I’ve been working on a short film for almost three years now, Risotto’s Way. A dumb, black comedy about a drug dealers wife trying to escape her husband by getting him killed. It’s taken me & the Blackbolt crew three years, & around fifteen to twenty grand, & we haven’t even finished shooting it. There’s still a few scenes to shoot, we haven’t even finished a rough cut, we need to record music, maybe some animation before fine cutting it to a point where it looks & feels decent.
Today the director who’s also editing the film told me that we may be missing a whole days worth of audio that we recorded six months ago in a location that no longer exists & cannot reshoot. This is just one problem in a sea of constant road blocks & failures that have plagued the production of this film since we decided to make it.
We have been doing our absolute best to totally avoid thinking & finishing this film because honestly, it’s a piece of shit, & we are sick of thinking about it, yet we are too far in now, the snow ball is rolling down the hill & we have no control. We just need to finish it now, even if it kills us.
This film won’t make us our money back, no one outside our friends will see it — Hi — & I suspect most people will be confused or politely reassuring after seeing it. Even though I’m still in it, seeing as it’s been almost three years I’ve noticed the difference in my psychology & attitude towards the film as it’s progressed.
The film started with nine pages, it was supposed to be a simple idea designed as an exercise to learn how to shoot a scene with guns, & squibs. Similar to what we did with Enter the Spaghetti which was intended as an exercise in fight scene choreography. A simple little thing. But back then, Bob & I were writing a lot of different short film scripts to get the hang of things & build a repertoire of work to convince people that we are not useless so they would give us money to make the still nebulous & unfinished grand ideas in all our heads. We would write something, leave it for a few weeks, revisit it, revise it & repeat.
Risotto’s Way grew each time we revisited it, & we began to start chipping away at production as we went. It grew to a massive forty five odd pages by the time we were ‘happy’ with the story, those pages added each time to fill out plot holes, loose ends & character moments that we felt the story lacked. It’s weird, even now it’s all a blur & it feels like the film has had a life of its own since those first additions to the script. It feels possessed & haunted, it’s been a stress inducing nightmare for everyone involved all while being quite paradoxically, really fucking fun to make.
This film has taught me a lot about making movies, organising people & about life in general. Everything from how to attain a theatrical firearms license — a total annoying tedious fuck around if you’re wondering — all the way to the inconvenient fact that sometimes people in your movie might just die & their scenes need to be cut.
There was a period of time where I got it into my head that I was making this film as a grandiose statement. A fuck you to the film industry to show everyone my film crew & I could self fund a movie for next to nothing, with shit equipment & have it play in cinemas to prove to everyone that we deserve a million dollars to make an actual film. Instead of being subject to the tiresome, demoralising wave of ooze that comes out of most studios today. A statement I stand by even though I am the writer & producer of Risotto’s Way.
But instead I’ve been humbled. It appears that this may turn out to be my biggest failure yet, in a long line of increasingly catastrophic failures that have been the events of my life. My only instinct is to fail so big, so many times without dying that I learn enough & bet big enough to get that first win. I only need one thing not to fail, I thought it might be Risotto’s Way as my mid risk play. But I may have to bet the house on the next one, the journey of this film has led me to a level of maturity I might not have now if I had not been swept into this maddening snowball I am still plummeting down the hill with.
It’s a strange paradoxical mindset you need to have as a film maker. You need to have so much confidence in your vision that you actually need to believe for your own sanity that the film you’re making is the most important thing in the world. While also realising that nobody gives a shit, & your film will not change a single thing. Making a movie, especially outside the studio system is akin to leaving the safety of your castle to trek through the forest on a hunch.
Anyway, It’s 3:30am & I’m getting tired so I’ll leave it there. If you want me to write in more detail about the disasters behind the making of this film leave a comment on the post & share it. Thanks for reading.
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