Continuing from Part 3...
One of the most interesting things about my time in film school is the degree to which the third year felt like the thesis year, the year where we all finally graduated to the level of work we wanted to be working at. It was a big, ballsy year. Joel was (somewhat unintentionally) remaking The Deer Hunter, I had my crazy little insects running around, Dave made Fuck, Brandy was shooting Jane (with Steve as her DOP!), and Mike Greenspan was setting the bar very high indeed with the Montreal-based production of the simple-seeming Fishtales. We developed so much artistic capital that year that, in a very real way, many people would never get any further with it in the following year. Rather than an extension of third year, the last year at film school ended up being a whole new ballgame with a whole new team. The personal growth we developed in our third year at York seemed naturally ready to flood into fourth year and create a graduating class of accomplished filmmakers who would prove upon the stepping stones of the years before and create classy, definining work that would perfectly round out our formal film education... but it just didn't happen, for a whole lot of people, myself included.
There were bad things going on with me already. The end of third year saw for me the formal beginning of what would become an almost 2-year fight with chronic depression. The roots of what went down in my head at the end of the twentiety century probably went back further than York, but the fin de siècle madness didn't start getting bad until I looked around in the early winter of 1998 and began to realize that I had been mightily played: raised on an ideal regarding the natural progression from education to career that simply didn't apply in my case, or at least, not the way I wanted it to. The first rallying cry of what I would come to call the "self-fulfillment generation" - an entire spawning pool of people my age who had been raised to believe that they could, and should, have "whatever they want," and that life wasn't life unless you were doing one thing that perfectly defined you and enthralled you on a daily basis. It's a lie, and a horrible act of selfishness to boot, but it defines almost everyone I know. We don't take our lumps well. We consider ourselves entitled to more. The end of the 1990s wasn't just a time period for me; it was a fucking metaphor. "Only connect," indeed. I started connecting too many things, and would continue to do so until the Great Eye told me to stop.
So in the summer between third and fourth year, I was nervous, but willing to build on the confidence of Night of the Centipedes by allowing myself to believe that I could continue my work in the fourth year and come out with a kind of "calling card" film (lordy lordy, how I loathe the living shit out of that concept) with which to make my first move in the professional world.
(Insert snickers here.)
I knew I had to develop a project for me to direct in fourth year and that it would have to be ready for the first week of classes, where the projects would be "pitched" to the production class(es) before being formally vetted by the aforementioned Production Committee 
.
This was sort of a new experience for me because generally, I have a stockhouse of ideas for films that I want to make, which I used during my film school experience to navigate through most of the projects as they came up, "filling in the blanks" with preexisting ideas that could now be brought to fruition under the logistics of whatever project category I was working under. Here, though, I was basically stumped. My longstanding intended thesis script, Scottsdale, was way, way beyond what York University had the capacity to support from a production standpoint in 1998. With that out of the way, I had two general ideas: that I wanted to do either a My So-Called Life episode (i.e. a teen drama) or an X-Files episode (i.e. a scary exploitation movie). I didn't have concepts to fill those requirements, but I figured those were the two most natural conclusions to the body of work I had built at York. I spent the summer rattling through ideas, and got well into August before anything firmed up.
I don't exactly recall where the idea for The Storm came from. 1998 was right in the thick of the neo-horror dynasty that Scream begat, where every slasher flick that came out had a genre-defying, post-modern "concept" concept. André and I were particularly enamoured of the possibilities of this resurgence of the genre (in fact, he wrote a decent spec script for me to direct that year called One Dead, One Wounded, One Never Seen Again) and I'm pretty sure he was with me when I coughed out what would become The Storm's single-line pitch: "A slasher movie with no killer."
I turned around a first draft of The Storm based on that single, crystal premise in almost no time whatsoever, the draft I wrote about way the hell back in Part 1. As per the usual, it fell right into the narrow canyon of how I conjure "concept" movies that can be made quickly and cheaply. It was big in theoretical scope but confined to a single location with five characters; aside from the rain effects - which were considerable - the entire production capital could be realized at my family's cottage, if, as I'd planned, we got the greenlight to go at the front of the production order, and could get the flick in the can before the end of October of that year, before the lake was closed out to us by approaching winter.
And I really liked the movie. It mashed up concepts of screen violence and screen sex in ways that were head-and-shoulders more sophisticated than anything I'd shot before; this was a grown-up movie, a 20-minute concept firecracker, mean and twisted and dark. There's a reason The Storm has stuck with me in the eight years since its inception: it was just a good idea. An idea that, nowadays, would need a good dusting and repurposing in order to move ahead, but for student work, pretty freakin' solid. I remember thinking after I'd written it that I was finally (after three full years of film school) getting good at writing film school-style short films. It would be a habit that would be hard to break in the following years, when the ability to come up with realizeable low-budget "to be graded" shorts would become about as useful as tits on a station wagon.
