Babylon and on and on...
Some thoughts on the collapsing distance between our screens, large and small
It’s Saturday, February 25th, and here’s where we are…
I have never needed my Hip Pocket movies more than I need them right now.
The stakes feel very high on this current creative project. I forgot what it feels like to want something this much, but now that I’ve put this much work into it, and this much thought, I absolutely want this to happen. I want to make this show. I am lucky enough to be working with people who are pushing me to rise to the very high standard of their work, and it is the most challenging thing I’ve ever done creatively.
For one thing, I’ve spent most of my career hiding behind genre. My early work for stage was stripped down human drama, and there was a short period where people thought of Rebecca Swan and me as New York stage writers. We kept telling people we were Star Wars kids, though, and we wanted to make genre movies. Science fiction, horror, outrageous action… we loved to ladle those things on top of whatever real-world ideas we were tackling. It felt like the safest way to approach things, and working that way, I honed certain muscles as a writer. This thing I’m writing now, though, is the opposite of that. This is as real and as raw and as personal as anything I’ve ever attempted, and learning to put aside my bad habits is part of what I’m doing right now.
I have enjoyed watching movies with no greater agenda than what I feel like watching next, and I’d forgotten what that actually feels like. I am watching way less than I normally do, and a lot of what I’m watching is background. It’s hard for my brain to fully disengage with the creative problem, so it’s hard for me to give myself over to something completely. That’s not to say I’m not enjoying movies at all, because of course I am. I finally caught up with Aftersun, for example, the debut feature from Charlotte Wells, and I had a complicated reaction to it. I spent most of the movie admiring it, but almost from a distance. It felt like a movie that was nothing but distance, right up to those last ten or fifteen minutes. Suddenly, it all connected and landed on me and as the film ended, I found myself sobbing. I couldn’t shake it, either. It is a piercing film, and I understand why Paul Mescal’s haunted central performance garnered him an Oscar nomination. He’s remarkable, communicating volumes with the way he holds his body or with a quick look, his emotions constantly on simmer. I suspect we’ll be seeing decades and decades of work from Frankie Corio, who plays Sophie, the 11-year-old girl who is taking this vacation with her divorced father. It is a beautiful piece about memory and pain and perception, and it’s so sneaky about the way it lands its considerable punches.
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