Keep paddling... that's Life

“The Book of Life” was on TV this morning, so sat and watched it with the kids, it’s a beautiful piece of work from Guillermo Del Toro as producer and Jorge R. Gutierrez as director. 

It is exquisite, glorious to look at and endlessly fun and entertaining, with real emotion running through it. It’s an action/adventure with a character in search for meaning and acceptance at its center. I remember when Coco came out, I think the two were in production around the same time, and Coco, coming from the behemoths that are Pixar and Disney, stole much of its thunder. 

This happens a lot, I don’t know what it is, genuine coincidence, parallel thinking, theft?! Gasp! In Hollywood, surely not! But it happens. I can attest to that, it’s happened to me a few times. I remember my old writing partner and I spent months developing a script about three friends, who lose a friend, and are employed to go to India in search of a woman. Then Wes Anderson announced “The Darjeeling Limited”. 

It ended up being nothing like the story we wanted to tell, but the foundations of the story were so similar it made it pointless pursuing it. All that to say, while “The Book of Life" and “Coco” are stories about a guitar playing hero, facing pressure from family to be something they are not, forced to enter the afterlife in search of truth and meaning... they are entirely different, unique, wonderful and worthy. If you haven’t seen “The Book of Life”, check it out, you’re bound to love it.

Filmmakers Side note: This is a tough area, you spend so long working on something only to have the wind taken from your sail by a larger ship. That may have set sail much later than you, but has the power to out run you. It’s disheartening. But you just have to paddle for a while, until the next gust comes along to carry you to different, often distant shores. 

Many of us set out on the same path, some just have bigger, faster, better funded ships. It’s the tough thing about being an indie filmmaker. You wish you could make people see your vision, make them understand it will be entirely unique and different to Director Goliath’s film. But most companies aren’t willing to take that risk. 

I once had a refusal based on a script I co-wrote called “The Race”. A cycling movie about an old champ coming out of retirement to race in the rás, Ireland’s largest bike race. They rejected it based on the fact there had been another cycling movie the year before, “The Flying Scotsman”, about and Olympic track racer... it’s like saying, “we’re not going to make “Saving Private Ryan” because “The Thin Red Line” came out last year”… they’re both set in WW2 and entirely different stories. 

Refusing to see the story as unique because it also has a bike in it is entirely narrow-minded and short sighted, but you’ll come up against this a lot. You just keep paddling, and wishing for a bigger boat. And maybe if you catch the right wave and land on the right shore you’ll get the bigger boat and next time you’ll get there first. The trick is, just keep paddling, because that’s life.