Rejection Energizes You (and Other Lessons from Mira Nair)

So after the disappointment of getting my dink from Austin, I needed some upliftment. Luckily Mira Nair provided it in spades at the IFP's Independent Film Conference in New York last week. She described needing elephantine skin to survive the ups and downs of Hollywood. That and amazing self-belief.

With every "No thanks. Not for us," she told herself, "You're wrong. I'll show you." And it's turned out pretty well for Mira. That's the spirit I find myself trying to tap into for the much needed rocket fuel to keep the momentum on crazy Bollywood movie musical going. If making a film is like going to war, it's a mighty long campaign.

Mira's keynote also had two pieces of great advice for Third Worlders...stuff I've felt but not been able to articulate.

1) Make what you make excellently. Do not apologize for its quality by saying explicitly or not, hey this is from the Third World so cut us some slack. For her first feature "Salaam Bombay" she told the story of blowing the entire movie's budget in production, leaving nothing for post. She put all the money in the film ($800,000) and then went looking for finishing funds. She just knew it had to look great.

2) Don't "anthropoligize" or explain too much culturally. If you watch Monsoon Wedding you'll see how much you're thrust into the action. There's no expositional dialogue about why we dress this way or wear this henna, or sing this song. There's no outsider leading you through the action and the work is all the richer and more authentic for it.

There was only one thing that bugged me about the keynote. The moderator kept trying to bring the focus back to Mira as a woman director/filmmaker and she seemed determined to steer clear of that pigeonhole. "It's not like I consciously decided that I wanted to make movies about women and walk around wearing orange pants," she said sitting up on stage at an F.I.T. auditorium, wearing a rather fetching pair of said shimmery orange pants. And then she quoted from what another interviewer said of her work, "I don't make political films. I make films politically."

Perhaps making films politically speaks to her commitment to the collective collaboration involved in filmmaking. (She told a charming tale of how she and her crew would perform a ritual at the start of each day's shooting of The Namesake, breaking a coconut and blessing all the equipment, down to the dolly tracks...since every item is important. "The carpenter has to show up to build the throne for the actor to sit on," as she put it.) Or maybe it's a nod to her ultra-realistic, documentarian roots on display in "Monsoon Wedding."

Whichever it was, it didn't stop her from plugging "Amelia", her first big studio movie, starring Hilary Swank, which opens October 23rd.

Will I Ever Write Like A Writer Again?

I'm freaked out. We're currently writing a budget for the crazy Bollywood musical and I'm being forced to think like a producer. Can we afford this montage? How can I do this scene differently? Does this character need to be in the scene?

Pretty much, I will never write another EXT.- EXPENSIVE PLACE- NIGHT slug line again without thinking "how are we going to light this?"

I wonder if this happens to all writer/producers? I was meeting with a fellow producer recently and saying how I've always operated as a writer, thinking story, character, visual and then all of a sudden you sit down as the producer, look at a bunch of breakdowns or schedules and you take out your red pen and you're slashing scenes.

The producer then asked me if I'd ever thought of selling the script...a question that's come up before and I was totally passionate that the material needed to be handled right and that's why I was in it for the long haul. It was a great shot in the arm (being forced to defend the decision) because I was reminded of why I need to be doing the tedious, slightly schizophrenic work I'm doing right now. It is too easy for someone else to create something inauthentic about Third World Girl's culture, and you know how I feel about authenticity.

So I've put aside thoughts of being rescued by big moneybags studio...for now at any rate. I'm learning as much about producing as I can and secretly looking forward to the next script I want to write that I do want to sell and be done with it.

A Third World Moment

Yesterday morning as I channel-surfed over breakfast I heard a familiar sounding accent that made me stop on BBC World where they were having a roundtable on the economy.

The accent was Guyanese. The man responsible for its thick flat timbre was none other than the President of Guyana, Bharat Jagdeo, who I learned from the moderator's introduction once sat on the boards of the IMF and the World Bank.

I didn't listen long. I'm currently buried under a ton of work...the non-creative business stuff that pays the bills...but there was one great moment in all the handwringing about the current economic crisis. Bharat Jagdeo found a silver lining.

