Making-a-film

After years of thinking and talking about films, I finally directed our very own first short film as part of a college project. My earlier ventures into short filmmaking were private, local, amateur affairs, but this time it was (more or less) the real thing: a professional cameraman, crew, lightboys, electricians, all the assorted equipment that’s such a pain to handle, and a very serious restriction of time.

And what an experience it was. Out of the millions of things I learnt over the past week of attending four film shoots (including my own), one thing will stand out: our professor Vikas Desai’s assertion that “filmmaking is easy, but making a film is a ...” He never completed that statement, but I’m sure what he meant to say was, “...motherfucking pain in your fucked-up ass.” And it is.

After every shoot, I deliberately went to the respective directors and flashed a smile so as to ask, “So... what say?” Everyone gave me the same answers. “Thank God it’s over.” “I have no words to describe what I feel.” “It was a humbling experience.” “My knees are going to break anytime.” It amazed me to realize that all directors, including me, went through the exact same feeling. It bound us together.

And that’s when I realised the difference between “filmmaking” and “making a film”: filmmaking is the arty side of cinema, that part of cinema that exists in your imagination, that part of cinema that you dream of making, that part of cinema that is up there, that part which you want to be proud of in the end. But “making a film”; now that’s the part that no one knows. That’s the part where you break your back shifting up heavy flowerpots to the third floor and back, carry beds and mattresses from one building to another, sweat like a pig but have no time to wipe it off, hurt your ankle but don’t even pause because the set-up is ready, blow your lid because a fucking pencil in the shot isn’t sharpened, bite your nails hoping the crew likes the food you ordered, get into a fight with the parking guy who’s giving you problems at the last minute, and generally wonder when the hell this ordeal is going to end.

When we were carrying heavy goods and props around like construction workers, I found myself saying to a few fellow students, although in jest, “Does this look like anything close to filmmaking?” Now I know the answer: what I was doing was ‘making-a-film’ not ‘filmmaking’.

And now I’m a little bit wiser, and I realize that, in order:
1. scripting is ‘filmmaking.’
2. shooting is ‘making-a-film’ and
3. editing is ‘filmmaking.’

And that’s the reason all directors heave a sigh of relief at the end of the shoot day: they know that now they can finally stop being mindless manual labourers and get down to ‘filmmaking’ proper; get down to becoming artists again. ~