“Space walk, it’s like a space walk
with the corresponding weight loss”
A Conversation With Filmmaker Mark Potts
by Pablo D’Stair
I only worked in a cinema for a short while—well, two times, each time for a short while—but the first time was my first job and was literally at a Cinema Six (…a Regal maybe…a Cineplex Odeon?). I remarked in my earlier article about Mark Potts’ and Cole Selix’s film that one of the most striking things about it to me was (and it remains difficult to put in to words) that the film managed to literally get “the feeling of the air” in such a theatre correct. By this I meant that unlike a lot of films (good and bad ones) which depict lowly slogging clerk/retail life, Cinema Six seemed to neither overly tart things up or overly make them drab—because the boredom at such jobs is special, the milieu is not sarcastic or exaggerated, there is just a kind of sterile-empty and it seldom is depicted correctly, in my opinion. Putting these thought to writer/director Mark Potts, he remarked that he agreed about the boredom, going on to say, “We were careful to make sure that [the characters] were just bored, but we didn’t joke about the boredom. We didn’t want that to be the focus. Because at a theatre, when you’re bored, you do sweep lazily or you do text on your phone or you do nothing but talk to the other workers about movies and relationships. That’s what we did and we tried to get that in the movie.”
This technique worked well, was something I found markedly refreshing in comparison to a lot of films which seemed to be making “jokes about their subject” rather than finding the truthful humor in what’s just there (the difference between Merchant and Gervais’ The Office and the NBS version, Cinema Six being aligned to the former).
I mentioned that, as a novelist, I feel only one film I’ve ever come across has depicted the “writer life” correctly—Joachim Trier’s masterpiece Reprise—and like with that film what struck me in Cinema Six was a (I explained I used the term as positive praise) “lack of creativity,” that the script seemed honed of actual, controlled, and honest observational truth, almost documentary-made-narrative.
Then, cutting it out with my roundaboutness, I asked Potts flatly “Which one of you bastards worked in a cinema and paid such careful attention?”
He explained, “Cole and I worked in a movie theatre for a little over two years in high school. That’s where we met—That’s a lie, we played football together in elementary school but he was good and I was bad and we didn’t really talk to one another. We worked at a five screen in Enid, OK. It was in a mall and it was just a great, great job. Very boring at times. At least for me. I was bored, but I always thought, ‘I’m working at a movie theatre. That’s awesome.’
“And a lot of what you see in the film are true things that happened to us or that we did while there. The candy customer happened (to me). When Cole and I became assistants, we played video games in the office. The owners getting mad at the characters is also sort of a nod at the fact that we almost got sued by the owners of the theatre we worked at.
“We shot a short film version of Cinema Six. It was really, really bad. But it was on YouTube and after we left, the owners saw it and said they’d sue if we didn’t take it down. Now, I knew they really had no ground to stand on, but I didn’t fight them and complied right away.”
Potts went on to say he “was a projectionist from time to time and I always wanted to see a film burn and it took over a year to actually see one. It was beautiful. Then I had to fix the movie and it was a big mess,” which I didn’t bring up at the time was always something I wanted to have the pleasure of experiencing in my theater stint, though never got into the projectionist room.
What I did have to remark about was how there’re always the candy customers, at any job, explained how when I worked at a Blockbuster Video there was this fellow who came in every day—whether he was getting a movie or not—and he’d call Whoppers ‘Whoopies’ (“Hey, you guys all out of Whoopies? Where’s the Whoopies?”) which would drive me fucking mad.
Then I returned to Pott’s more important revelation about the threatened law-suit, said I felt it was wild about the threat from the theatre owners over a YouTube short—and also very interesting. In my capacity as a sometimes-indie-publisher, I would now and then have concerns about ‘Am I infringing on anything?’ or ‘Should I change the names?’ in some piece, but nothing had ever come of it when I didn’t.
I thought it must have been—though he was talking of it lightly now—a shaking experience, being accosted like that. I could only imagine having gone through with making a film with pals, posting it up in good fun, enjoying the personal little rush of ecstasy (no matter the quality of the piece) and then—Bang—having someone actually threatening legal action must have been genuinely affronting, a cause for genuine anxiety. I explained that when I rhetorically think about stuff like “I’m gonna make a movie” it’s through a filter of “Shoot first, ask questions later” (to borrow a line from Mamet) especially figuring that any film I’d make would be at an “outsider/indie” level.
