I hardly ever read any industry news (superstition? laziness? self-righteousness?), but this story about the director of a much-lauded Sundance hit withdrawing from a distribution deal with IFC really captures this climate of despair from the other angle--sure, there's been pervasive flap over the indie distributor crisis (excuse the unbecoming journalistic argot), but almost exclusively from a news-critic-blogger-fan angle. Now we're going to start seeing what it's like for those filmmakers who are being offered deals in this new era. "Never mind."

The first assembly of Around the Bay was three hours and forty-five minutes. The first assembly of Canary, finished last weekend, was 93 minutes.

It's an odd pleasure listening to the commentary track on the Criterion laserdisc edition of Taxi Driver. Recorded when Goodfellas was Scorsese's "new film," the commentary is neatly organized, with Scorsese and Schrader introduced and re-introduced by the stoic moderator, who summarizes their careers intermittently.

As Yvonne mentioned, we recently shot some additional scenes (four months after wrapping). One of the scenes required Eli and Dave to have a conversation in a small office bathroom. We did several takes, and eventually I settled on a shot which covered both actors satisfactorily--it was inventive without being ostentatious.

"Right from the beginning, his understanding of cinema was apparent...He already understood and integrated the plasticity of cinema with the plasticity of narrative. Every shot is the narrative and the narrative is every shot...Many films are delicately subservient to an idea or theme and consequently the images are never allowed to exist as themselves. They illustrate a scripted, written reality or concept...This subtle distortion of the vision-language hierarchy violates the primordial strength of what cinema has to offer. It flattens out reality and it flattens out cinema." -- Nathaniel Dorsky, Devotional Cinema

I often use the phrase "unprivileged angles" to describe my preferred camera technique: backlit subjects, follow-cam, lopsided compositions, one actor obscured behind another.

But Canary reaches a new level. Images are dominated by occlusions and barriers. Whereas unconventional angles in Around the Bay serve to distance the viewer from the characters, in Canary these shifting cages trap the characters, or lend a surreptitiousness to the action (and inaction).

Theme as technique as theme.

Greater than plot. Greater than character. Greater than genre. Greater than you. Greater than me. Greater than the sum of our parts.

Texture is the desired result of all my incoherent efforts.

I write this as I blithely ignore month-old emails from friends and associates. Since the premiere of Around the Bay, I feel I've been extracted from the usual substance of my life, like the pit of a fruit cut out and set aside. Something along the way--the lopsided screenings and incommensurate press bonanza, the time spent, the money spent, my mind and body spent, wife and children neglected--has set me adrift.

Fear: Carla hates me.
Fact: Carla told me when we met that everyone thinks she hates them.