00:16Personally, I'm engaged in doing films that are about American history, and the word history
00:22is mostly made up of the word story plus high, which I've discovered tremendously late
00:29in my life for someone who likes wordplay.
00:32And so I'm interested in a good story, and that's it.
00:36The inspiration comes from stories, which are collisions of happenings and humans, and
00:43that's it, sort of, basically.
00:46I'm not interested in telling you what I already know, that's homework, the last time I checked.
00:55I'm rather interested in sharing with you a process of discovery that I've made by investigating
01:01something that I didn't know or only had relatively superficial information or knowledge about,
01:08but understood that the dynamics, the contours, the interiors of the story had something that
01:15was drawing me.
01:15If all of my films are asking the same deceptively simple question, who are we, as Americans,
01:24ultimately that comes to who am I.
01:26I mean, that's a, who are we, is a convenient way to hold it off.
01:30Who am I, is the artist's question.
01:32So what you're looking for is a story which is sort of firing on all cylinders, is an engine
01:38that's attractive in, in its ability to contain a lot of power.
01:44And at the same time, you realize that the engagement of that, all, bringing all your
01:49faculties, will also in some ways hold up a mirror to you.
02:00I don't choose the projects they choose me.
02:05Having said that, there's lots of ideas.
02:07There's 50 or 60 ideas that I have going around in my head, just ideas, thoughts.
02:13And I, I write them down and we'll collect some notes on it.
02:16And it's only when an idea leaves being an idea and goes down to the heart, that when
02:23it's accepted, that I say yes to something.
02:25And I, I think that should be what the decision is for you as well.
02:30Like you don't want to make a decision based on marketing.
02:33You don't want to make a decision based on, wow, I could make a lot of money off this.
02:39This will sell really well.
02:41I mean, at least I can.
02:42They drop down into your heart and you say yes, and it's a wholehearted yes.
02:45And sometimes it's a yes for 10 years, 10 and a half years.
02:49Sometimes it's a yes.
02:50I don't know anything that's been shorter than two and a half, three years to make a
02:54film.
02:55And that's a big commitment.
02:57And it's sort of the way our friends are in our lives.
03:01You know, you know a lot of people and you under, you by face and you know, a lot of
03:05names,
03:06a little bit shorter set, and many of them are acquaintances and lots are within friends.
03:11And then a few are people you're going to know all your life.
03:13And the ones I say yes to are the ones I want to know all my life.
03:16And so when you choose and say yes to something, it's, it's, it's for real.
03:27Okay, so I have here some folders of projects that are got off the list and got at least
03:37a folder of its own.
03:38And you know what, I've never, I've never shared these before.
03:40I've never shared these before with folks of, of, of things that I got invested enough
03:46that it left the list of 25, 30, 50 ideas and, and had enough material.
03:52We'd written a treatment or a page and a half or a description or a rationale, or we began
03:57to collect stuff about books or information or, or scraps of paper.
04:01And that's what all of these things are and none of them I've made.
04:05And, and some of them I will make like here is Apollo eight, which is a really, really great
04:11story of a film, which I haven't made.
04:14And I don't know why I haven't made.
04:16And I'm not going to say I'm never going to make it, but I kind of doubt it.
04:20You know, this is a film called Buffalo and it's been in our folders for decades.
04:26Now we're making it, it's now on the schedule and what it is, is the biography of an animal.
04:32It is about the decline and rise of an American symbol.
04:35We're choosing the team, who's going to do it, who's going to write it, who's going to
04:39produce it.
04:40When do we begin sending people out to the prairie to, you know, check on the populations
04:45and where we should be filming?
04:47Yay.
04:50Freemasonry.
04:50Freemasonry.
04:51So if you look at the dollar bill, it's filled with all these symbols of Freemasonry.
04:56The Masonic movement was a byproduct of the Enlightenment.
05:01And people like Mozart were Freemasons and Jefferson wanted to be, and Franklin was, and
05:07George Washington was.
05:08And you see him with an apron with the eye on it.
05:10It deserves a good treatment.
05:12So big question mark.
05:14Um, lynching.