Even thinking about it now, I want to make it.
But there was that My So-Called Life concept. And if my father only ever made one significant contribution to the way I approach life (and lord knows that ain't even true), he drilled into me the precept of "always keep your options open." So when Jen - girlfriend at the time, cameo starlet of Night of the Centipedes, and all-around hottie - pitched an idea to me that would eventually become Absence, I was more than willing to let it move ahead. Hell, I was enrolled in two production classes in the fall (4010 for film, and 4020 for video); I was probably entertaining delusions of doing both movies. Whyt not? If I was good at one thing in film school, it was grandstanding.
Absence (originally titled In Absence of You) was built around an idea that had been kicking around my head completely independently of its kicking around Jen's head, which was the notion of faith in the intangible - in the script's case, faith in God being related to faith in something as unquantifiable as love. I was all embroiled in my first real love affair at the time, of course, so these were things I thought about quite a bit. Jen's first draft of the Absence script articulated these ideas pretty nicely, and though we would eventually toss the script back and forth at each other for three or four rewrites that only ever really resulted in us ending up back where we started, it was certainly solid enough for me to build a proposal upon. I picked my favourites, and wrote proposed The Storm for film production, and Absence for video.
(I probably should have - and this entire mess might have been avoided had I - gone the other way around on that. Sadly, I was still too new to the video/film divide to have faith in The Storm's ability to work on video. Four years after The Hunt and a year before The Blair Witch Project, I could only see The Storm in film grain. Nowadays, it would be a 24p hi-def job all the way. Absence, on the other hand, was sorely wounded by its production medium, in spite of Ken's truly magnificent efforts at lighting and shooting Beta-SP for a filmic look. The flick works better today on video than it did in 1999 on video, but again, only because our common understanding of the language of video has improved significantly in the past five years.)
I remember the Storm pitch session in the film production class going very well. Not quite as well as Daniel's Whole Machine pitch - which is sort of, as I like to think of it, the moment Daniel became Daniel - but better than some of the others. The Absence pitch in 4020, on the other hand, was weaker than I would have wanted - being a character piece about faith and loss, Absence didn't exactly boil down to an exciting one-liner like "a slasher movie with no killer." I turned in my written support materials on both and waited.
I had two profs in fourth year, one in the film class and the other in the video class. The latter was new to the program - in fact, I don't think I went a single year at York without having somebody come in and try to rewrite the way the production stream was run in their own image. My fourth-year video professor was no exception; she talked big talk about her industry experience, and wanted to run the productions in the video class as real industry productions, with greenlights, interlocking start dates, approved budgets, all the usual stuff. It was vaguely exciting and vaguely unnerving, but certainly head-and-shoulders better than the reckless indifference of the airy-fairy whack job running film production, who I probably shouldn't describe in any greater detail here, for fear of becoming truly bilious. What happened to The Storm shouldn't have surprised me, I suppose; the students got it, and the production committee did not. I got to sit through the next production class as Airy Fairy Whack Job announced the eight projects that would be going ahead - including the words that will be emblazoned upon my soul until I die, "We have to go with at least one fantasy science fiction type thing, so we're going to go with [the 45-minute science fiction film pitched at an $1100 budget and a 1:1 shooting ratio, a production plan so unachievable it actually provoked stunned gasps from the class the week before]." Eight projects, one seemingly arbitrary "I don't understand genre so I'm just going to flip a coin" decision, and no Storm, and my cheeks burning furiously.
Airy Fairy Whack Job came to me after the class and apologized for not having had the opportunity to tell me before the class had started that The Storm would not be picked up (I suppose it's difficult to find the time to be courteous when you're an Airy Fairy Whack Job) but that there was good news, and Absence would be going ahead in video production. I was happy. I actually didn't have a favourite between the two, you see. I was glad to get one or the other, if not quite both, and Absence had more than its fair share of artistic challenges. Though I was still sort of stunned by the humiliation that had just been visited upon me, this would be all right.
And then the video professor told me that Absence wasn't going ahead at all. Airy Fairy Whack Job had gotten ahead of herself, it seems; the decision was still pending, and the script wasn't strong enough, and I had absolutely no right to presume I'd be directing in fourth year, thankyouverymuch.
That was when I threw the shit fit.
Not to get too specific about it, but basically between these two teachers, I was informed by e-mail that the production committee didn't consider me to be one of the class directors - that I had been "indulged" with Night of the Centipedes, but that in the fourth year, serious work had to prevail and I was not welcome at the table. I was told that since Airy Fairy Whack Job's commitment to me was null and void, I had no recourse but to take a crew position on other directors' projects and finish out the year with whatever grade I could scavenge.
