Do Not Try This at Home

That is all I have to say about movie making. But not only did I try it at home, I shot in my actual house for days, my trash cans overflowing with craft service empties or “crafty” as they call it. For those who don’t know, craft-services are the constant supply of drinks and snackables that movie sets provide the troops, and it has been scientifically proven that the crew works best if they have a copious selection of chips, nuts, puffs, trail mix, Nilla wafers and Welch’s fruit snacks on hand at all times. Don’t give your gaffer his Doritos and your movie will end up looking like an episode of “Survivor” when you were going for Wong Kar-wai.

Cheez-its aside, the process took me to the brink. Four days into shooting I was seriously considering pulling the plug. I didn’t like the dailies, I didn’t like the subject matter and most of all I didn’t like me, nor did I understand why I was putting myself through all this. I was on a grief bender and what should have been an exciting chance to create turned into a referendum on my life. I’d wake up in the predawn darkness and try to con myself into enthusiasm when all I wanted to do was sob. It wasn’t just that I was underprepared and a decade removed from both directing and acting (not to mention creatively flabby from a lack of artistic risk and effort). It was that deciding to make this movie had gotten right to my core issue: The war between revealing myself, and hiding out.

Truth is, I had taken a bold stand. Empowered myself and my colleagues. Said, “We’re not waiting for anyone’s approval or validation or money. We don’t need the powers that be to legitimize us, we legitimize ourselves!” But as opposed to being freed by this act of self-emancipation, I was crushed by it. And as visceral and real as that all felt I kept on going. If I had lines, I said them. If there were shots to decide on, I decided on them or gave my two cents. Sure, I was a bit scattered, and the director in me no match for the insecure actor, but I hung in there. I had been doing this or some version of it (writing, acting, directing) my whole adult life. I may have not been the brilliant auteur or the second coming of Philip Seymour Hoffman, but I didn’t need to be. I was playing Tommy Swerdlow, a role I was very familiar with, and my co-writer TJ was playing TJ Bowen, a part he knew quite well. We had written it together and knew what it meant, even if we struggled at times with how to put it across. My co-director and director of photography John de Menil had shot our last movie and been a dear friend for fifteen years. He worked tirelessly and made beautiful, interesting pictures. We got off to a bit of a slow start, but the camera rolled, which is one of the things that has to happen if you want to make a movie.

Will the film be good? I don’t know. I haven’t seen a first assembly and so I have no idea what it is or wants to be. Movies are mysterious and you can have ten incredible scenes and a movie that doesn’t work and no incredible scenes and a film that somehow does. The last one we made took four years and I never gave up until it was right, and though I want this one to be a worthy follow-up, that’s not what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is how much I needed to make this film, and how much shit it brought up in me. Now, when I say “I needed to make this film,” I don’t mean it in some dramatic “this is a story I need to tell” kind of way. I didn’t “need” to. To be honest, I’m haunted by my past and the decision to do heroin one more time (the inciting incident of the movie) was something I truly had to “act.” Our interest wasn’t in the lure of dope, it was in showing our lives as they are now and how far we’ve come since the last film. To do something about friendship, family and TJ’s experience running a rehab for the last eight years. We wanted to put an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other and let them duke it out.

But more than anything we wanted to make another movie because the last one means so much to us. Because we knew it was time to once again put ourselves out there in a big, bold way, and because we both know it is so much easier not to. Shooting dope is a great way to hide out, but shooting film is the opposite. Shooting film says “Look at me. Connect with me. I care. It matters.” And everything we do that truly matters has to a chance to turn out terribly. We all know that, but I am telling myself again, because every morning of the shoot I woke up in fear and shame and doubt-- But I went and did it anyway. I went and did it because I don’t want to hide out. I want to live big. And the only way to do that is to do it. Even if it makes you sick.