What you get is what you see, not the other way around. Some days we live to remember, and other ones we’d kill to forget. Cinema opens all the doors and then leaves the crowd to get lost and found in what it got. That in itself – the search for what cards are in our hand – can be a life-long journey. In a shared environment of survival games, what’s your next story in the making?

I shoot a sequence with Kirill Mikhanovsky. He plays the russian immigrant in Wisconsin. It was fall in Milwaukee, leaves were falling.

A poetic beat, a la Ermanno Olmi? [re:take #4 Truth and Beauty]

The 16mm color 100 Kodak stock under the cloudy red skies was perfect.He looks like a Montmartre avantgardist, with a Fellini scarf. The temperature was close to freezing. Two weeks later I got my film back.

Oh, man.

Even my friend Aaron said this was film poster caliber. I thought it was a compliment. I saw emotional info established. Useful, important. I love it, therefore I keep it.

You’re justifing a slow, internal, psycho-scene from a sentimental Point of View?

Yup. For over a year I believed this nonsense. Only after my wife conceived and gave birth to our second baby, did I see what was happening. The scene was an attention sucker. Not with the rest of the film.

Bad, bad. bad.

I ended up cutting it out after the third grad-school test screening.[Re: Screen Tests]
I kept the final segment, when he climbs the tree by the riverside.

And he throws the script page by page. That was poetic allright

Mistake #1: SHOW & TELL
when you know what concept, idea or philosophy you want the film or a scene to deliver… Hold Relax, don’t do it! THat’s the mistake: putting on screen your intention. That’s bad. I used dialogue that pointed to “what is”. My bad. If my images can’t hold and hide no secrets, cut them.