9th December 2004
My son was 13 on Monday. I expected him to wake up covered in pimples, smoking a Silk Cut and screaming insults at me in a broken voice. Miraculously he has remained, for the moment at least, bright and sweet-natured and a complete film freak.
He has devised a game to while away long journeys or queues at airports... can you get from actor A to actor B using as stepping stones only three movies? For example, to get from Lauren Bacall to Ray Winstone you could go: Bacall and Kidman in Dogville; Kidman and Glazer in Birth; Glazer and Winstone in Sexy Beast. And on and on.
But his real enthusiasm is in making short films; these he shoots on a camcorder or the PD150 we have borrowed. He uses whoever is around at the time - friends of his and of his kid sister - and lets the story evolve, as far as I can gather, rather in the way that I imagine some of the early Keystone films were half written and half improvised. In this way he has made four or five smart little films, some of them music videos with the actors lip-synching; some of them montages showing, for example, the same child playing ping-pong with himself, only at one end of the table he is in a green top, and at the other a white top; and some of them, short dramas.
"THAT IS WHERE YOU SMACK YOUR FOREHEAD"
The deciding factor in all this is the editing software on his PC, which is absolutely entry level and cost around £30 in Dixons. As any filmmaker will tell you, you really only start to understand how to direct films in the cutting room - usually when it's far too late to do anything about it. That is where you smack your forehead with knotted fist and say: "I get it now, I needed THIS coverage or THAT shot... and the actor should have been QUIET not LOUD, and wearing RED not BLUE," etc, etc.
Harry knows more about the grammar of filmmaking at the age of 13 than I did at the age of 33. He, and presumably millions of other kids like him, are going to grow up with a confidence in the craft that will, I'm sure, begin to demystify the whole 'Cloud of Obscurity' that surrounds the act of directing. They will, of course, all be left with the same absolute and irreversible need for the three most important things in filmmaking: the story, the story, and the story.
