I keep forgetting to eat

I’m still working on the screenplay. New ideas keep coming to me, which is great, but every new idea also creates a little problem because it has to fit with everything else. So I write, go back, change things, move things around and try to make everything work together.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how strange it is to make an independent film almost entirely by yourself.

You put months of your life into it, money, energy, pretty much everything. And then, when it’s finished, someone can destroy it in five minutes with a comment on IMDb or Letterboxd. And that’s totally fair, of course. People are allowed to hate a movie. But I don’t think most people realize how much work goes into a very small film.

And sometimes I feel like even some of my friends don’t completely realize how much time and mental energy it takes to write a film. From the outside, maybe it just looks like I’m sitting at home spending time in front of a computer. For me, it’s a full-time job.

Over the last few months it has basically felt like going back to school. I’ve been taking three different courses at the same time. One on screenwriting, because this is actually the first film where I’m writing a proper screenplay and taking all the rules and structure seriously. I’ve been doing a color grading masterclass because I wanted to get better at that. And I’ve also been studying cinematography, especially lighting, because I’ve bought all these lights and now I need to actually know what the hell I’m doing with them.

I have a small team. There’s an actor, a friend who will help me with a few scenes, and another friend who was kind enough to let us use his cabin for the shoot and who will also help me with cinematography and lighting.

But apart from this small group, most of the time I have to think about everything at once. The screenplay, the budget, the location, the props, the camera, the lights, the sound, the production design and a million other little things.

And because I’m working on the film pretty much all day, every day, except when I’m sleeping, my life gets a little ridiculous. Sometimes I forget to eat. Sometimes I drink a few more glasses than I probably should because I convince myself it helps me concentrate. My physical health probably isn’t very happy with me right now, and I’m not sure my brain is either.

The strange thing is that I’m incredibly happy.

Making a film feels a little like having a child. You worry about it constantly, you spend money you probably shouldn’t spend, it keeps you awake, it completely takes over your life, and somehow you’re still ridiculously proud of it.

Sometimes the mental exhaustion becomes physical and I really feel it. I think a lot of people imagine making movies as something that’s just fun. Like you just point a camera at something and that’s it. Maybe it works that way for somebody. It definitely doesn’t for me.

And I’m talking about a tiny production. I can’t even imagine the stress of making a much bigger film with hundreds of people and millions of dollars involved.

But this is my film. And however exhausting it gets, I want to make it exactly the way I see it in my head.

So I’ll probably keep forgetting to eat. And yes, I used GPT to translate these thoughts into English because I’m so tired that sometimes I can’t even speak my own language anymore.