The Other Side of the Dream

Joking or only half so, we often like to say we are “living the dream” in the film business. Dreaming is more than a metaphor in the Business, however, and the dream has at least two sides.

When I work as a standby painter or a scenic artist, by the time they call “Wrap!” on the first day of shooting, the majority of work on the “other side” has already been done months or even years earlier.  The first part of the film’s creation has already occurred: that of bringing an idea into being through inspiration and passion.  I’m not saying that we on the production/shooting side of a film have no passion.  It’s just that our passion is going into predetermined channels, the channels opened during the inspiration part of the process on the other side.

When I production design a film, I get an invitation to join the other side, and I love the experience.  It is, in one sense, even more like living a dream than the rest of filmmaking work—in the sense that a dream has little to do with reality.

On the other side, when filmmaking begins, the script, even if it is completed, is still a running conversation of sorts shared between a small group of people; it is not yet an official blueprint for plot and dialogue and character. The film to come is more of a force than a plan, simply because everything with a solid reality has yet to be formed.  The production office may or may not have opened, and the shooting locations only exist in theory; like subatomic particles in superposition—they are probabilities only, as yet to collapse their waveforms into reality.  The actors may be only partly cast, the leads still out there somewhere, as yet unknown, even to themselves; and the director may be hoping for his own team but still isn’t sure he has one yet, because that team can only be formed through the work of making things happen out of nothing.

On the other side, more than any other time in the process of filmmaking is it so obvious that we are creating something out of nothing—nothing but ideas.  If that isn’t magic, what can magic be?

More fantastic still is when the ideas and force behind the inspiration have a source that’s… I’m searching for the right word here, folks, because I don’t want to sound like a namby-pamby, new age, hippy fluff-head—but it may be unavoidable.  Let me put it this way: sometimes I work on films that have a spiritual origin, and the sense of passion that creates them is not driven so much by creativity for its own sake, but by the need to express the really Big Questions.  Where do we come from? Why are we here?  Is there something out there bigger than ourselves and if so, what is the nature of that something and how do we fit in?

I’m not talking about religion, or even spirituality as we commonly box and package it.  By example, I refer to a book on film written by Stephen Simon, a producer and director I love to work with.  In The Force is with You: Mystical Movie Messages that Inspire Our Lives he coined the term “spiritual cinema” and his list of spiritual movies included such diverse titles as Star Wars; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Dr. Strangelove; The China Syndrome; The Matrix; and Forrest Gump.

Their common thread for me was that I had loved every one of them, and had put them into a special class of favorite film: they touched some deep chord in my psyche that other surely great films did not.  I loved Goodfellas and Fargo too, but they weren’t part of the same class.  After working with Stephen I realized what that class was: spiritual cinema.

When I work as a production designer it is usually on these kinds of films, which are often labors of love much more than they are commercially oriented.  There’s not much money, and they’re definitely in some backwater eddy rather than part of the mainstream filmmaking current. Part of that is the way Hollywood has been structured, which is another story for another blog.  But another part of it is the vision of the director and the writer: they have specific things to say and questions to ask, and a series of producer-driven rewrites would never happen.  They also do not want to explore any common denominators if it means dumbing things down in order to bring in a bigger audience.

So these movies I design are done on their own, but usually done by film professionals, who might be working for very little money, but working on principle and out of passion for the project.  Well-known actors, too, take on these projects because of the spiritual focus. 

It is incredibly informative to look at the other side of these kinds of films, especially since they’re a do-it-yourself form of filmmaking.  But the other side is usually a secret world, like dreams, I suppose; only a few of the people involved from the beginning can know how it is done and what happens at each step in the process of creating a film from scratch.  However, with digital media and the power inherent in the internet, you can get a good, long look at the other side should you be curious.

One of the most interesting independents I’ve designed and so had the opportunity to work on from the other side is called Dreams Awake, a sort of family road trip film that evolves into a mystical adventure set in California’s iconic, visually stunning Mt. Shasta (magnificent! I hiked up there every day off I had).

Jerry Alden Deal, the writer and director of Dreams Awake has kept up a great blog about his experience of making this film from the beginning, and his narrative probably, if put into a book form, would provide an excellent detailed course on almost every aspect of filmmaking, production, editing, and post-production.  A first-time director, he has had to learn countless new things about making a film as he has worked through the entire creation process involved on the other side. His blog can be found at

http://www.indiefilmblog.com/ 

Now that Jerry is getting close to finishing his film, he has done some interesting things to get it noticed on the internet, and his choices are also instructive.  Check out the following links to see what he’s come up with:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dreams-Awake/126279460223

http://twitter.com/DreamsAwakeFilm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VcFmZ_Ufcg

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1053835/

Aspiring filmmakers will find some useful ideas and pointers from Jerry’s experience, but of course the experience on other side is different for every film creation—as different as we all are.  I love the living the dream while on set and shooting, but I also love the first, more mysterious land of the dream as it begins to take form on the other side.