Movies You Made: “It Felt Good To Have This Pain”
I recently received an email from filmmaker Matt Latham:
Hi Scott,
I’m a long-time reader. Thanks for the blog and everything that you do!
My short film, It Felt Good to Have This Pain, recently won Best Short Film and Best Cinematography at the Fresno Film Festival and has just been put online here. It’s about an unrequited love between two women as remembered from the afterlife:
For the past couple of years, I’ve been developing a process of writing that, while not typical, has been really useful for me. I thought your readers might be interested! I had been concerned that my writing felt like writing, and wanted to shake things up a bit. First, I approached a couple of actresses that I knew, and asked them if they wanted to help me develop the project, before I knew what it was going to be. Fortunately, they were adventurous, and said yes.
I made a private Facebook group for us to share anything we wanted — pictures, videos, movies we love, feelings we’ve had lately, blogs we read — and we also had occasional workshopping sessions, where we would just explore body positions that are visually striking. Within a month of doing this, a direction naturally emerged out of the cross-section of what we were all sharing with each other. The pictures we shared gave me a strong aesthetic sense of the movie, and by this point, I got to know the actresses really well.
Then, I made the decision to start writing. I gave myself the rule that I had to write it quickly, to see what would bubble up out of all the thoughts I’d had in the past month. Interestingly, I didn’t know what the story was going to be, but I could see the movie, so I just sat and wrote it down. “Going into the story and finding the animals” is actually exactly what I felt I was doing, and I had an emotional/aesthetic outline instead of a plot/scene outline. What came out totally surprised me.
I loved this process so much that I repeated it for a feature-length film that I’ve already shot, called You Are Your Body / You Are Not Your Body, which is now in post-production. It worked out very well again, and I’m very excited about it. We have a trailer for that movie on our Kickstarter campaign to raise post-production/festival funds:
YOU ARE YOUR BODY / YOU ARE NOT YOUR BODY - Feature Film
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I hope that you’ll pass the short film and Kickstarter along to the blog, and that your readers will find them interesting. Thanks!
In exchanging emails with Matt, I noted that his process is reminiscent to that of Mike Leigh. Matt acknowledged that Leigh is a major influence.
How about helping Matt obtain the resources to finish his movie post-production? You may visit his Kickstarter site here.
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