I asked Potts if he’d noted any lasting impact of the threat—had it colored his approach to “doing a film,” had this threat of legal action made him more self-conscious of the eventual end of a project, made him feel a need to “plan for effect” ahead of time?
Getting more specific on the matter, Potts explained “We had it on YouTube for a little over 13 months before they said anything. And when they did, I was actually taking a Media Law class and knew that, in Oklahoma, they were outside of their time to claim libel (which is 12 months.) So I was really tempted to tell them to fuck off, but they were also threatening the job of the current theatre manager, a guy who had nothing to do with the short and wasn’t even working there at the time we shot it. So Cole and I decided that running that guy’s life wasn’t worth keeping a shitty short online.
“But it didn’t really change anything for me. I’m definitely a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ guy. We shot a bunch when living in Chicago for a short period of time and never asked permission for anything. We’re doing the same out in LA now. I’d love to be able to pay permits. I’d LOVE it. But I don’t have that money and I’m not in that situation.”
Touching on one of my other remarks, Potts added “And you mention the rush of having something online. I don’t really get that. I genuinely hate myself and think of everything I do as a failure. Seriously, it’s depressing sometimes. I’m never really satisfied because I always think I could have done better. Cinema Six has done pretty well, but we don’t have distribution and we didn’t get into Sundance so I think, ‘Well, Mark, you fucking lazy fuck, what did you do wrong?’ It’s stupid, I know. But I don’t know what’ll have to happen to snap me out of that mentality. Probably somebody punching me in the face.”
Coming to think of it, I found it funny I’d phrased it that way about the “rush,” realized I was basing that more off of remarks from people I know than my own experience. When I write something, I told Potts, while in the process I am rabidly in love with it, think it the best thing I have ever done, but pretty much the moment something is finished I am distanced from it—not that I hate it, not as far as that, but I’m just not interested in it, feel ready to be on to the next thing.
So it was interesting for me (not just because of my personal, very positive opinion of Cinema Six) to hear what he said about what happens with him, post-completion. I intimated how one of the things that always kept me distanced (and has brought me to that distance, again) from the “writing world” is the sense of “what comes after the act of writing” being of such primacy to so many authors—will the work be published, wherefore, to what prestige, all of that. It seemed much the same in film, from what Potts said, which ran curiously against the stream of how I personally view the medium. I told him that I suppose I find the immediacy of the “audience experience” to a film so outside of the “business” end of things it easy not to think of that angle of filmmaking, at all. I gave the example of how I much prefer to come across a film removed of its initial “release” context, when the fanfare or jeers are gone, when it is just another film. And so much of the cinema I have come to adore I have come across completely independent of surrounding context—indeed, I try to avoid context where at all possible.
To bring this around to a point of discussion, I asked Potts if his remarks about depression/self-flaggeation were as honest as they sounded. And I asked at what point, with a film, did he as a filmmaker feel a piece he had created had played itself out, when did he feel that, due to its age-since-completeion etc. etc., a film loses the potential for an “appropriate impact” (to me, Potts seemed to suggest—as do many—that this needs to happen almost immediately after release).
“Do I genuinely hate myself?” Potts rhetorically rephrased, picking up from the center of my meandering line of questioning. “Probably not as much as I use to, but yes. I have some confidence in myself and my decisions. I do think I’m funny and I do think I am a good director, but the more influential side of my mind tells me that I do not matter: it’s the people with money, it’s the audience, it’s the film programmers. And that’s where I start to hate myself. I can’t just love what I make and be done with it. If it doesn’t do well, I blame myself. It’s hard with film festivals because they don’t accept a lot of comedies. And if they do, they are with known names. It’s really hard to get into fests to begin with and I feel I’m already taking a step back trying to do that with a comedy.
“But, on the other hand, if I make a really good comedy, then they won’t say no. So when I get rejected, I feel like I could have done better. I feel like I let everyone down. Our crew on Cinema Six were so fucking good. I can’t say it enough. They were so, so good and they deserve more than we were able to pay them. So if the film fails, I failed them.
“I put too much pressure on myself and I know that, but I can’t help it. I want these films to be seen and do well not only for my sake but for the crew’s.”
