How to make a film out of per­son­al experience

I dis­agree with Ben Wheatley’s log­ic that you shouldn’t crit­i­cise a film unless you’ve made one. The pre­sump­tion seems to be that proven movie-mak­ers are inher­ent­ly supe­ri­or. Which is the same as sug­gest­ing that because cat videos are pop­u­lar among view­ers, cats should run YouTube. Still, my expo­sure to movies and direc­tors has fos­tered a yearn­ing to, as Wheat­ley would have it, walk a mile in their shoes. This is not to make a bid for cre­ative over­lord sta­tus, but to expand my arse­nal of expres­sion­is­tic tools and release an impulse that has been fes­ter­ing for years.

“Mys­ti­fi­ca­tion is the process of explain­ing away what might oth­er­wise be evi­dent,” wrote John Berg­er in his sem­i­nal visu­al cul­ture book from 1972, ​‘Ways of See­ing’. There is a lot of mys­ti­fi­ca­tion when it comes to cre­ative arts. Mak­ing movies seems an almost impos­si­ble goal if you dwell on the numer­ous steps and lucky breaks need­ed to trans­form an idea into a fin­ished film. But high­light­ing dif­fi­cul­ties is a form of mys­ti­fi­ca­tion. Every­thing worth doing in pro­fes­sion­al life requires work­ing and learn­ing, a dance of progress and frus­tra­tion. With labour and hard­ship as a giv­en in any walk of life there is no rea­son to fix­ate on bar­ri­ers with­in a par­tic­u­lar indus­try, unless you active­ly want to deter hope­fuls. Wher­ev­er a per­son has some­thing to say, there is the poten­tial for work of val­ue. This isn’t to dis­miss for­mal skills, but to stick up for a dri­ve for per­son­al expres­sion which, when absent, makes tech­ni­cal achieve­ments seem hollow.

Not every­one thinks this way. I expressed my film­mak­ing ambi­tions to a pro­duc­er friend and his response was, ​“Why don’t you write a nov­el?” Nov­els are, obvi­ous­ly, a great form for chan­nelling per­son­al expe­ri­ence but they are not best-suit­ed to what I want to express: lone­li­ness and asso­ci­at­ed inter­nal strug­gles. It’s true that great writ­ers like Franz Kaf­ka and Albert Camus had the whole ​‘life is absurd and indi­vid­u­als suf­fer alone’ lit­er­ary genre on lock­down. But the visu­al lan­guage of cin­e­ma makes it pos­si­ble with­in a con­densed time win­dow, using few or no words, to show dis­cord between a char­ac­ter and their envi­ron­ment. Through the body lan­guage of an actor cou­pled with the atmos­phere of a scene, all man­ner of inter­nal strug­gles can be sug­gest­ed in a mys­te­ri­ous way that invites the view­er to inter­pret them. In Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, for exam­ple, momen­tary glimpses of Scar­lett Johans­son try­ing to pass as human are equiv­a­lent to pages of prose evok­ing the same.

“I was going through a real­ly com­pli­cat­ed time in my life – los­ing my best friend to can­cer and not know­ing how to deal with it,” says direc­tor Josh Mond, whose debut fea­ture, James White, is about the pre-emp­tive grief that comes in waves when a loved one is dying. ​“I want to be a film­mak­er and what bet­ter way to learn how to tell sto­ries than explor­ing some­thing you need to dance with in your head any­way.” The film is bold­ly per­son­al. There is a son and there is a moth­er and there is no doubt that they are essen­tial­ly Josh and Cor­rine, his moth­er, who died of can­cer in 2010.

“Before mak­ing James White, I made a lot of con­cep­tu­al short-form stuff and I felt very com­fort­able in a very visu­al world. There was more of a sur­re­al-ness to it and I realised that that wasn’t appro­pri­ate. I was hid­ing behind that stuff – it became more like a defence mech­a­nism.” The impulse to cam­ou­flage vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties is com­plete­ly relat­able, yet by not doing so, by strip­ping away the illu­sion of strength, you cre­ate the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a very pure type of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. James White does this through a volatile and messy tone, true to the wild­ness of watch­ing your mum suc­cumb to ter­mi­nal cancer.

