Filmmaker’s Diary: Click Click Click!

The French and their dossiers! Even the experimental organizations want the damn dossier! Synopsis; 1-2 page note of intention (treatment) focusing on details related to the image, sequences…; a completed script – that’s 115 pages of my anti-script; a list of specifics including the duration of the film, number of days for shooting, format, blah, blah, blah; a CV. And all of this times seven (seven copies). And all in French! I ask myself…Does my anti-script count as a script to the French? What about improvisation? White sheets flapping from the clothesline on a sunny day. (There’s a point to things left yet unfinished!) How do artists afford to print out seven copies of all that stuff….and still afford to buy the café crèmes and the cool shoes? Should I even bother getting funding in this conventional way/habit? (It ain’t my style!) I leave the questions to the wind and the flapping sheets on that clothesline. Echo and her little friends wouldn’t leave me alone last night so I didn’t get to sleep until five this morning. They woke me up at nine. They want out! The vision wants out! I have to do something fast. I’m looking for two five-year-old girls to play lead roles. I’m also looking for someone to help with the day-to-day, like contacting a school for the mentally handicapped and convincing them to perform in a parade scene which will be led by the personified Imagination – a Chaplin’s Tramp-type character who gets the little girls into a lot of trouble, often! (As imaginations are apt to do!) Once I have these people, I’ll just go out and shoot my friends and family “acting” the visions in my head. Afterwards, I can “shop it around” for post. I’m not worried. Paris is a good place to be for filmmaking!  Mantra me…I can’t let profits or budget limit my creativity. I have to focus on using the medium of moving images to tell a story, to touch people in the heart. I believe. I believe. (CLICK! CLICK! CLICK!) I will do this as I have scribbled poems on napkins or drawn pictures in the sand! Sure, I need a little cash to make things easier and faster and comfortable for my castandcrew (one word), but I swear I would turn down a million dollars if someone offered it to me! Just because I want to prove a point!  Next week, I plan to be still. Stillness is medicine. It aids vision and helps us to see what’s coming. Sometimes we have to sit still long enough or we miss that golden opportunity – it passes behind our backs, unnoticed and forfeited. It’s important for me to be calm and to wait for the right people – people I can rely on and who also see the vision, love the phantoms, hear the voices! This is very important because I don’t want to get into anything now that would later hinder the success of the project…because Echo would kill me if I let that happen!   *Rachael K LeValley is a self-proclaimed and proud-to-be schizophrenic-jack-of-all-trades! She doesn’t believe in walls – they are not really there! She is shooting her first feature film, Histoire d’Echo, in Paris, France, using an anti-script and the different film/video platforms. Histoire d’Echo is about Echo (from Greek mythology). LeValley chronicles the film’s progress for bonjourparis readers in this Filmmaker’s Diary!