Posted by D. Ney at spider-tl071.proxy.aol.com on July 18, 2001 at 14:41:25:
I, like probably many of you, am a fan of View Askew as much for it's independent nature as it's original and hilarious movies. Though most of Kevin's movies have been funded with some studio money, watching them you can almost taste the absense of studio meddling, which is what makes them feel so alive. When people bitch about the lack of camera moves or of some unecessary verbiosity (using words like verbiosity), I am truly baffled, considering there's movies like Armageddon where 11 words were spoken the whole movie and 4 of them were "meteor."
So...I am a writer, as it seems a lot of View Askewers are, and I think VA has given me the confidence to look into putting together a very modestly budgeted independant movie, a la Clerks.
My question is, how the fuck do you make a movie? Complicated question, I know. Maybe a better one is, where does a typical suburban fuck with an idea start? Do you find young hungry camera guys or film school director-types, or is it smarter to try to handle those things yourself? Do you go out and rent equipment, or do you rent equipment and find someone to use them? do you have to be with a union, or anything, to start? Do you take your cursory knowledge of film technique and try to bring your own modest visual ideas to light to support your character driven story? To pay, do you join twenty credit card companies and max them, or you take loans from the bank, or do you blow and finger your rich hermaphrodidic she-uncle until it cums the money? Are there practical ways to make your money back if the budget isn't too big? Goddamn I ask a lot of questions.
I know these sound like naive questions but for as long as I've been writing I've always assumed someone else would bring what I wrote to fruition. View Askew makes me feel like there's a better way, and I would love to give it a try if I weren't so confused about where a good place to begin is. I have the want, and hopefully ability, to tell a good story, but I just don't know where to start in terms of putting it into a screen.
If any of you guys have advice on a book even to get to start, practical advice, info on digital cameras and their upshots/downsides, personal war stories trying to make soemthing, just whatever. I can't tell you how much it would help. Thanks for reading,
Deren
Moonlad@aol.com