Anoth­er upcom­ing film, Mus­tang, offers a com­plete con­trast. ​“There’s so many motives of fairy tale and even of mythol­o­gy,” says French-Turk­ish direc­tor Deniz Gamze Ergüven, whose film is about the patri­ar­chal oppres­sion of five care­free sis­ters in rur­al Turkey. It is fuelled by real anec­dotes, some of them lived by Ergu­ven, some from her mother’s gen­er­a­tion and some tak­en from inter­views. The stan­dard tone for such a sto­ry would be grit­ty real­ism, yet Mus­tang has a light-hand­ed momen­tum pro­pelling us for­ward even after trag­ic events. Every moment is a gor­geous treat for the sens­es and the coastal set­ting is magical.

“These are in no way nat­u­ral­is­tic sets or places I’ve been grow­ing up or spend­ing my sum­mers. They’re cho­sen to look big­ger than life and sur­re­al. I want­ed to make shots that could be draw­ings,” Giv­ing her­self a fic­tion­al struc­ture and stylised aes­thet­ic goals helped Ergüven to make some­thing new out of some­thing old, while still retain­ing the grav­i­tas of truth. Hav­ing goals beyond express­ing a raw expe­ri­ence is essen­tial if you actu­al­ly want to reach oth­er peo­ple – to com­mu­ni­cate with them as opposed to release an unprocessed diary. It’s easy to spot a film that has total fideli­ty to bio­graph­i­cal events and zero atten­tion to engag­ing craft. The unfor­tu­nate para­dox is that the more you breath­less­ly reveal of what hap­pened to you, the less an audi­ence is like­ly to care.

“What I do is I write all the things that cross my mind. Among them, I choose the moments that I can make rela­tions between because obvi­ous­ly, I can­not say every­thing and, obvi­ous­ly, 16 years of my life can­not be a 400-page book. That means that I had a very minor, mis­er­able life.” This is the per­spec­tive of Mar­jane Satrapi, a direc­tor whose call­ing card fea­ture, Perse­po­lis (based on her graph­ic nov­el pub­lished in 2000), is about com­ing-of-age dur­ing the Iran­ian rev­o­lu­tion. ​“Of course, much more has hap­pened but you choose – this is the impor­tance of anec­dote – a small sto­ry that makes you under­stand the big­ger sto­ry. Take Bicy­cle Thieves by Vit­to­rio De Sica, the sto­ry itself is very tiny but through this anec­dote is the whole social sit­u­a­tion of Italy after war. If you start talk­ing about big ideas – big ideas are very abstract, it doesn’t mean any­thing. You have to talk about the things that you know and then they become universal.”

Perse­po­lis debunked stereo­typ­i­cal bull­shit about an Iran­ian iden­ti­ty and in the process revealed Satrapi as a high­ly blunt and bril­liant­ly cre­ative voice. We had a hearty talk entire­ly giv­en over to the sub­ject of turn­ing per­son­al expe­ri­ence into a film. ​“The biggest trip is not what you do around the world, the biggest trip is what you do inside your­self. The key of every­thing is the accep­tance of who you are. If you accept who you are then you can make this per­son much bet­ter.” It’s encour­ag­ing that despite pos­sess­ing one of the bold­est per­son­al­i­ties on the film scene, Mar­jane Satrapi is pret­ty sym­pa­thet­ic to the plight of fig­ur­ing your shit out.

Psy­cho­log­i­cal resolve is essen­tial but with­out prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion all you will have to show for your life are good inten­tions and wast­ed time. Satrapi’s words are like a whip-crack: ​“You have to have a cer­tain eth­ic in the work. You have to have cer­tain prin­ci­ples and you have to stick to them. You can­not just be mel­low and shal­low in life. Time is the only thing that you can lose. You can lose your mon­ey and you can make more after­wards. You can lose your house – what­ev­er. But the time that you have lost, you have lost.”