Following up on this, I asked Potts if he feels the ability to “freely distribute” (either literally free or to make physical copies available for sale at, really, no cost to him personally—via a Create Space entity or some such thing) is leading to (especially in Indie Cinema) an irrelevancy of sorts with regards to the Festival Circuit and the angling for “official distribution.” I hastened to add that I well know that “ability to make something available” is not the same as “distribution”–so what I meant was did he see this ability to “make movies available” as a step toward building a new platform of distribution, a more self-reliant, slow burn approach.
Potts’ remarks ran the usual line on this subject—a considered middle-ground. “Being able to freely distribute movies is sort of a double-edged sword,” he said. “On one hand, it’s great. Everyone can see your movie and hey, you might earn some money. But on the other hand, it’s a crowded market and the cheaper your stuff is, the cheaper it makes everything. It’s like how now, when it comes to production, anyone with a DSLR can shoot something beautiful so people are undercutting professionals to get jobs. It devalues the content some, I think.
“And again, it’s so overcrowded. I don’t believe having your DVD on Create Space or for free anywhere helps anymore. It’s sort of how I feel about Kickstarter. Literally, everyone is on Kickstarter for something. Getting funding on there is really no harder than getting it in traditional ways. It’s a super-saturated market and I have no clue where it goes from here. I’m glad everyone can make movies and get them seen, that’s awesome. But at what point does it do more damage than good?
***
I reiterated some of my previous article’s remarks about the details in Cinema Six—the set pieces, the exact tone of the costuming etc.—how they continue to strike me even well after watching the film. I wondered how much of this was put together for the film, how much conjured from memory, and how much was just incidental? Contextualizing, I suggested there was such a tone of Wes Anderson (specifically early Anderson, the short film and full length version of Bottle Rocket) to Cinema Six, a polish but a gritty one. I wanted to know, in particular, if it was an extant movie theatre used in the film, of Potts et al. just filmed there or was there a shell that was decorated, stem to stern? I had the feeling it is the former—as with Bottle Rocket and Anderson’s infusing an existing world with as much of his aesthetic as possible, thus leading to that film’s special sort of gorgeous—in Cinema Six, as it seemed someone must have just worked at a joint like that and daydreamed the beautiful way it could be flatly photographed.
Realizing my own rambling tone, I asked Potts to regale me with tidbits about how the shots were composed little nitty-gritty this and that, and he complied.
“We found the theatre that way, but it took forever to find the perfect one. We looked a lot in Oklahoma and Texas for a great theatre, one that resembled the old-fashioned style of the theatre Cole and I worked at. Nothing was working. They were all too modern or had gone digital (Cole and I did not want a digital theatre). Finally, months later, producers Kelly Williams and Don Swaynos found the Hometown Cinemas in Lockhart, Texas and it just jumped out at us.
“One of my favorite moments of making the film was dressing the theatre. It was great, but we added a lot to what you see. For example, the producers were wondering what to do with the large ICEE machine since we couldn’t get rights to that name. I just shrugged and said to put a trash bag on it and an out of order sign because that’s what Cole and I had done at our theatre once.
“All the signs were based of things we had done before or seen at other theatres. We added almost all of those. Our art director, Nathan Smith, was also a huge help. He did a lot of work taking our ideas and actually making them work or look good. He provided quite a bit to the look of the theatre.
“As for shooting, I have to be honest and say Wes Anderson was a huge influence for me early on in my filmmaking efforts, but now I’m more influenced by Alexander Payne and the Coen Brothers. And I’ve always found their films sort of simple in execution. Not huge camera movements or anything like that. Their films look like the place and time they are set in and they let the camera roll and the characters are the focal point. And that was the goal with Cinema Six. I wanted the characters and dialog to be what people paid attention to. I wanted to keep it simple and focused, so we didn’t have a lot of camera movement. I like that type of filmmaking. I’ve always felt the camera is the eyes of the audience and I like those eyes to be more observational than anything. I get slightly uncomfortable with up-close shots, so I always try to stay wide. It didn’t always happen, but wide is where I like a lot of the shots live.”
As it comes to Alexander Payne, I had to admit to being in the minority opinion of not finding him too grand—nothing deficient in his work, just I’ve never been hit by it on a gut level, found it fine and serviceable while a lot of folks, many of whom I greatly respect, are just mad for him. My thinking has led me to the conclusion that perhaps I have just been so unaffected by the subject matter of his films I have not bothered to give him fair-consideration as a director (though really the subject matter usually doesn’t matter to me if overall there are other things of evident “value”—a word I apologized for, unable to think of one less awkward).