He said the thing that struck him was that if this economic crisis had happened in the developing world there would have been lecture after lecture in forums like this (i.e. the BBC's slick studio) about cronyism and inefficiency in the developing world. The one good thing about the crash to his mind... no more lectures from the West about how the developing world should run their economies.

He said this to stony-faced silence from Sweden's minister of finance and a former A.I.G. bigwig but to warm applause from the studio audience.

Sweet.

Good Morning

It may be 3.55 PM.

Still feels like morning in America.

Like the POTUS Elect is always fond of saying, his story could only happen in America. And that's why Third World Girl loves this place and this American city she lives in.

One of the MSNBC folk said this morning, "We are a nation of dreamers" and that Obama spoke to a dream in many of us. For sure, that spirit of "can do" he calls on when he talks about immigrants setting out for a distant shore, it makes my eyes mist up.

Hail to the new and the power of dreams.

My Little Voice Speaks Up.

A couple years ago I took a short story workshop with a great, warm, no b.s. novelist. The first draft I brought in of a story that had won a contest was in his opinion way too precious, going nowhere. I got hammered at the roundtable and I went back and reworked it.

What I remember of the reception of the rewrite a couple weeks later is the workshop leader being taken aback at how I'd taken a note and ran with it. I can do this to the extreme which I've learned is both a weakness and a strength. I just don't have any sentimental attachment to how things are on the page. In fact, I never met a rewrite I didn't like. If I'm honest, I have a problem realizing the point at which I'm not making things better, only different.

After the workshop I ran into the workshop leader and his editor at a writer's festival and he sat me down and said, Third World Girl, you've got to know what you're doing. To paraphrase, he thought my voice and style was chick lit but that I kind of copped out on it by trying to be too highbrow. There's a place for your little, quirky, small stories...don't be bummed if they're not going to win a Booker Prize.

This is years ago and it's something I've been thinking about recently in light of the fact that I'd been struggling with this social drama. The story's an important one, based on a true, heartbreaking story but the other day when I started to re-outline it I thought...why am I telling this story? Why me?

On reflection, I realized I had fallen into a trap. See, to some extent film in Third World Girl's native country is an academic exercise. It must be "deep." It must say something profound about our post-colonial condition but looking at my work, the best of what I have... and what I've managed to make... is nothing like that.

Once upon a time, I had a mentor from my country who looked at a simple story I wanted to write about a group of Third World students living in a house, doing crazy things to make the rent. The mentor tore into me. "What are you doing? Write the story of your grandmother," he said. Being an impressionable, desperate for validation sophomore at the time, I felt like I had been correctly chastised. I felt like a big dumb sell-out, and cried big dumb sell out tears. Now, however, I think...screw that. You write the story of your grandmother. I'll write what I like.

I guess what I'm trying to say is last night I finally realized, my Third World film doesn't have to be like your Third World film and let the social drama go. Here, now, officially I'm setting it free to the universe to let somebody else write it.

I've got to go grapple with a small little Third World love story that I've been thinking about for a while.

The Dumbest Endeavor Ever

I was talking to a friend of mine, bitching about being a third world producer trying to push projects forward in the first world. Right when I'm kvetching about all the out of pocket costs I'm running up, I said this has got to be the dumbest endeavor ever. What on earth makes me think I can get stuff made when people with way more connections and ahem talent are using those great 120 page scripts as coasters?


Not only that, my time has never been less my own (I've got a lovely 2.5 year old), I run a company so said kid doesn't starve, and I'm shopping a feature musical and working on two screenplays that are trying to claw their way from the backburner into the charming pieces of work they could some day grow up to be. Oh, and of course, I've got the historic documentary cash drain that's becoming almost as expensive as my grad school education. So come watch this fun ride...watch projects gather momentum and grow at the lightning speed of grass pushing up from the earth.


And let me apologize in advance for the inevitable let-down I will be as I decide, crap, I don't have the time to blog... I ought to be actually working or cooking or living.