Theme: ACTOR DIRECTOR

09.01.2021

The premise is: nobody needs fixing! I am just here to lend a hand. To facilitate. And act when inspired.

I dreamt that there were two badass Terminator type killers who could change their hands into swords and they were coming after someone I knew. Me and a couple of others tried to run from them but then ran into human traffic and got stuck. I could feel them approaching. I tried to hide in the crowd so I crouched down first and then let myself fall down the grassy banks by the side of the road and into these bushes. Although I knew they were coming after someone else close to me, I lay there pretending to be dead. And then I saw that the person they were looking for was actually unconscious next to me lying on his front and the assassins knelt besides him, figuring out where his heart was with two pens and stabbed him. He didn’t feel anything. When they got up and walked away, they said to me that they knew I wasn’t dead but they were not after me. I was really relieved but then I saw that I had settled in a huge fresh dog turd with bits everywhere and I was totally disgusted with myself, disgusted because it was completely pointless for me pretending and that I could’ve intervened but didn’t. Instead I was paralysed by fear but I should’ve done something because you can do whatever you want in a dream, non? I could’ve I saved that person if I wanted to without doing anything I didn’t want to, only with my mind. That’s the cool thing about dreams.

I was also a short shaggy Mexican man which is weird because I’m not an ignorant racist pig.

This is a realisation.

Is the key to know I will always be protected no matter what because I’m in a dream? Meaning, even if there are deadly assassins after me, I don’t have to hide? Instead, I can just let them do whatever, and even if I have the experience of being stabbed in the back by hand swords, I could just look at it sticking out of my chest and go okay, that’s interesting and start laughing!

If I can do anything I want in a dream also means that I don’t HAVE to do anything either. I also don’t have to save anybody because they don’t need saving. There is no real danger.

Expose the dream.

Because none of it makes sense. Or only on the surface.

It’s like behind the scenes everything is propped up by wooden poles.

Theatre

The Truman Show

I don’t have to explain anything that’s happening to me. But I can be a very good director. Proposing changes in the script and leaving actors space to move intuitively. Space for improvisation.

For surprises.

This makes good movies.

Exploring the human condition. Being open.

Robert Altman

“Once the actors are cast, 85% of my work as a movie director is done”

Developing the script, by yourself (or with a fellow writer who is on the same page)

Keep away from the obvious.

Suspense and surprise.

Suspension of disbelief.

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF

… is the intentional avoidance of critical thinking or logic in examining something surreal in order to believe it for the sake of enjoyment.

Peter Jackson

“I’m an entertainer.”

Martin Scorsese

“We are not creating normal life but something slightly different.

Steven Spielberg

“I dream for a living”

All I have to do is having fun!!

Being a director actor or actor director

My life as a movie

Seeing everything through frames. In shots.

Mirrors

Shadows

Human emotions

Stylised

World Cinema

Creating (visualising) a world through a unique set of eyes and mind

Visualising a world that has potential and potency

Cinematography

A lense. A perspective

Orson Wells didn’t know anything about film making, yet they gave him the biggest budget ever bestowed to make the greatest movie of all times.

To have proven that it is possible to make great movies on a very low budget. Imagine what can be done with a gigantic budget? There is the excitement.

What is interesting about Orson Wells is that he shot most of his movie pretending to simply work on pre-production and in real locations, therefore away from prying eyes of the film studio and journalists. In order to feel free to do what he wanted to do. To work without pressure.

Curiously, he never got the same chance again. Why?

Maybe he didn’t feel the need, I guess making the greatest movie of all times did not require anything else.

Beginner’s Luck

It’s the best feeling.

He had already done radio and theatre, so maybe he was ambivalent to movie making, it might’ve just been another medium to communicate and explore. So he thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Acting-Directing. But that was it.

Wells also watched one Western over 40 times. He declared this his Movie Making Masterclass.

Control the flow of information, you control the behaviour.

(Tau)

Outside? What’s outside?

Explain

This is a house.

Start simple

Ask questions

Why is that?

How is that?

Is that similar or different?

If different, how different?

Am I alone?

We create for each other.

Jones

Playful co-creation

I’ll show you the world, my world

By staying silent, alert and blindfolded.

DER HIMMEL ÜBER BERLIN

The casting of Peter Falck

“I need, for a very special part, a fallen angel.” … short pause … “How did you know?” “It shows.”

“Till the End of the World” global chase romance (Wim Wenders)

Movie to come

18 countries and 25 different cities asking questions.

That will be my Masterclass.

Der Himmel über Berlin

Heaven on Earth

Which movie would I watch over 40 times to inspire me? The Fifth Element?

It’s my favourite.

Suddenly not free on Youtube anymore.

Curious.

Non-chronological narrative

Citizen Kane

The Colour of Pomegranate

The inside visualised.

Seeing the world like theatre

La Belle et la Bête

Its world is a stage.

Showing the extremity of the light and the dark

Light and shadow as equally important.

“When showing for what it is, the childlike admiration for the form can return to us ….”

If I am able to see and feel the sun and be playful in Berlin in winter AND during lockdown, I will be able to see sun and play everywhere in the world.

The viewer filters things, therefore creating their own protagonistic reality.

Algebra is a narrative.

Allegories

Algorithm

Connected in universal truths

Visual storytelling.

Universality

The viewer aims for something to latch on. Through the eye of the storyteller.

To recognise himself in someone elses’ eye

Mirroring relationship

Life is a meditation.

A single narrative thread

(Fritz Lang)

An entire lifetime of purposeful One.

Bleached hair means transformation.

Memento (Christopher Nolan)

Long Kiss Goodnight

La Jetée

With use of photographs

Snapshots in a timeline

Non-linear memory

Hiroshima, Mon Amour

Flashback and time shifts

Collective memory

Singular part of a whole

Separate stories connected in one causal connection, can be completely random

• Pulp Fiction

Would be so much fun to be an Air BnB secret shopper.

To be sent around the world to check out places.

This one I’m staying now doesn’t look lived in.

It feels cobbled together.

Which is fun.

Each room feels like those “free stuff” boxes of random stuff in doorways in the streets all over Berlin.

Few dishes and the most impractical dish rack in kitchen history.

Also one of the pots is burnt inside. Someone hardly cooks, and if so, gets distracted and walks away.

Two ovens, but not one oven dish

And that curious black shallow litter tray in the hallway since you clearly don’t own a cat.

Jones whatsapp’d me some weird messages earlier … it sounded like his old self.

I wonder.

But also not.