I asked Potts if he could maybe illuminate me as to his take on Payne’s work.
Potts said, “The Alexander Payne question is a good one and I have no clue how to answer it. There’s just something about his films I love. The tone, the style. I say ‘style’ because he’s not a flashy director. Everything he does is with actors and dialog. Maybe it’s because he uses the camera closest to what I love using it for and that’s just observing. I always kind of see the camera as someone watching things happen. That’s why I don’t want to move it much or cut quickly. The camera is someone watching the action unfold.”
So leaving Payne lay, I moved on to asking Potts to add his insights to a continual discussion I have concerning ‘what the director is and what the director is remarked for’. I told him that it often seems a generic default to praise the “director” of a film, which to me seems highly subjective, bordering on silly. On the one hand, a “good director” it seems should be able to work with a surrounding group of any talent and utilize them to impressive end—that is a “good director” with a bad cast, poor writing, less than apt cinematographer etc. should still be able to render a fine film, while a “bad director” (which to be less extreme I softened to simply a “not really good” one) surrounded by exceptional cast, great writing, a crew of talented folks etc. could easily get the kudos of the film being “by them” when nothing is, on close inspection, further form the truth. Realizing my vagueness, I added that I didn’t just mean that “all film is collaborative” so why give undo Credit to a single personage, but instead meant, very pointedly, that sometimes a great film does not have a great director, full stop.
With all of that preamble, I put the direct question to Potts: what is the director and why are films typically considered “theirs”?
Potts said that, to him, a Director is “basically a manager. He managers everyone on set to do what needs to be done for his vision to be met. I don’t see it much different than someone who manages a department store, honestly. There are so many moving parts that you have to make sure you have the right people in the right positions in order to make sure everything works smoothly.
“And you have to be a nice guy. To me, that’s the most important thing. Well, maybe nice and firm. There were times on Cinema Six I had to be sort of a jerk, but it wasn’t out of wanting to be, but out of necessity. I argued for things I really wanted. Like ‘No, I don’t want multiple angles of this damn scene. I want this specific angle.’ Stuff like that. Creative arguments.
“Barry Corbin actually told us a great story on set about working with the Coen Brothers on No Country For Old Men. He said he was doing a scene and, about six takes in, he stopped and asked, ‘Are you guys going to give me any direction?’ and they said, ‘If we cast correctly, we don’t have to.’ And I loved that. I’m very particular about cast. In fact, I can’t write without specific people in mind. I think that’s why it’s so hard for me to write something big and grand, because I don’t know who would do that. I write for the people I know or people that are possibly attainable. And that’s a problem, I know.”
I’d heard that about the Cohen’s (and a similar story from…Spielberg was it?) regarding casting, though had to admit I found such anecdotal wisdom slanted due to the fact that when someone at “that level” talks about Casting they kind of have the pick-of-the-litter and a wide array of material to build casting considerations from—endless resumes of previous film, actor exposure etc etc. It was still an apt thing to say, of course, but I told Potts I figured it must be a different world at the Indie Scale.
To this point, I went on about how I personally find it wonderful whenever I hear an independent filmmaker talk about how they wrote/directed/produced to the tune of what they had available—didn’t bother thinking “Oh, Day-Lewis would be great in this role” just wrote a role they knew “my pal Gwen” would be great in. That’s where it’s at, I said—as observer and audience, I like that.
Conversely (and despite the fact that the results are usually phenomenal) I said that I often wished established writers/directors etc. would force themselves to utilize, write for, and think in terms Unknowns—write the scripts based solely on Idea, Character, and then try to find a perfect fit from a field of talent that doesn’t already have a stamp on it. For example, I touched again on Wes Anderson, saying how I felt his “regulars” are suited to his work, certainly, but kind of desired him to go and cast only from a pool of unknowns. And this, to me, applied broadly, not just to “director/actor tropes”—I wanted established Directors to take the talents and flavor of Unknowns and try to dip into this newness to be constantly on quavering ground.
To all of this, Potts had several things to say, and much of it I felt (paradoxically) in agreement with, despite my lead up.
“I’ve written a few things with some famous people in mind,” Potts began. “Just heroes of mine, like, ‘Oh wow, it’d be great if they could do this.’ But in the back of my mind, I’m always thinking of someone I might know or have access to to play a part.
