A Filmmaker's Life: Speaking of festivals, a bit of advice for filmmakers....

Going through the festival grind can be confusing and disappointing for the first time filmmaker. But here is some great advice:

A Filmmaker's Life: Speaking of festivals, a bit of advice for filmmakers....

"Melancholy Baby" showing in Newport Beach and Boston

To those reading this blog for the first time, I'm Sean Hood, screenwriter and filmmaker.

So on Friday, April 24, my film, "Melancholy Baby," will be screen at the Neport Beach Film Festival and The Independent Film Festival of Boston. Please click the links to see details and to buy tickets for the event.

The film just won an "2009 Award of Excellence" from The Acolade Film Awards.

Check out the article on Melancholy Baby in Moving Pictures Magazine.

You can read independent reviews of the movie (written by people who are NOT friends or relatives) here:

FilmBizarro.net

Paul Hood (no relation)

The Angry Princess

Johny Darko

You can get a sense of me personally from my blog articles:

My Dinner With Marcus

How NOT to Pitch A Studio

Why YOU should write Stigmata 3

A Filmmaker's Life: Swing For The Fences

This is an inspiring article written by my friend and mentor, Jacques Thelemaque, about the importance of plumbing the depths of personal vision, even on seemingly commercial or "genre" projects. Please excuse the cliche in the title, and click below...

A Filmmaker's Life: Swing For The Fences!

Marcus Responds

On Friday, I wrote a blog article "My Dinner With Marcus" about Friday The 13th director Marcus Nispel and the moment I realized that in order to get the job writing his upcoming project, Subterranean (aka Pod), I would have to eat a sandwich of blood sausage and sliced tongue.

This morning Marcus, who is shooting a commercial in Mexico, responded:

Just read your blog about me feeding you tongue sandwich. Hilarious! I can see how that might strike you as unusual. I'm actually in mexico right now sampling some local cuisine...

Maggots, grasshoppers and ants!

I suppose this is how he celebrates when his movies are number one at the box office (Friday The 13th made 55 million worldwide). If Conan The Barbarian enjoys the same kind of success, I will certainly join him.

My Dinner With Marcus

The director of Friday the 13^th makes me a sandwich.

I’m sitting in the beachfront Malibu home of infamous German director Marcus Nispel (Friday the 13, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), hoping to convince him to pick me as a writer on his next horror film, Subterranean. Unlike the remakes he is famous for, Subterranean (aka "Pod") is based upon his original idea, and Marcus is being very picky about who is going re-write the script. In the middle of our heated debate about whether or not more exposition could have improved the original “Alien,” Marcus abruptly goes to the kitchen to make sandwiches. When he returns, I realize that if I eat the sandwich I will probably get the job, and if I don’t, I probably will not.

The sandwich is made of blood sausage and sliced tongue.

One of the never ending challenges of being a screenwriter is the necessity of collaboration. In the past, my collaborators have asked me to write startlingly ridiculous and insipid things. They have asked me to write about puritan ghosts who haunt freshman dorms. They have asked for nurses to take showers in asylums at midnight. They have concocted “satanic, chollo, midget priests” and “goats with shark teeth.” They have changed my male protagonists into lesbians and my heroines into werewolves.

It’s my job to eat the sandwich.

Before this meeting, I was told to prepare myself for the worst. Marcus, they said, is difficult to collaborate with. His mind jumps quickly from one idea to another, one inspiration to the next, and often these bursts of insight seem confusing and contradictory. His insistence on managing minute and seemingly irrelevant details, has given him the reputation of being eccentric and even crazy. But as I sit there, watching his eyes grow wide with excitement as he recounts his favorite scene from The Thing, I can’t help thinking, “is this man any more insane than the other genuinely creative people I know?”

Is he crazier than the artists I knew who would build found-object sculpture out of rubber ducks? Is he crazier than the mathematicians I knew who would wouldn’t eat or sleep until their proofs were not just correct… but “elegant?” Is he crazier than my friend the Prop Master, who spends hours in his garage designing and constructing absurd, robotic “inventions.” Is he crazier than my own father, rising every morning at 6 AM to do the same mouthpiece drills he practiced at age 11?

Is he any less sane than me?

No, in fact, his rants and inspirations feel frighteningly familiar. So I take a second look at the sandwich, the thinly sliced meat, and decide that I am actually sort of hungry. I take a bite, and realize that blood sausage and sliced tongue may sound like a horror film, but it actually tastes more like bologna.

So as we take out the script for Subterranean, and as we outline sequences, flesh out characters, and argue over dialogue, I eat the sandwich. I eat every last bite. And when I am done, I politely ask for another. I do NOT eat it just to humor him. As it turns out, he couldn’t care less whether or not I eat the sandwich. I eat it because I want to.

Because it tasted good.

P.S. And yes, I got the job.

You can read Marcus Nispel's response to this blog here.

For other Genre Hacks stories try reading these posts:

How NOT to Pitch A Studio

Why YOU should write Stigmata 3

Just Listen (A love letter to cinema sound)

The Female Shadow

The Shadow, a term introduced by Carl G. Jung, contains all the impulses and desires in our psyche that are repressed, undeveloped and denied by our conscious mind.

