A few weeks ago, I went out for a long walk. I wanted to have a think about movies and the making of them, and where I'm at now and whether I'm going anywhere with this. I discovered to my stunned shock a few months ago that I haven't shot a single frame of video footage since the day before Kate and I broke up, which is almost certainly an utter coincidence but a fundamentally unnerving one nevertheless. And in this new, Office Job world I find myself in, I am concerned on a semi-daily basis about whether I'm ever really going to get back to the sort of creative juice I used to feel when I made films.

There have been times of great productivity in my filmmaking life. One of them was last year. But even last year, when I made what I consider to be one of my more solid bodies of work overall, there wasn't so much "drive" as "good opportunities" that lead to the windfall. I went on a road trip to a Star Wars convention; I made a great documentary. I got asked to make a music video; I made a great music video. I got mailed a bunch of useless Ewoks animation cells; I made a great one-minute movie. But, as I suppose is true of most art-bearing folk at some point in their life, there was (and is) the ongoing concern that the old passion has faded to a rusty glow, and won't fire up again. I wrote about it a while back in an entry about hunger, and it's hunger that seems to be missing, particularly now. I am in a strange nether-space, neither coming nor going. I have no goal, no long-term, no nothing. I have a paycheck that arrives every 2 weeks bearing six digits and a decimal place, and a general idea that I have to get back to my real interests someday.

So anyways. I was walking. And I was thinking about what I'd like to write next, because I don't think Glow has fully percolated yet and Mongoose was an exercise at best, and Blood Rose / Black Rose seems a bit vainglorious all things considered. For some reason The Storm popped into my head again, as I suppose it's bound to do every two or three years. I thought about taking another crack at the feature-length version of that script.

The Storm, for those who weren't around in '98, was the script I wrote to be my thesis production in 4010 Film, the final film production class in my time at York University's highly chaotic Department of Film & Video. It was a 20-minute concept piece, a slasher flick with no slasher, a lone surfer riding the Scream wave down to its ultimate post-modern conclusion. It never got made. In the years since, I've fooled around with it a few times, thinking that it's a decent untapped resource and that I should try to bang it into feature length. All attempts along this line have failed.

But I was thinking about it again, and feeling like it might be a nice project for the summer, so I decided to give it a whirl and went and dug up some copies of the earlier drafts, in both short and feature form, of the project - to refresh my memory and get my head back into the characters and overall shape of the plot. I read a few drafts on the subway on the way to work the next day, and my head was sort of slightly blown.

First of all, pretty much every draft after the very first draft, that initial short script back in August of 1998, doesn't really work. None of the feature attempts, and not even any of the revisions of the short script itself. With the exception of one minor modification of the ending that I came up with a few years after the fact, no subsequent revisions were worthwhile.

But that first script.

Damn.

There's something intrinsic to that original 20-page draft, that first attempt at the concept, that is so clear in its intent and so unmuddled in its execution, that it might well be a rallying cry for never mucking about with your initial vision on anything, because you'll probably just go ahead and fuck it up. Is there a lesson in all of this? No, probably not. But point be taken, that draft is fucking awesome. It should be a movie. And it never was.

The Storm, of course, never saw production in my final year at film school. Its prodigal twin, Absence, ended up being my thesis project, which at the time seemed a perfectly valid choice. The decision, for me, was between two projects that each satisfied one of two separate artistic yens I was under during that penultimate year of the 1990s: to either make an episode of My So-Called Life, or an episode of The X-Files. (Damn you Gabrielle Johnson to your dying day for coming up with My So-Called X-Files, and damn my own pride for never pursuing it.) Absence happened, and so did everything else, and that's all certainly fine. But I can't help noticing one thing:

There's everything I was, as a filmmaker, before 1999.

And there's everything I've been after.

And the two really don't compare. In some ways I often feel like the benefit of hindsight is telling me more and more over the years that the choice between Absence and The Storm was one of those crucial hinge-points, unrecognized at the time, where a life can go one of two ways, and every other event that follows that point will forever be influenced or coloured by that one seemingly innocuous decision. Something in my artistic self got squished that year. If the past 7 years of history are anything to go on, whatever it was never came back. It's the sort of thing that still sends me out on long walks to try to figure out the state of myself as a filmmaker, and makes me feel fairly shitty about how things have gone since film school. At the same time, whatever it was is also still alive enough to make me giggle like a molested pig when I come up with a movie idea that truly fires my imagination in the same way that conceiving Light & Magic ten years ago sent me ten and a half paces into the womens' washroom before I even noticed I was in the wrong place. Squished, but if I'm writing this, clearly not dead.

Absence. The Storm. Grudge match anyone?

To be continued...