“I love it when directors work with the same actors, but I also love it when they bring in new people. Wes Anderson’s crew is fantastic, but when the rumor circulated that Johnny Depp was in his new film, I got really excited. I was thinking, ‘What could Anderson do to Depp!?’
And honestly, I’d love to have a set crew and a small set of actors in everything I do. Brand Rackley has been in nearly everything I’ve made. He’s one of my best friends and he’s tremendously talented, although I don’t think he believes he is because he’s a self-hating dumbass like me. Or maybe he does know he’s talented and he’s just really good at being modest. I don’t know! He’s that good of an actor!”
Potts returned to the point that had started out aside (a good thing, because I would have gone off in an utterly new direction due to my freewheeling attention span or lack thereof) saying, “Overall, a director is responsible for not only the on-set tone (being a good manager) but getting across the on-film tone. A director is solely responsible for the tone of a film. But I don’t think a good director can make a bad script good. I put the script on a higher pedestal than most. In fact, it angers me so much that screenwriters don’t get more credit, or blame, when a movie does poorly. If a movie bombs, the director is blamed. But what about the script? How come that guy gets a pass? But when it does really well, the screenwriter isn’t even mentioned. It’s really fucked up. It all starts with the written word.
This was a thing very near to my heart, so I pressed in, giving my thoughts about how I so often bring up the fact that, back in the day, a screenwriter was a selling point—emblazoned as big as the director in the credits and marketing of a film—saying that this still, to an extent, happens today, but I feel it is usually kind of ‘hipster,’ ‘less genuine,’ that it happens more for namedrop marketing than absolute respect. A film starts with the script (with some exceptions) I agreed, but had to add that what I think is that, to audience (general and even the more astute variety) The Script, as separate entity, is seldom considered (I’ve joked that the award for Best Screenplay is not decided by people reading the script, but watching the film) only the “Full Film, of which the script is seen as properly expressed by” is considered.
To give more scope to this, I told Potts how when I watch a film—especially a crumby one—I always wonder “What did this look like on the page?—it’s shit on screen, but I can well imagine the film the writer envisioned was great.” That is, I clarified, it’s a case of “Great script, Not So Great Film” (I gave the example of two films with Ewan McGregor—Nora and Rogue Trader). But I went on that I truly think a good director can take a weak—even poor—script and make a film of a certain gravitas or stylistic that makes the audience think “This script must have been excellent” just by association. To this point, I gave the example (making sure to note that I don’t, personally, call the film Great, out-and-out, but do have to say it is popular and much better than it script) of David Fincher’s Se7en. Not pissing on the film, exactly, I remarked that the screenplay is kind of shit—Se7en is not really a well written film (serviceable, not bad, but not a sensational example of writing by any stretch of the imagination). To me it is a film where a director/cinematographer/performers etc. absolutely elevated what was run-of-the-mill into something noteworthy (I parenthetically gave another example of a beloved film to me—again with McGregor—Shallow Grave—explaining I think it a marvelous film, but that if one looks at it the script…eh, it’s only a so-so, at best).
Anyway, winding myself down I summarized that I think this can happen, a lot. If audience is pleased by the “big picture” then the “germ” of the script is overblown with praise.
Potts was succinct and redirecting to the core question at had in his response, telling me, “I do agree about the script stuff you were mentioning. I just think over time, people devalued the screenwriter. Studio heads and producers thought they could do the same job, so they decided to change things in a script whenever they thought it would work. If I ever make something I didn’t write then I’d want the screenwriter on set with me at all times so he/she could help me out when something didn’t work or we needed to tweak something.”
To get off the ethereal/philosophical track, I took some time to make a few observations about the cast of characters in Cinema Six, explaining to Potts I was doing so to pump for as much detail of their creation as he felt like sharing.
I told him how watching his film I (not just generally, but deeply) felt ‘I fucking know these people’ to a point it seemed eerie—the whole time watching the movie, the character ‘Dennis’ in particular I could swear was a cat I worked with a Scott’s Super Video (I still kind of think so). I found something splendid in how stripped down but full Potts and Selix got the characters without treading on stereotype. Again I compared the film to the UK Office, how the characters genuinely seemed clipped from verite experience, just framed precisely to make them seem fictional. They didn’t seem written, is what I suppose I mean, but at the same time they were clearly mannered, given precision—I ramblingly tried to make a finer point, explained how it seemed to me like the difference between the more freeform “mockumentary” style of Curb Your Enthusiasm or Best In Show and the unselfconscious-but-mannered style of Stranger Than Paradise or Eagle vs. Shark).
