What Does Cinema Mean to You?

1.2 — An exploration into my personal filmmaking philosophy

I text this question to about 20 filmmaker friends and colleagues.

The question was first posed to me in the summer of 2022 while going over a script for a short film I wanted to shoot that year. A friend (who I originally met while crewing his MFA thesis in 2020) was giving notes on the script, and because we both have a philosophical bent, he offered that so much of what making films is about is finding an answer to that question, “What does cinema mean to you?”

It stayed with me. On set, while making Rhapsody, if there were ever a moment of quiet to be with my thoughts, or in between days of production, I’d ask myself this question and try to suss out a clearer answer each time. The question became a guide while filming. Each choice, if a strong intuition didn’t come right away, went back to, what does this mean to me?

Anytime I wrestle with that for a moment or two, a strong emotion squirms out.

In the edit as well: do we need to hold on her getting her things together for so long, ping-ponging around the room in one take? I ask what it means to me and it is embarrassingly clear that if you were to set up a static camera in my apartment on any given afternoon, you’d see me ping-ponging from the closet to the desk to the kitchen to desk to couch with my phone back to the desk to an old notebook I wrote an interesting sentence in once seven years ago and back to the desk and to the radio and — OK! — now I can write that thing I’ve been trying to write all afternoon.

Of course, we need to hold on that shot. The question begets another, all-important question–what do I see?

Answers via text start to come in. A lot of folks talk about being young and being drawn to movies from a young age, about having a sense of needing answers to questions.

I text the friend who originally asked me the question, wanting context. Did it come from a teacher? An interview he watched? Is it a question of his own design?

He responds that while in school, he took a class on first features, and this was something the professor said that he ran with, in much the same way I ran with it once it was asked of me. I haven’t shared yet that I reached out partially in regard to my first feature and the process of making it.

I ask if he has any resources from the course and I get a list of first features starting with Cecil B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man and ending with Save Yourselves, co-directed by Eleanor Wilson and Alex Fischer in 2020. In total the list contains more than 250 noteworthy first features.

Skimming the list fills me with excitement and trepidation. On top of editing a feature, prepping for a short film that shoots in late September, screening films for the Austin Film Festival, and working on my next feature script, a list of 250 worthwhile films seems like a nice way to spend the rest of the year. I issue myself a vague warning about overcommitment and bookmark the list.

We get to talking about the purity of a first feature–how in his words they can be, “so reflective of one’s voice… [because] the nature of what it takes to produce a first feature is usually so far removed from the influence of the Hollywood system.” In a way, it’s the freest you’ll ever get to be while making a movie, when you can take great risks because there’s nothing to lose, for better or worse.

There’s a lot riding on firsts. The need to find your voice, to prove to yourself and others that you are capable of doing it, to show what you are made of, to find out if you actually have something to say.

It’s a lot of pressure. Perhaps more than is healthy. But, making a first film is such a monumental and necessary task for a director that a certain colossal pressure might be the only way to initiate such a reaction. You need that much gunpowder to fire the cannon.