The Honeymoon is OVER!

It happened. I fell out of love with my movie.

It all started with a cut…..

I was on such a high when we finished shooting the feature. It had seemed like such an impossible task, and between you and me, I felt like kind of bad ass for orchestrating the whole thing pretty much on my own. But because I had to dive back in to my day jobs immediately after we wrapped filming, I didn’t have a lot of time up my sleeve to edit the movie myself. I also had a lot of people asking me “When will the movie be done? When do we get to see the movie???” And I was afraid that if I tried to edit it myself it would never get done.

Someone who'd worked on the production suggested sending it to an editor they knew who would do a full rough cut for 700 bucks. I thought this sounded like a great price and a great way to see someone elses perspective of the film. This editor also had a lot of free time on his hands so he could work on the cut immediately. GREAT! I was excited to get the ball rolling.

A few months later he returned the cut of the movie. I watched it nervously on my laptop, alone in my room.... And when it was done, I cried. 

Not tears of joy over what I had achieved… Quite the opposite in fact - Tears of disgust and humiliation. Ugly, UGLY thoughts started rushing through my mind; 

I've created a steaming pile of shit! I’m a terrible director! Why did I ever think I could do this? I’m a total amateur!… 

I hate this scene. Why did I not get coverage of that scene? Why didn’t I shoot more B-roll? Why didn’t I organize more background actors? This dialogue is terrible, and so is the title. What a shitty lame title. These jokes aren’t funny. I’m not funny. I’m a delusional loser who just spent a year putting together the worst movie of all time. FUCK! 

- I should add in a side note that none of these feelings had anything to do with the actors performances. There are some truly fantastic performances in the movie and I love my entire cast. I just hate myself – that’s all.

After I'd cried for a good amount of time I tried hard to console myself and think more calming thoughts;  

It would be ok if I threw the movie out. Quentin Tarantino threw his first movie out. He shot the whole thing and realized in editing that it wasn’t good enough so he abandoned it – and look where he ended up! 

The Duplass brothers also threw out their first feature. Maybe I could just quietly pretend this never happened. Or tell everyone that all the footage had been burned in a fire…. Hmmmm. Maybe I should actually burn it in a fire…..

I shared my dark thoughts with a few people I trusted and they asked to see the cut. They agreed it wasn’t working but also sat with me and looked through my uncut footage. They tried to tell me that I had a lot of great stuff to work with and I shouldn’t just abandon it.

I decided to take an entire month off from thinking about the movie. I immersed myself in other projects, and honestly it was a relief to not think about it.

Then a couple of weeks ago I felt like I was ready to look at the footage again. I started going through scene by scene, take by take and looking at what I had. There was a lot of good stuff. I started playing around with cutting some scenes on my own. I’m a slow editor, but I do enjoy the process and I think it makes me a better director because I am forced to confront whatever mistakes I made on set head on rather than have someone try to cover them up for me, with me none the wiser to what I could have done better.

I’m now falling back in love with my movie. I like the scenes I'm cutting. And I’ve taken some of the pressure off myself. I haven’t given myself a hard deadline to finish it, or even decided what I want to do with it when it’s done. Maybe I’ll enter it in festivals, maybe I’ll just show it to friends and family and then let it be. It’s not going to be perfect. But there will be enough good scenes to make it an interesting movie. And the most important thing is that any feelings of regret that I had from making it are gone. I’m so glad that I made it. The best way to learn is by making mistakes and I made a LOT of mistakes on this film… But I also did quite a bit of stuff right too. So there’s that.