Why Do You Want to Make Movies?
… Or why are you already making them?
- To make the world a better place.
This has been said to me more times than I could count. If this is your reason, become a front-line health worker, a community activist, or join an NGO and support people in need, just don’t cloak your ambition in phony altruism. Art that aims to make the world a better place is invariably bad what’s more. James Baldwin said that the purpose of art is to uncover the questions the answers have hidden. Anton Chekhov said that the writer should not solve the problem but present it. Movies are not about teaching us how to behave, they’re about showing how we do behave — and the questions those behaviors open up. On the other hand, much of cinema, though not all by far, surely helps develop our sense of empathy, which has to improve our engagement with our fellow humans. Much though, is also primordially savage. Whether that purges our primordial instincts or serves to desensitize us, we can argue about, but people who think watching movies can make the world a better place are not watching movies, not thinking about them with sufficient care. Cinema is dangerous, even when it’s Ozu’s.
2. To win approval, love, and fame.
If you want to win awards, critical acclaim, fame, popularity, celebrity you’ll be trying to copy everyone who’s been successful in such ways in the past. You probably won’t win approval, awards or anything else. If you set out on your own path but only so as to hit the big time and have thousands of fans, you will be an iconoclast under false pretenses. Unless you risk failure, humiliation, and court comprehensive rejection then the films you make will never be true to you or to themselves. But be warned! Even if you take that risk, that may not work…
3. To become a member of a select club.
That way lies conformity of thought and approach, and an end to critical thinking. Be a misfit. Clubs are rooted in common assumptions and common thinking. Avoid them and their self-congratulatory coteries.
4. To make money.
Try real estate, finance, banking, cryto-currencies, state-of-the-art batteries.
5. To be cool.
Please… No! Be awkward. Be gauche. Be unfashionable. If inelegance is in, be elegant. If elegance is in, be inelegant. Don’t get tattooed — one day you’ll look past it although I won’t be around to see it. Maybe looking past it is inevitable anyway, should we be lucky enough to grow old, tattooed or not.
6. To achieve your dream.
If you’re dreaming, you’re asleep! Martin Scorsese.
7. To avoid doing a proper job.
But John Ford said ‘Directing is a job of work’. So it’s still a job?
8. To save yourself.
Now we’re talking! You won’t succeed but if you don’t need to save yourself, and desperately, your films will be boring. Art is best practiced by the damned, the doomed, the denigrated, the dispossessed, the desperate, the disdained, the doubtful, the delirious — or some among them. Saving someone, anyone else, by some other means, is a more noble act.
9. To free yourself from your fears.
Again, this probably won’t work, but why not give it a try? Hitchcock said that you should put your fears up on the screen. His sole means of coping with them. Do that as well as he did, and whether you succeed in mastering them or not, you won’t be doing too badly.
10. To give voice to your people and community when that voice has been silenced.
Yes! Do it!
11. To tell stories.
There can surely be no greater motivation. The compulsion to tell a story, the drive, the need will serve you better than any other inducement. And when you let a story go where it has to go, whether you like it or not, whether you think audiences will like it or not, when you are serving the story rather than insisting the story serve you, your preconceptions, some message or moral you want to dish out, then you’ll find yourself on the right track. A good story poses questions, challenges common assumptions and thinking, makes mischief, conjures deep emotions, and reveals what we creatures are — perhaps in some tiny, daily, but profound way, perhaps with deep existential vision yet one that somehow proves all too grounded and familiar. A good story invites good storytelling. When you make a film you make use of the interfunctionality of dramatic narrative, visual language, sound, and performance to serve that act of storytelling.
Master these crafts and you’ll discover why you wanted to make movies…
Peter Markham August 2021
Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)
