Dreams are powerful things. You can’t mess around with them, yours or anyone else’s. You need to mind them. Be precious with them. Look after them, and above all, pay attention to them. If you don’t they can turn against you. Forgotten and abandoned dreams can come back to haunt you, they can prevent you from doing many other things, including being a nice person! God knows I can be grumpy at times, and it often comes down to frustration stemming from a lack of fulfilment.
Tricky thing about dreams is that they change as we grow, they might change completely and become something entirely different. Or, they can change size and shape. If we don’t pay attention to that it can be as detrimental as if we’re ignoring them. It’s like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, the peg being the old dream, and the round hole is our life as it is now.
I look at my dream of being a filmmaker, a writer and a director and how it hasn’t gone according to plan. It almost did. I was in the room with the producers, those who held the keys to the kingdom, I even booked the gig, but it fell through. Then I built my own room, became my own producer, and went after bigger fish. Only to have the line snap, and the big fish escape.
I still hung onto that dream, the scale of it and the shape of it, for years, but my life now is unrecognisable to what it was then, as am I. I’m not that hungry young 25 year-old filmmaker who wants to conquer the world. I’m 43, I’m a Dad of three young kids, I’m married and the things I worry about most these days (apart from Covid) are paying the rent, putting food on the table and maybe someday, buying or building a house for my family... not film.
But it is still there. It hasn’t gone away, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t at the forefront of my thoughts on a daily basis. I still want to make films, I still think of stories I want to tell and I still see those stories as films.
I think what’s been holding me back these last few years is that I’m still seeing my dream as the old dream, which is far too large to scale and conquer in my life as it is now. I don’t have the time, the energy, nor the financial means anymore. And that was holding me up. I was saying no to a lot of things, or half-assing things I had said yes to, because they weren’t part of the dream, the BIG dream! But maybe they were, maybe I am actually living the dream!
If I think about it differently, if I reframe it, if I scale it down and resize it to fit my life as it is now, I can make it work. I have to look at what I have to hand and ask what I can do with that. I can’t can’t make a feature film right now, but I can make short films. I can’t make the kinds of shorts I’ve made in the past, that require thousands of euros, a full crew and a dozen actors to shoot over a week or two! But I can find a couple of actors to shot something on my phone over a day for a couple of hundred euros.
Maybe it’s no great shakes, but it’s honest to goodness storytelling, in it’s simplest, purest form. It’s stripping it of all the bells and whistles and just focusing on the story. Creating small, intimate short films that tell a simple story. Nothing wrong with that.
I’m also looking at helping people to tell their stories more. Not just focusing on myself all the time, that can be exhausting. I’m working with a writer at the moment to help her tell her story. I’m lending my experience so she can find a structure to her own story.
Most of the time it’s just getting out of the way and letting them do their thing. But what I find works best is just being there to encourage, to coach, to say it’s working and to keep going. It’s often the only thing people need.
Sometimes you don’t know there’s a door until someone shows you. Too often I’ve met people in this field who want to hide the doors, or stand in front of them and charge you an admission fee. How can you stand in front of the door to something else’s dream and tell them they can’t enter?!
Sometimes all you have to do is say yes, say it’s good enough, and say you’ll help them. More often than not a simple word from you can make all the difference to them.
There are a lot of us out there. We’re dreamers, but maybe we’re older now, jaded, tired. We have a couple of kids in tow, a job, bills, commitments, but we’re still dreamers, we’re still storytellers at heart, and by not being able to tell those stories of dream that dream, it causes the heart to break a little, that light inside to dull a little. But we don’t have to give up on the dream. We just have to think of it in a different way, resize it to fit the shape of our lives as they are now.
What I want to do is shoot short films, no more than 5 minutes, two actors on one location to be shot in a day on my iPhone. That’s it. Small, intimate, simple scripts that perhaps surprise and delight their audiences.
And I’d like to help others do the same. Even even it just means reading a script and saying “Yes, it can be done, here’s how” it might be enough for some people. Sometimes all we need is that little bit of validation, that Yes, the permission.
But here’s the thing, the only permission you need is your own. Say yes to yourself, get out of your own way and go shoot a film. Don’t let your dream die, make it fit your life now. Tell your stories.
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