#6: No film school

I am starting from scratch. I have literally none at my disposal that are of advantage to this endeavor. Every time I tap friends to shoot something, I only bring myself and my pen and pieces of paper. Inasmuch as I have tried saving up money for a decent camera, it only ends up being spent on either emergency family expenses or debts nearing their deadlines. I always borrow. I plead for favors, and I borrow and rent and plead for more favors.

I always envy people having the things I don't have. I go on with the cliche: "If I had those, imagine the things I could do." But, yes, it's true. That decent camera you're just letting rust in your cabinet, I have dreamt of buying that every time I pass by a camera store. I always pass by camera stores. I stop and look at the cameras on display, usually protected with clear glass. I look at the specs, and then I look at the price. Then I calculate if I save this much money, I can buy it in this span of months. As I stare at that camera, I see my reflection on the clear glass. Then I say to myself, "Who am I kidding?" Then I carry on and walk. Many times, it is in this same moment of walking away from the camera store that I get my ideas for my stories. When I get home I write them down. By the time I finish that story, I stop. Now what, I always ask. I always, always end up printing that script and just filing it inside a dedicated cabinet for stories that I am sure will never get to see the big screen. Sometimes I open up this cabinet and just scan through these stories. I cry on them when the moment demands it.

But I can't go on like this forever. So came Mathilda. I have not gone to film school. I don't have the opportunities and the assets a film school offers. My network of friends I can tap for favors is limited, and I can't ask them forever. My family does not really support this dream. I barely have people who I can talk about these things with passion, and when I find myself talking about this stuff with them, I am afraid I have cast them away because our interests do not really correlate. So I end up just writing them all down and filing them in the same cabinet. That's what I always do. If I can't talk about it or no one wants me to talk about it, I just write them all down.

So, film school. I don't hate film school or people spending much money on film schools. If I had the advantages they're having now, I could have done the same. I want to learn from people who know the craft and understand it as much as I do. I want to surround myself with people burning with the same zeal for cinema. Passion is overrated. I need cinema. I need to make films. I don't want to make films. I need to make films. There is a myriad of differences between the two. We should really change what we tell our kids in elementary when they go up on stage and say to the people what they want to be when they grow up. That is an awfully wrong statement. If I was wise enough when I said that line back then, I could have said, "When I grow up, I need to be..." and drop that mic like the asshole I am.

So this is me, spiritless. I am a master of self-pity. I drown myself with the sadness that everything is just really pointless. But my cabinet of stories is coming to life. Every night. Every late night. It comes to life. It terrorizes me.

So we are here.

#5: Getting political

One of the decisions I have to make before pushing through with this script was the element of social criticism that the story entails. The film being political was a crucial choice. The criticism in the core of the narrative was something I kept pondering about.

Will it be wise to have a film with social criticism as my first project? Or should I start with a slice-of-life, emotionally-driven, artsy, romantic comedy? A hardcore horror? Or a thriller?

Mathilda is a mashup of truth upon truths; layers upon layers of forgery with the core being a hard-hitting criticism on the status quo of the country I love. So I decided. I have to challenge myself with the demands of the material. This being political is a conscious choice and no matter the outcome, I've made my stand.

Let's see how this goes.

#4: The cinema of questions

I personally believe that cinema should never give out good life lessons or answer the perpetual questions of life itself. We can attempt to answer them, but what do we get after we think we've found the answers? There is no beauty in the answers. You get it, and that's it. Much more than the ever-absolute life lessons, like a fairy tale with a happy ending, then dishing out the moral of the story for kids to emulate in the future and eventually fucking them up when they grow up. There is no moral of the story. You can interpret the shit out of what you just saw, and we don't pressure you to emulate the moral we instilled inside the narrative of the film. No. Cinema should be all about questions. We need to ask more. Questions should pop into your head as you watch films. That, I believe, is my personal quest. My cinema will be the cinema of questions. You seek for answers. We provide you the questions: the all-important questions we are afraid to ask, we forget to ask.

That is what Mathilda will be. There will be more questions than there will be answers. 

#3: Collab is love

We just finished our second pre-production meeting. I was left amazed by the power of collaboration. The moment when ideas flow so smoothly is an exquisite experience. I am happy to be with these people. I am happy to take this risk with them. With the right people, I think this project now feels a little bit easier.

This is when I realize I need people I trust for future projects to be materialized. I am unsure if this will be the same set of people in the future. They have their dreams to fulfill, too. Let's just wait and see, I guess.

So the hardest part of this project is finding that American guy. There are lots of foreigners in Cebu but approaching them is hard. Imagine asking them to act in a short film about Western culture imperialism and that stuff. And that spoiler, too. I mean, how can we find that American guy?

My time's almost up. Roughly a month is left and I'm still with my first project. More stories are waiting with lesser and lesser time. I won't be doing leaps of faith. I'd fly the shit out of this quest to uncertainty.

#2: Pre-production jitters and the dilemma of pretention

The script was finally finished on the 19th. This was written  without the film festival in mind. In fact, this is not really suited for that local film fest since this has a really, really, bad ending. Not bad bad, but, you know,  realistic bad.

Miraculously, the production team has already been formed. I chose the people I trust and I love working with.  We are not pros per se but, hey, everybody started naive. Of course, unless you're Einstein you're never naive.

So, here comes the jitters! Jitters! Can we really do this? Where do we get this actor? Money? How do we finance this? Equipment? Where do we get it? Borrow it? Buy it? Steal it?

Jitters. I knew this would come. Every big project I started came with jitters. The eternal confusion. The unending doubt. The bottomless pit of questions.

So here comes the challenge: decisiveness. I have to decide the big and small things. The crucial and the trivial. The tiniest detail should not be missed. And there's time. Decide fast. Decide smart. Decide with caution. Nobody said this would be easy.

And then there's the problem of being pretentious. I think every budding filmmaker is plagued with the unending angst that their films will end up pretentious. I honestly think that's not the problem. That's not even a problem. The more you dwell into the confusion of your films ending up pretentious, the more time you lose actually doing stuff. You'd be stuck betwixt avoiding being pretentious and barely crossing the line of a decent film. So I say: screw it. Write that script. Shoot that film. It doesn't matter if it is pretentious or shitty or outright messed up. Francis Coppola shared the same sentiment. Watch the documentary his wife made: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991). The man said it so beautifully.

That's why we're here.

#1: Once it starts it never stops

The bargain was simple: create a film or be dropped. Thus the creation of Ang Mabulokong Kinabuhi ni Mathilda Smith (The Colorful Life of Mathilda Smith), the ambitious stepping stone into the vast unknown of this cinematic quest. I never had the chance to study in film school so I had to devise, create, experiment, conjure to the point of mental (and financial) breakdown my own path into cinema. I will not sound dreamlike for the rest of this entry so I'm going to summarize this passion: I need to make films.

The material for Mathilda is still in the works. The narrative is very tricky for a mockumentary but I have already decided to jumpstart this lifelong quest with a challenging and demanding story. If this succeeds I still don't know. In fact, it doesn't really matter if this will be pulled off. I'm just going to make more.

Part of the deal was to submit Mathilda to a local film festival that has veteran and established filmmakers attracted not just because of the prize but of the price they get to cash out to produce their entries. Quite a profit, I guess. Though I reiterate, it doesn't matter if this wins prizes. I have faith but what I'm really looking forward to is what's next. Once it starts it never stops.

Once I start I never stop.