Boys Become Men Trailer
That’s just one of the questions you will encounter every time you release a film. And so it has for me. Along with the chorus of viewers of my latest film I’ve been adding my own voice to the question: What now?
At this moment I probably have at least ten projects that I have developed and not yet made. I could take any one of them and update the research, revise, and polish them and have them ready to go within a month, easily. For most it would just be a matter of a few days.
The story that I’ve been most wanting to make now for ten years is BOYS BECOME MEN – the sequel to BOYS TO MEN? (2004). This feature doc on a year in the life of 15 year old American boys would highlight the best practices of workshops and men who are initiating and mentoring boys into mature masculinity. It’s a theme I’ve been obsessed with for 15 years, one that’s also reflected in my 1999 feature THE UNSPOKEN. It’s a film I feel I was born to make, one that could be the culmination of everything I’ve learned over the course of my entire life as a filmmaker and a man. But there’s no money to make it. And I don’t have the psychic energy to hoist it onto my back and say “no matter what.”
Basically, there are only five things to ask yourself before picking your next film project:
1. Does the project have the richness, the “juice” to maintain my interest over the next, say, 5 years it’ll take to make? Am I passionate about the subject almost to the point of obsession?
a. Commentary: For me, this is the most important criterion of all. At some point, you’ll get sick of the film no matter how turned on to the subject matter you are. You just have to hope that point comes only when you’re nearly finished with it, rather than, say, when you’re still in the middle of shooting.
2. What possibilities for support exist for this film, both cash and in-kind? What networks can you activate: friends, family, spouses, crew people, non-profit and government institutions, corporations, small businesses…?
a. Commentary: If you work hard enough at it you can get almost anything for free. But it means activating every possible resource you’ve ever had at the same time that you’re developing new ones.
b. Along with economic survival you have to consider psychological survival. Are there enough nourishing, supportive people out there to sustain you through your “dark night of the soul” which almost every filmmaking process contains?
3. Am I clear on how I’m going to survive economically while making it? Will my day job allow me enough time and income to sustain it?
a. Commentary: Though I’ve been a proud self-sufficient income earner my entire life, since I was 17 in fact, increasingly it looks like I’m going to have to be supported by my wife if I’m going to continue to make films full time. Who or what is supporting you?
4. Is there an audience for this film?
a. Commentary: Ideally, just as the film is released, you’ll arrive right at the crest of the wave of public interest in your film’s subject matter. A lot of this is luck. My film DREAMS FROM CHINA was finished in April 1988. One month later the Tiananmen Square student rebellion and massacre took place. Suddenly everyone wanted to see a China film with a human rights theme. My film fit the bill and benefited tremendously. This question may not be so relevant to you if you’re making a film purely for “artistic” purposes – to satisfy your own creative longing, purely for self-expression. In that case screw the audience, make what you want.
b. My own film-to-be BOYS BECOME MEN has been so far out ahead of the wave, so off the radar for most potential supporters of the film, that they hardly understand the subject matter (“What’s initiation?”), much less actually want to support it. Again, if you’re a fine artist solely following your own instincts, the truth is you don’t need supporters. But if you have to enroll others to build support for your project then let the compromising begin! [Editor’s note: In fact, four years later I shifted the focus of the film to be about both girls and boys partly with an eye toward easing the funding process.]
5. When the Academy Awards call, do I have a tuxedo?