ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

12 years, 4 months ago - Ben Blaine

Last September my brother and I finished the first draft of a script for a film called “Nina Forever”. We started shooting that film on the 25th March. For a while I tried to give you regular updates on the process as sharing this experience seemed like one of the reasons I’ve been given this blog to write all these years. This was fine whilst we took those initial baby steps. With a few months before our start date we were simply welcoming new and wonderful collaborators into our creative process and though we were busy, there was time to sit back and consider the process through thoughtful eyes.

I stopped writing about the film partly because of the pressures of pre-production but more because of the utter fear that anything I said would turn to dust before I could even finish typing it. Pulling a film from thin air in six months is not quite the process you imagine it to be. When people talk about wanting a challenge I think most of us conceive of that in terms akin to climbing a mountain. It’s a difficult process, one that drains you emotionally and physically but inherent in the idea of a challenge is a comprehendible climb and the knowledge of a summit. What I’ve found over the past weeks is instead a sense that half way through the arduous climb the entire mountain may simply disappear or turn out to have never been there. The challenge has not been that of climbing but of being stood on a desolate shore trying to build a coastline with nothing but sand and seaweed.

There is not room to outline all the ups and downs of the past weeks but I will just say that with a week to go before the shoot we fired our entire production team and with her first scene shooting on Tuesday one of our lead cast was not in place until the Friday before we started. Throughout this incredibly effective weight loss programme my only way forward has been to remind myself that problems such as these are integral to the creative process of making a film.
I adore cinema because it is the most three-dimensional of art forms. Like an artistic decathlon, a film combines elements of photography, design, narrative, theatre, music and finance. One discipline I hadn’t expected though was production as performance art.

I don’t mean simply the need to act as if everything was going perfectly as planned. Performance isn’t lying. A performance artist expresses an idea through a way of behaving. In the same way I found that enduring the hollow terror of the past few months has become an essential part of the creative act of making this film. I have in fact found myself with two tasks of equal importance. That of the film, which will one day live independently and out last me and that of making the film.

This second art work is ephemeral and will end as surely as a high wire act in a circus. It is related to the film, like a soundtrack album or stage translation, but it is a different creative act to the film itself. I am not able to write more at this time but I do want to share this piece of performance with you, so for a short while this blog will be in the safe hands of my friend Katie McCullough who will be bringing you regular updates on our progress.

Remember, the ground is far away and we have no net at all. Wish us luck x