2004-07-23

Tell Me About The Film You're Making

So, I'm going through some old 8mm video tapes, looking to capture anything interesting while I still have Gabe's camcorder.  So, I've got a tape from September 1999 with me doing a walk-through tour of my first house, to send home to the peeps in Massachusetts.  At the end, I play a little guitar.  It's pretty bad.  It's embarrassing.  Then, the tapes is done, my bro takes it back to Mass, and all is well.

Not quite.  Doing a final pass last night, I let then tape run through, and, boom, there's my brother Carl, self-taping, extreme close up.  He says:
So, if you're watching this, you probably had to sit through that horrible tape of Josh playing guitar.  Also, you probably see that I need a shave.

This is followed by a number of late night shots in my bros bedroom, with Jeremy and Carl taking turns taping each other on the computer.  It's all quite fascinating.  In the last clip, Carl relates the "Putt-Putt" mini golf bit made famous by Patch C-Holm, or some such retail cinema employee.  Nice.

The most intriguing clip, however, is of Jeremy, responding to the query posed in the title of this blog entry. 
So, I want to make this film... in the style of a Wong Kar-Wai film.  You know, influenced by Godard and that whole New Wave, French thing.  And we'll use people we know... our friends... these are American Actors.  But they'll speak Chinese, but with subtitles in English... because I think that, really, any film is better, with subtitles. (Carl: But how will you get them to speak Chinese?)  Look, basically... it'll be gibberish.

It's tough to capture the pace and style of the language used, but, trust me, this is wildly funny.  And on the way back from lunch--we're talking, not ten minutes ago--and this really starts to inspire me.  Because it's difficult, for me anyway, to come up with good ideas for something to film, something plausible, feasible, something that I'd love to shoot.  So here it is.

A semi-fictionalized film about a small-time visionary young (in his own mind) Director (played by Jeremy), obsessed with Wong Kar-Wai (this is true), following him in his attempts to make the above film.  No one shares his vision (though he'll share it in abundance, ad neaseum), so this becomes a difficult task.  Like a WKW film, this film (and the film within a film) would be largely unscripted, just setting a situation and letting it go.  Jeremy can freestyle about WKW, and we can reference a lot of WKW elements of style (repetitive music, language, voice-overs) and substance (do you like pineapple?).  No doubt, this film would be a gem to other WKW aficionados.

What do you think, Jer?

3 comments:

Gabe said...

Do it, do it, do it.

Brock said...

Yeah, go for it. It sounds pretty cool.

Jeremy said...

It kills me that I haven't been able to post in a full 10 days. But trust me, I have something to say about this and I will. Give me another day.