Because of the sort of writing in Cinema Six, I felt I knew the characters before they revealed themselves through story, the way I would ‘know’ people I just worked a job with. I reiterated the “eerie feeling” the film gave me, how watching the film I got the same feeling I’d always get when walking into a video store or theatre I knew I was going to turn in an application for, just a curious whisper in the blood that “I don’t know why, but this lifestyle attracts me.”
To make a solid point of this, I mentioned how this usually doesn’t happen in “retail drudge” films, good or bad—for example, I like Dante and Randall from Clerks, but I don’t want to know them or work their jobs. I feel the way these characters are written is, in a way, dishonest, meant to voice a sarcastic bellyache, while the Cinema Six lot seemed completely honest, there to show the odd beauty of the grind and Nowhere Man ennui. It was, I continued to inarticulately ramble to Potts, like how the French can make the French ennui romantic even though they are clearly saying “this is not an expression of exuberance,” told him I found there to be something neo-French New wave happening in his film.
And then in order to keep myself from continuing to spiral into fatuous, self-referential blather, I told Potts to please share thoughts about the characters and the process of writing them.
Potts took the reigns and laid things out, thusly:
“I’ll start with Leonard and Cassie, which are two characters people seem to really love. Cole and I don’t know anyone like them, but we liked the idea of a really strong, filthy female character and her beaten down, quiet boyfriend. That’s really why they are there. They are just a ridiculous pairing and no one understands why they are in love because they really do, on the outside, hate being with one another. Love is fucked up and they represent that.
“Julia is just a combination of a number of different people Cole and I have met over the years. A person who doesn’t understand exactly what life really is because of her wealth and opportunities.
“Dennis isn’t someone we necessarily know, but is more of a combination of fears we have about life and love, if that makes sense. He represents the person who left home and came back because things got too hard or got too scary. In his case, it was heartbreak that drove him home. All the credit to Dennis being great goes to Brand Rackley. Cole and I have known Brand for nearly a decade and he is so good at turning our crap into gold. He really understood Dennis. Dennis isn’t the type to pout like Gabe is. He isn’t the type to be passive sort of like Mason. I always thought of Dennis like a guy stuck in a river of shit. He’s not crying about it, he’s not fighting it. He’s just sort of floating along wondering if it’ll end and sort of not caring if it does.
“Then there is Mason and Gabe, which is pretty much Cole and I. Mason changed a little over the years as Cole changed. Cole never had the fears Mason has with family, but he definitely had the fears about having a family and what that meant in terms of growing up. Getting married and having kids, how that changes a person, how it changes their relationships with friends. The fear of leaving a life of comfort, be it in a job or responsibilities (or lack thereof). Cole experienced this and it came out in Mason.
“And Gabe is me. There’s really no way around it. There’s not much different about Gabe than myself. I’m terrible with women (I’m now married, though), I was overweight, and I just loved being at the theatre. I wanted to make movies, but didn’t really want to talk about it. No one really believed I would do it (I still really don’t think moviemaking will work out, but I continue doing it because I’m insane like that.) And, true story, I thought working at a movie theatre would get girls to date me in high school. I always thought, “Man! Free movies and popcorn? Ladies will want to go on dates with me!” And it just never worked. I tried, too. Just always swung and missed.
Promising a question with a less ambling set up, I really wanted to dig in to something with Potts. I prefaced that I was asking what I was going to ask from the perspective of writer-to-writer, wanted to know how much of what he’d just laid out about these characters was stuff distinctly considered “before the fact” or “while writing” and how much was thoughts he’d come to consciously only after the script was down or the film was made? Did he have these notions about “what sort of person he wanted each character to be” at conception and so wrote the folks to specifically fit these description, or did he just observationally render characters within a situation and then come to think of them as representational of this or that, afterward?
Unable to avoid the ramble I’d just before promised to leave off, I added in that for myself, when writing, I of course have an idea of what I’m up to, but the impulses are all unconscious—after the fact, I can look at what is there and see things in it (just the same as can any person in the audience, I felt needed to be mentioned) but I find this a far cry from choosing to have those things there and then consciously setting them down to the page.
Then, specifically, I asked: What’s the breakdown for the Cinema Six lot—how much was rendered from the start and how much came to be revealed after the finish?