When she said this, it was like she peered into my soul, noticed how much time I waste every sin­gle day and deliv­ered a speech designed to laser my weak spot into shriv­elled non-exis­tence. Anoth­er thing I have is idea debt, which is when you spend more time fan­ta­sis­ing about your dream project than work­ing on it. The more you dream about it, the more mag­nif­i­cent it becomes and the more dis­cour­ag­ing your ini­tial first draft will be when you final­ly set it down on paper.

“You have to have two peo­ple that you trust and you make them read. I always have that. When you tell the sto­ry, every­thing in your brain is com­plete­ly obvi­ous. You know the con­nec­tions. Then peo­ple read it and they’re like, ​‘I don’t quite get what that means’ and this is not because they are dumb. It’s because you didn’t write it in the right way. Rework it, rework it, rework it, rework it. It’s very impor­tant that what you’re say­ing should be under­stood the way you want it to be understood.”

Then there is the abstract kin­ship you can have with writ­ers and film­mak­ers who have left their work as a lega­cy. For Satrapi, suc­cess is not about prizes or applause from high-fly­ing con­tem­po­raries: ​“If you have arrived then you don’t move any more.” The way for­ward is to fol­low the path of light blazed by Crime and Pun­ish­ment author and genius of Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture: ​“Fyo­dr Dosteyevsky is like the height of what you can do as a writer. Does it mean that I will ever become Dosteyevsky? No, but he’s like a light in the mid­dle of the dark­ness. Am I ever going to reach it? No, but it’s not so much to reach the sun that is impor­tant, it’s the way that you go.”

I haven’t iden­ti­fied one true bea­con but coin­ci­den­tal­ly clung to Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture dur­ing times of intense self-loathing and lone­li­ness, find­ing solace in the bleak wis­dom and gal­lows humour of the char­ac­ters and their worlds. I also tend to agree with ​’40s screw­ball direc­tor Pre­ston Sturges that you should make audi­ences feel glad that they are watch­ing your film. So some­thing in between bleak and frothy – like Satrapi’s most recent film, the 2015 men­tal ill­ness com­e­dy-dra­ma, The Voic­es.

Chat­ting with Satrapi, I start to feel like an imposter, car­ry­ing on like a per­son who is seri­ous­ly about to write a fea­ture script and seri­ous­ly believes it might become a film. At least, lights in the dark have pre­sent­ed them­selves in the course of research­ing this arti­cle. Like Josh Mond, I want to be bruis­ing­ly frank about the par­tic­u­lars of suf­fer­ing alone. Like Deniz Gamze Ergüven, I want to cre­ate an art­ful frame­work inspired by real life but upheld by a sound fic­tion­al nar­ra­tive. Like Satrapi, I want to crack on with the busi­ness of becom­ing bet­ter, assist­ed by trust­ed read­ers. It occurs to me to tell her about men­tal defects that may lead me astray but before I can real­ly get into those, she inter­rupts with a moti­va­tion­al speech:

“You should say it. You should tell it. You should stop the hes­i­ta­tion. You want to tell a sto­ry, you just say it, then you find two of your best friends to read it and then you work on it again. Don’t be scared of doing it. First of all, when you are doing it, nobody is see­ing it, so you are not in any kind of dan­ger. Once you have the mate­r­i­al in front of you, you can judge, but you can­not judge some­thing before even hav­ing stud­ied it because you are cut­ting your arms before even tak­ing the weapon. Writ­ing, just do it. In the worst case, it’s no good. In the best case, it’s great and you’re suc­cess­ful. There’s not so much risk that you will write it and then they will say, ​‘Oh what you write is not good. We are going to put you in jail.’ The two bad things that can hap­pen in life are you go to jail or you’re dead. The rest is okay.”