A HUMBLING
Two no-budget short films of mine over a few years led to a shoe-string-budget feature that managed only three festival showings. But a great review of that film in Collider gave me hope.
All the while, I'd been rewriting over and over again a wild feature film, pitching to producers, actors, and financiers to no avail. After a decade of revisions, a close friend and mentor said of the script - "I think you've aged out of this story."
But a fateful meeting on a rare rainy day in LA brought the script for Buck Run into my life. As I walked, umbrella-less, cursing my decision to stroll to a part-time job I'd held for a few years, an old colleague hollered out to me from a grip truck he happened to be driving down that particular street at that specific time - "Nick! I have a feature film you'd be perfect to direct!"
Perhaps it was this fatefulness with which the project came to me that had me believe, throughout the next few years of financing, directing, touring, and distributing Buck Run, that it would be, somehow, the only film I'd ever have to make - that it would complete me forever and always. And I acted as such. I was willing to sacrifice anything for that project. I started conversations with my producer, saying, "If I die before this film is finished..."
Buck Run brought many things to me and won many victories, some I hoped and longed for, some I could have never imagined. What the film didn't do was bring closure to my life. It wasn't the answer to "all things me" for which I searched. And why should it be? Why should any of our creative endeavors do such a thing?
In this way, all of what comes to us, the good and the bad, the yes' and the no's, act as a humbling. One often refers to art as being bigger than us, but we ought not to believe our lives are smaller than the films we write and direct.
What I loved about that Collider review of my shoe-string feature I spoke of above was that it said that the film was "a testament to no-budget filmmaking" and that it showed how "even the smallest of films can possess the greatest of ambitions." I've carried this statement with me for these years because it speaks to the imperfection of art. We may strive our whole lives to make something perfect and never do so. Thank the Artistic Gods for that! Otherwise, we might stop short of the whole of what resides deep within us that needs expression.