Potts kept right in step, which relieved me, and it comforted me that he began by saying, “I love that question. And for Cole and I, it really comes down to the idea. For the longest time, before we wrote anything, we’d have months-long conversations about the script, the characters, the scenes. So, when I sat to write, everything was already ready and I just had to get it all in script order. And that’s sort of how I still do it when writing alone, but I rarely take notes. I don’t know what it is about me, but I hate taking notes. I’ll write down bits of dialog, though. I have a file of dialog for various scripts because when I think about those stories, that dialog comes out.
“I also know I might get there differently than I think. For example, I could jump around and write scenes in some of my ideas, but that makes me uncomfortable, especially if I’m not 100% sure how I’ll get there.
For Cinema Six, it was different for each character. The mains were thought about well in advance and we knew what they’d do in the situations they found themselves in. That was set from the beginning. Everyone else was sort of “let’s-see-what-happens-as-we-go-along.”
Leonard and Cassie were my favorite to write and I think that’s because they were so unknown. We went into a scene knowing what needed to happen but not how they would get us there or what they’d say. That was a lot of fun. And Byron and Lindsey really, really grounded them in logic and realism. I say this in all honesty: if it weren’t for those two, Leonard and Cassie probably wouldn’t have been as great.
And Julia was a funny character because up until about 8 months before we shot, she was a he. I honestly can’t remember why we changed it, but the character was originally based off a friend of ours who worked with us and always acted like that as a joke.”
***
To end things out, I took a step back from Cinema Six, in particular, and gave a last preamable to prompt personal remarks from Potts-as-Artist. I told him how I’ve always found (as a writer) that an Artist is primarily looking for a very specific, personal desired-experience to be fulfilled when they decide to Be An Artist—they want a one very pinpointed thing to happen and only this will mean, to them, they got what they wanted. I’ve found, in myself and in others I’ve spoken to, that whatever the “imprinting moment” whatever the “first way they identified” the idea of Artist was is what they want, will not be satisfied until it happens. For me, I said, the idea was to have one of my books exist on a store or library shelf in a foreign country, to have some random person pick it up, come to it with no immediately sensible prompt, just in the way I first came across Knut Hamsun, removed culturally and by time etc. For other writers I know, it might be “until I have a press conference” or “until I do a book tour” or “until I’m a Bestseller” but it always seemed to touch on how they “first Envisioned a Writer,” that until they, personally, had an experience that resembles the exact, individually-perceived iconography that awakened them, a spiritual itch will not have been scratched, so to speak, no matter what other success they have: there is a Holy Grail Moment, deeply personal, nothing to do with “general notions of success”.
I told Potts I wondered if this is so for him, as a filmmaker—and if so, I wanted to know what is this particular “thing,” what is the moment he wants the most? If not, I wanted to know what the impetus is in him to make films, what is the drive to express in this way?
Gracious as always, he first said it was a fantastic question, then offered these thoughts.
“I think I’ll have that big moment when I can go to a theatre and buy a ticket for my movie. Or buy a DVD for a movie I made that I didn’t have to create in Photoshop on my own and print out (I stole that sentiment from producer/editor Don Swaynos.)
“It might be because I tore thousands of tickets while at the theatre, but the idea that I can buy one and have someone tear it for me just seems like the dream I have.
“I don’t know what drives me to do this, honestly. I’m going to be very honest here: Filmmaking stresses me out. It pisses me off. I get sick to my stomach a lot and I feel like I’m letting everyone down and I am going to fuck up and lose people lots of money and I’ll never be happy and I second guess myself constantly and I feel kind of miserable the whole time.
“But I love it. I can’t say why but I do. Every time I think of quitting or selling my equipment, I get an insane sense of stupidity washes over me. And I think that stupidity and doubt is what drives me. It drives me to shut my head off, because while all those bad things that I listed are happening, I’m writing something, playing make-believe with my best friends, and making movies. And that’s just too fucking cool to let a little think like intense self-doubt get in the way.
“I’ve only been sure of two things my entire life: that I wanted to marry Hailey Branson and I want to make movies.”
“Three things,” he corrected. “Marry Hailey, make movies, eat popcorn every day.”
***
Pablo D’Stair is a novelist, essayist, and interviewer. Co-founder of the art house press KUBOA, he is also a regular contributor to the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka). His book Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: the short films of director Norman Reedus will be re-releasing late in 2012 through Serenity House Publishing, International.