Examples of the male shadow abound in genre movies, from Mr. Hyde to Tyler Durden, the Wolf-man to the Hulk. The civilized man has a double, another side of himself, also male, who acts out his darker, animalistic, selfish, aggressive, violent, or sexual urges.

Recently, in my own work, I find myself investigating the shadow side of the feminine. And by this I don't mean a woman as a stand-in for the repressed impulses of the male psyche. I'm looking for what eluded both Freud and Jung - the unconscious she.

It’s easy enough to find movies with typical female shadow figures: the vamp, the femme fatale, the creepy-pubescent-girl. What I'm looking for our stories about ordinary women encountering their own shadow-sides directly.

Two examples come to mind...






One is the novel, Come Closer, by Sara Gran. In this shockingly disturbing story, a perfectly ordinary, happily married, successful young woman finds herself inexplicably acting out impulses that are violent, obscene, and self-destructive.






The other is the film Swimming Pool, directed by François Ozon, in which an uptight, well-mannered, middle-aged, English novelist encounters a lascivious, crass, teen-aged, French nymphomaniac, who may either be a murderer or a figment of the older woman's imagination.









Hours after publishing the first draft of this blog, Richard Lowry, a producer friend of mine, reminded me of the best and probably most obvious example, Bergman's Persona.

However, I'm looking for more examples - stories of Ms. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. Any thoughts on the female shadow? Any examples in film or literature you would point me to? Please leave them in the comments section.

I should add that Jung believed that The Shadow contains not only those parts of ourselves that we would rather keep hidden, but also our greatest strengths, similarly bottled up to suit the needs of civilized culture and our ordinary world…





… which is why it continues to fascinate me.

The Bucket

I have a bucket that I carry with me wherever I go. I collect things in it, hour by hour, day by day. Some of the things are ordinary like a piece of string or a broken watch, but other things are quite unexpected, like love letter or the lens of a telescope.

Yesterday I found a thumb tack on the bottom of my shoe; it went in the bucket, along with three dried chips of turquoise paint and an empty Coke bottle. While in the shower a bright yellow frog appeared by the open window, and I would have put it in too, but I left my bucket in the car, and by the time I fetched it, the frog was gone.

You have to be quick.

Often I will steal things, usually from my closest friends. They’ll be talking and a little golden coin will drop out of their mouth and tinkle on the floor. I’ll snatch it up when they aren’t looking and then call it my own. I don’t feel bad about it because they do the same thing to me. Just the other morning I spied a little porcelain bird that a friend had copped from my pail and had put into hers. I think she felt guilty, but I didn’t mind; in fact, I was glad that she could use it. I just couldn’t find a place for it anywhere, and it suited her collection perfectly.

I know people who leave their bucket at home most of the time, only taking it out when they think they need something. Of course, after just a few hours of searching they get bored or frustrated about not finding the thing they were looking for, so they put the bucket away. What they don’t realize is that you have to keep your bucket at all times and you can’t be so picky about what you collect.

Me, I’ll pick up anything.

Some people like fancy buckets made of tin, old-fashioned buckets made of wood, or electric buckets with flashing lights, but I’ll use whatever is handy. The container isn’t as important as the things you collect. You can use a cereal bowl or discarded Starbucks coffee cup, or even your pocket in a pinch. The mistake is to see something and tell yourself, “I’ll get that later, when I have more time,” because as soon as you turn your eyes away (from the bronze nail, the dead caterpillar, the silk yarmulke) it will disappear. You’ll never find it again.

Recently I’ve gotten in the habit of getting up very early and meeting friends at coffee houses. They bring their buckets too, and together we sort and sift and show each other what we’ve found. Often we trade: a rusty license plate for a silver toothpick, a rubber ball for scrap of shag carpet. It’s fun to share.

But most of the work I do alone, dumping out the contents of my bucket and deciding what to use, what to throw out and what to save for later. It’s really amazing what turns up if you keep your eyes open and you make sure to have your bucket with you.

For instance, while driving in my car, my cousin appeared in the passenger seat - not as she is now, a middle-aged mother of two, but as a child with fiery red hair and a doll that was missing its left eye. I didn’t know why or how she appeared, but I didn’t ask questions. I just collected her and her doll in the bucket as soon as I reached a red light, keeping an eye on her in my peripheral vision to be sure she wouldn’t vanish.

I sometimes put expressions in the bucket, like “posilutely splificated.” I put sounds in the bucket, like the popping of bubble wrap or the giggle of a barista. I collect attitudes, poses and gesticulations. I gather confusion and doubt. I pick up itches, headaches and ennui. I take things I don’t believe in, like ghosts or trickle down economics. It’s important not to be judgmental, and accept whatever appears in your path. Anything.

Do I sound crazy to you?

Well, if you haven’t guessed, I’ll tell you that the “bucket” is just my notebook. And the things I find are seeds: seeds for writing, seeds for filmmaking, seeds for acting, seeds for understanding, seeds for meaning. If you are an artist or creative person, you need to have a bucket, you need to take it with you everywhere, and you need to collect whatever you find. Whatever idea flashes in your head, write it down. Anything and everything.

Just put it in your bucket – it may look dusty and ordinary, but you may discover something rare and beautiful in it later. Don’t wait. Do it now. Right now.

Before it disappears forever...