This is Not a Journey (The Making of “Playfight”)

I’ve always been intimidated by the idea of documenting my creative process as it unfolds. I think because I’m nervous that I’ll end up with an odyssey of a film that was never made.

Sunday, November 12
I’ve always been intimidated by the idea of documenting my creative process as it unfolds. I think because I’m nervous that I’ll end up with an odyssey of a film that was never made.
I know that behind this fear are my experiences with the fated production of I’m Still Here and the collapse of The Only Bar on King Street from a feature film into a proof-of-concept short. I have now come to see both of these as far from failures (I touch on this in my talk, How to See the Future), but these experiences have surely informed my declaration that the process of making a film tends to play out as “a series of stressful miracles”. Looking ahead toward the film I’ll be spending the next year of my life on – my Masters’ Graduation Project in Berlin – I feel the old temptation to silently and painfully hold my breath until something I’m proud of pops out at the end.
Yet watching behind the scenes or making-of documentaries about films was a huge part of how I fell in love with movies, and how I started to put the pieces together of how they were made.
I think in one fell swoop, I can reveal both the impetus for my writing here and the core source of inspiration behind my next film. I’ll do this with an excerpt from a lecture by Alan Watts, who put things quite perfectly in his argument that life is NOT a journey.
“Existence, the physical universe, is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn't going anywhere. That is to say it doesn’t… have some destination that it ought to arrive at. But that it is best understood by analogy with music.
Because music as an art form is essentially playful. We say "You play the piano”. You don't work the piano. Why?
Music differs from, say, travel. When you travel, you are trying to get somewhere.
One doesn't make the end of a composition… the point of the composition. If that was so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there would be composers who only wrote finales! People would go to a concert just to hear one crashing chord, because that's the end!
Same way with dancing. You don't aim at a particular spot in the room, that’s where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance.”
It is about time that I open up to focusing on process rather than an obsession with product. I’d like to embrace the messy, stressful, constantly-on-the-verge-of-falling-apart nature of making art. Sharing it publicly will fit in perfectly with the paradox of performance and audience that has always ruled my life. This all may be impossible given the nature of film, or documenting the process of making something. As you’ll come to see, these ironies are precisely the point.
I came to Berlin to answer the question of how my philosophical life and my life as a filmmaker might come together. How I can finally break down the wall I constructed between them over my four years at the University of Toronto, and let academia and creativity dance. I need to make a film that explores the insights I’ve discovered through my research into meditation, secular spirituality, psychedelic assisted therapy, and the nature of consciousness… Furthermore – a film about the tension between art and raw experience. I’d like to dive deeper into the curse of the artistic impulse, which I began to explore in the first short film I directed in Berlin:
I have a deeply ingrained impulse to take the most unusual, surprising, spontaneous moments in my life, and to memorialize them in art. I tend to write things down – snippets of overheard conversation, for example – in a notepad, creating a reservoir of striking moments to incorporate into my films later on.
Sometimes this is beautiful. To integrate life into your art is what most of us aim to do as filmmakers; expressing ourselves by drawing on our lived experiences. But I feel conflicted. Sometimes, the act of reproducing these moments, interpreting them into artistic products, can be destructive to the original moment itself. [Roll Call] aims to explore the danger of this artistic impulse.
We must realize that most films (and by extension, their makers) are obsessed with endings. Film structure is taught with diagrams and graphs of linear narrative progression, models of the Hero’s Journey, and intense focus on how motifs converge into a perfect synthesis of meaning by a film’s conclusion. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; experimental films that dispose of any narrative structure tend to be unbearable for most audiences.
We are also obsessed with evading endings; that is to say, we are obsessed with immortality. We don’t have the ability other artists do to have their art live and die in that fleeting moment. Stand-up comedians, live musicians and thespians all have some incredible ability to find fulfilment through creating art that will live on only in the memories of the people who were in the room to experience it.
I find myself determined to eternalize my ideas. To ensure that the form which embodies my stories will last longer than I do. David Fincher makes a similar observation when talking about film actors; how “the camera is going to trap them in amber for all time.”
The film I’ll be making is about a professional dance choreographer who discovers the world of playfighting and attempts to integrate it into his art. This is a story that I think that only I can tell; and that I can only tell now, at this exact point in my life.
I’m not sure exactly how my documentation of this process will take shape over the next year… perhaps in snippets of writing like this, in voice journals, or in photos. Perhaps a mix of each of these. In any case, they’ll appear here.