How to Make a Good Film - A Pep Talk for Fellow Bad Filmmakers

Let's face it: a lot of truly independent films are truly bad.

Making a feature is hard work, and it's easy to screw it up and even easier to get discouraged. Maybe you're one of those filmmakers who has an embarrassingly bad romantic comedy "calling card" wasting away in your closest (or, more likely, on your hard drive).

Well, don't feel bad. The first novel that Flaubert wrote was so bad his friends suggested he give up writing entirely. A few years later, he wrote Madame Bovary and changed the way novels are written. He didn't give up and now he's firmly ensconced in the Western canon.

We're not all born geniuses. Most of can't write a symphony at the age of eight like Mozart; most of us can't direct "Citizen Kane" at twenty-five. History is full of great artists whose earliest, unseen efforts are best left unseen. But they learned from those experiences, and they moved on. They didn't quit.

The point here, basically, is not to get discouraged. And to illustrate the point a little more personally, let me tell you about how I learned to make a film that was actually good.

The first film I ever made was called "The Suicide of Jacob Cedar". It was my final project for my senior year high school video class: a full-length feature film.

The story took place shortly after the titular event, and followed Jacob's girlfriend, best friend, and parents as they tried to deal with his mysterious death. It employed a very theatrical flashback structure in which during the course of a scene, Jacob would enter the scene, and then we'd be in a flashback, the dialogue continuing like the whole thing was one continuous scene.

It didn't have much plot, and was really created in an attempt to understand my own feelings regarding my father's death the year before. That was still too fresh, and I was unable to provide any insight into grief. Nothing original-- or, indeed, personal-- was present in the script. Instead, only the most banal of generalities were given lip service.