond’s film ‘James White’, our third first feature, following ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’, ’Afterschool’ before that.
We didn’t know it at the time, and maybe not even in the years to follow, but we decided to trust each other, for no real reason other than instinct. We trusted each other’s spirit, drive, ideas and talent before anything was concrete. We took the leap and have not looked back.
We knew the first thing we needed was a good feature script to launch our company. Antonio had the idea for “Afterschool” but it wasn’t something we could wait for him to write on nights and weekends while he worked to make money to get by. We needed him to do it right away. There was an urgency that would not allow us to wait.
Our plan was to make music videos, promos and commercials to pay the bills while Antonio wrote. Josh would wait outside of Atlantic Records and Island Def Jam waiting for them to open their doors and see him. And they did. And after months of begging, they gave us work. Very small budgets – $2000 here, $3500 there, but we found a way to make them work and pocket a bit of cash, which we split three ways. So as Josh and I were doing the job, Antonio was able to focus entirely on writing. And from then on we set the structure of our company, everything split a third, no matter what. Our parents thought we were crazy but we trusted ourselves, and we moved forward together. And still to this day, everything is split three ways.
Our community of filmmakers didn’t stop with the three of us. We needed people to guide us and believe in us. We found a few. Our lawyer Wilder Knight, our manager Melissa Breaux, producer Ted Hope, and our agent David Flynn, all came on very early and were a great support system. We trusted them to guide us and they trusted that our farfetched plan of us all being directors was going to work.
But the first person to trust us was our casting director Susan Shopmaker. Not only did she believe in us and love us, she also employed us. She doesn’t like to admit it for some reason, but we were her casting assistants for more than five years. We saw every actor in New York in that room, and we became friends with a handful of them, and they acted in our films.
Our community was extending, and it was at Shopmaker’s that we learned that that the most important element to a film is a good performance. We were fortunate to have her trust us and our plan, and so she vouched for us with actors. Actors that trusted us and we trusted them.
From there our creative team grew: Jody Lee Lipes, Joe Anderson, Zac Stuart Pontier, Michah Bloomberg to name a few. We came up together at school, freezing our asses off in dark fields in the rain making shorts. All coming out of school and staying together and working together, but also each person going off and finding success on their own. It’s been wonderful to watch.
Trusting others can be scary. And you might not always be right. We have trusted people and have been let down, and we have let people down too. We even let each other down at times. Nothing is perfect. You have to know that there will be ups and downs and disappointments and you cannot be afraid of that.
In my opinion, watching a vague idea grow out of thin air and over time become articulated, written, nurtured, cast, scheduled and shot, is the most exciting process. You take a shred of an idea, a lot of hope and a strong conviction in what you are doing, and try to bring people on board to take the journey with you.
When you are directing and you trust your actors and crew, they will feel supported and do their best work. When you feel trusted, you feel safe; and when you are safe, you are free to fail and make mistakes without judgment.
Even when you have you have great people around you, making films can be very isolating at times. People tell me they never found a group like we did to work with. I think that we got very lucky. Timing and luck have a lot to do with it. But I also believe that these things don’t just come to you. In order to be supported as a filmmaker, you have to trust those close to you, and let them trust you. You need to go out and support other people, trust and believe in others. It is cyclical. It will come back around to you.
There is a great community of filmmakers out there. Sometimes it can be supportive and sometimes it can be competitive. It’s important to have both. Both can elevate and inspire each others work. You put your inner soul into the public eye when you make a film, whether you know it or not. You are in there and people will see it. You cannot be afraid to fail, or you won’t be you. If you are not you, you can not make your film. If you get scared at some point in the middle, don’t look back. Keep going, trust you are doing this for a reason, even if you don’t know what it is at that particular moment. Truth be told, you may never know. But you have to do it. You just need to trust yourself.
(Edited and proofread by two collaborators I trust, Antonio Campos and Wayne Arthur Roberts III)
JAMES WHITE KICKSTARTER:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2104379593/borderline-films-presents-james-white
