Roller coaster

I’ve more than made up for my earlier days of abstinence in the last three days. When our financer fell through, (something that we really should have seen coming) I kind of fell into a mild depression for a few days. My solution? Drink, smoke and other forms of escapism.

I’m kind of back on top. Not completely, but kind off. I hope that by using the same trick I’ve used a lot lately – namely to pretend to be happy in order to provoke feelings of happiness – will push me back up the rest of the way. I will need it, because these next two weeks will be just as hard of a slog as the last three were.

I’m very much looking forward to going to Goa. I’ve seen Bangalore now and though it’s a nice city, I’m ready to continue my travels. That, I think, will be my motivating force for the next few weeks. The end of the tunnel is in sight and I can even see the beach out there.

That will be my motivating force, but my focus better be on getting this short done. We’ve put way too much work into it to watch it fall apart now. That would be an eternal regret along the lines of ‘if only’ and ‘I wish’. It’s not often you get a chance to do something like this. I was almost going to write ‘something you’ve always wanted to do’ but I don’t know if that’s true. Have I always wanted to make films? In a way, yes that’s true. I’ve always been fascinated by films, but I had never really considered directing them. For my first venture out I was actually expecting to be somewhere in the background giving advice, but not making any decisions.

I was always a poor decision maker. I don’t know what has made me so much better at making up my mind. I guess in part it was the realisation that to make a decision and later on realise it was wrong is often a better thing than to not have made a decision at all. People don’t like people that don’t make decision. People want to be around decisive people, often simply because they like to be dragged along in the wake of those decision makers.

Anyway, off topic waffling. Later today we’ve got another meeting with another potential financer. Hopefully this will be the one that works out (rather than the twenty odd that haven’t, to date). If it’s not this one, then let it be the next one, or the one after that. We only need one (or two, if they want to divide the burden between them). It doesn’t matter how many ‘nos’ we get, as long as we get a ‘yes’ (and somewhere soon).

That’s an important point to remember in exercises like this. You only need to find one; one actor, one financer, one DOP, one lighting expert, one set designer one director and one producer. Everything else, though nice, is ultimately just luxury. We can make this work on the bare bones.

It’s all a matter of just getting that skeleton in place.