FilmCourage interviewed me and asked “How do you know when your movie is ready to shoot?”. In the conversation, I simplify things into three steps:
- Discovery: the process of defining what matters;
- Prioritization: organizing complexity and weighting the options and opportunities;
- Engineering serendipity: you build the bottle that can hold the magic elixir. How can we reach higher? How can we accomplish more than we planned for and manufacture magnificence?
The film business as of late has been cutting budgets to the bare bones and filmmakers are rising to the occasion. We prep our movies in less and less time. It’s mission impossible but we deliver it. But what get’s lost in the process?
Recap: This series chronicles my wide-eyed and crushingly insecure processes that pulled back the curtain on my ideas about filmmaking – revealing what it really takes to write and direct my movie, Recess. Occasionally I gain productive insights that plant me on less insecure ground. Others I still talk to my therapist about. Perhaps the most important insight I’ve kept – from teething as a writer – the idea that creating detailed, well-drawn characters with original voices can make even a script about a haunted doorknob compelling. I realize there may be infinite approaches more resolute but, for me, the haunted doorknob concept puts character development into perspective. 
