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.
What is the point of film school?
Filmmakers have always flirted with television. One has only to recall, from 1980, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, a series of, notably, thirteen 52-minute episodes plus an epilogue, or David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990/1991), which lasted for two seasons, the first with eight and the second with twenty two 50-minute episodes (the pilots were feature-length) or indeed Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom (1994), a series of eleven 55-minute episodes. Cinema’s flirtation with the new form in fact started much earlier, perhaps with Roberto Rossellini’s infamous 1962 news conference where he declared that cinema, the medium for which he had directed such classics as Rome, Open City and Paisan, was dead and that he would henceforth be making movies for television. 