Except, of course, that I did have recourse. I fired off a particularly legalistic e-mail to both professors expressing my supreme displeasure at not only their lack of curricular vision, but also the simple personal rudeness that they had both exhibited in my general direction. And then I played my ace: the fact that, after my experiences with him in my second year, I still retained the ear of the head of the department, and could escalate this problem to him directly. And would. And did.
Ah, the power of the cc. In a world still getting used to e-mail, you have never seen two people freak as quickly as those two profs did when they saw who had been copied on my message. I got two phone calls at home at 7:20 that morning, within five minutes of each other. There was backpedalling aplenty, and although The Storm remained unfeasible according to the production committee's assessment - an assessment I still fundamentally disagree with, especially given how difficult Absence proved to be to produce in the long run - Absence was quickly returned to the production slate for the video class. The holes in my crew were immediately filled at the highest level, the best outcome of which was getting Ken for my DOP, a man whose work I respected tremendously but with whom I had no personal relationship before that year. By the time Absence was done, I would have called him my brother: he shot a hell of a (video). I had Steve cutting, I had Joel for an A.D., I had Meredith as the "indispensable other." Adam "Traxx" Raley was back to complete the circle of my York experience (he and I had partnered wayyyyyyy back in our very first production exercise in Film Production 1020). The gang was so very, very solid.
Oh: and having your long-distance girlfriend on the set all the time? Doesn't suck.
But so it went. I suppose the key thing to understand here is that the combined pressures of all of this - of how the abuse of getting the project greenlit undercut my sense that I was working at the same level as my peers, of how my ongoing peaks and dips in chronic depression were substantially destroying my day-to-day ability to function properly, of how Jen and I's tribulations as a couple amped up the tribulations of having her the writer and star of my thesis production, and of how at the end of the day Absence wasn't qutie a strong enough script to achieve its own ends - fatally hurt my ability to get a good movie made. I call Absence all kinds of names and make fun of how awful it is, but whatever deficits there might be in the product itself, it is surrounded by such a wreath of my own pain and problems that any intrinsic issue with the flick seems magnificently magnified. Of all my projects, it is the only one I have absolutely no ability to look at objectively. It just hurts me, every single time. By the time it was done I had to isolate myself from it so completely that I undercut my own film by cloaking it in the pre-Phantom Menace hysteria for which I was York's local poster boy. I hosted the end-of-year screening that year, and drew attention from my own movie by doing so in a full Darth Maul costume. When Absence's credits stopped rolling, Steve and I cut in a quick Episode I trailer that we had lovingly assembled with easily as much care and attention as we had lavished upon the film itself, to snap the audience out of their experience of Absence itself. It was all a big, stupid distraction game. The hand is quicker than the eye. Blood is blood.
I always say that Absence was the most fun I ever had shooting, and that was true, but it was apocalyptic fun; it was the fun you have when you've gone one step beyond reason and hope and are just trying to catch what you can and make it work out. Absence didn't deserve the carelessness and indifference its director heaped upon it during its creation, but with each passing step, from the fight to get it made right to the day we finished the on-line mere hours before the fourth year video screening, Absence felt increasingly like a serious detour in the wrong direction for me. The further I got away from The Storm, the more I realized that my earlier equivalency between the two was entirely wrong. They weren't equally viable projects for me. One was the Matthew C. Brown film, and one was the hack job, and I should have seen it a hell of a lot sooner than I did. Like I said way the hell back in the beginning of this way-too-long four-post monster, I took a step down the wrong road when I made Absence. And yeah, I'm still trying to get back.
It's very possible that at the end of all this, The Storm is the gateway through which I have to pass before things get back to where they used to be. Just as likely, it's way too late (and too impossible) for going back, and all that's left is the continued slow march forward into increased artistic lethargy and wider acceptance of the lazy, hazy world I've slowly sunk into in all the years since I was chasing hell through the high school hallways making my first movies. I still want to believe that there's a bigger, brighter future that is bound to happen, and I'm willing to try any alchemies that will crystallize that form and make it loom in my future like a skyscraper, whether they involve fishing St. Lawrence Market out of Six Mile Lake or going all the way back to my 18-page script for a slasher movie with no killer and turning it into a long-belated reality.
Ultimately, this is a (very, very long) story about confidence: when I had it, when I lost it, and why I need it back. Coming up on my thirtieth birthday it seems like I've spent most of my twenties taking tiny little steps, having been censured (and having censured myself) for taking too big ones. I've learned to go for the easy double every time, instead of swinging for the fences. I may never be as hungry as I was when I was 18... but writing all this and looking back on those years makes a pretty strong argument for wanting to find a way back to being as cocky.