05:16So there it is.
05:17I mean, I'm, lynching means the period after Reconstruction collapsed.
05:22And then Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow and lynching became a kind of Durrigger justice application.
05:30And that'll be part of a film that I am doing from Emancipation to Exodus.
05:35So yes.
05:37They're just like the way songwriters have scraps of paper that are just a phrase, like,
05:42don't forget this or some, you know, thing, sometimes it's, you've written a few paragraphs.
05:47So the Marshall Plan, I just pick up and it's got, um, what life was in post-war Japan.
05:54And, and so you just have little notes to yourself about what would be included in it.
05:58I mean, some of these things are old emails printed out from like another, literally another
06:04century, you know?
06:06So it's, it's, it's cool.
06:09Sometimes it's just, there's the Amazon thing on a, a new book about George Marshall.
06:15Let's be sure to order it.
06:16And that book was ordered and I've read it and that's why there's so much grief.
06:22I mean, you can't, there's not enough time to do them all.
06:26I have spent my entire life with a piece of paper and a pen next to my bed.
06:30And sometimes I've written stuff down in the middle of the night that is unintelligible.
06:34It's just like comedians, they collect jokes, um, and they don't know whether they'll use
06:40it.
06:41And I'm sure comedians have many more jokes that they sort of have in their filing system
06:46than they've ever used.
06:47You know, my pockets are filled with, you know, scraps of paper that are notes about,
06:52you know, what the next film should be or an idea for a film, like we should do this.
06:57You know, I wrote down in my pocket on that piece of paper, it says drone.
07:01That's what you need to do.
07:02And I think we're just collecting lots of ideas.
07:11Blake said you could find the world in a grain of sand.
07:14And that's really true, that you can focus intently and see everything.
07:18You can see everything.
07:20And the only way you can communicate it is through the intimate.
07:22As above, so below.
07:24The architecture of the solar system is the architecture of the atom.
07:29And I think every artist knows that instinctively.
07:34You can follow a baseball player, Jackie Robinson, within the big series of baseball, 18 and a half
07:41hours, or within the arc of a two-part series, four hours, on him specifically, and understand
07:49that there's something hugely central.
07:51The first progress, the first real progress in civil rights in the United States takes place not in a
07:59school in Topeka, Kansas, that's Brown versus Board of Education, not in Montgomery, Alabama, that's Rosa Parks.
08:05It happened to be on the diamonds of our so-called national pastime, well before any of those things took
08:10place, when a grandson of a slave walked out to first base at Abbott's Field on April 15, 1947.
08:18And so you find in Blake, you know, one of the most spiritual of all poets, this idea that that
08:29grain of sand contains the DNA of everything.
08:33And at the same time, when you've got what we'd call a master shot or a wide shot, you are
08:40searching for the particular, the detail, both specifically, physically, but also spiritually, mentally, emotionally, intellectually.
08:49These are all the things that are going on when the topic is chosen.
09:01You can make a film about something other.
09:04In fact, that's why we're here, is to engage the other, to find in the other ourselves.
09:10The binary says me and you, us and the others, right?
09:16The good guys and the bad guys, you know, the rich, all of the things that we do.
09:21But in point of fact, what we find in the other is the glories of releasing ourselves from the tyranny
09:29of our own set of experiences.
09:32Christianity is the only religion, right?
09:35If we were born in Saudi Arabia, we'd be saying something else.
09:40And then finding in the other the universality.
09:43That's what's so great about film is that because it isn't just about language, which is hugely important barriers like
09:51borders and oceans and rivers separating people, it actually breaks things down because the image hasn't got a language to
09:59it.
09:59We also begin to understand that we can find in the other a mirror of who we are and we
10:08can help to perfect ourselves, both in their otherness and in the universality of their experience.
10:14And so we're obligated to do that.
10:16And so here I will come back.
10:17The other day is こorro-
10:17Is it still outside the world?
10:19We have another wonder.
10:19The journey is that ближ, a modern language, a modern language, is 인터�adı.
10:20It's much fun.
10:20Already hastily motivated stuff today all day.
Comments