To create something is to start with nothing. To want to create something completely new, with zero consideration for, or connection to, the world outside your own head, or what has come before is a fools game. So, it is important to be like a sponge.
I write this after two months of travelling South America (half way now) and everything weirdly aligning perfectly for me to begin writing our next feature film. Articles I happen upon, the book I’m reading (Infinite Jest), the music I’m listening to, all oddly connecting, propelling me toward a very clear vision for the next film. For me, the purpose of travelling for a prolonged period of time (this time in particular) was less to see parts of the world and soak up cultures and “find myself”, but more to get away from myself, my previous idea of my life. This portion of my life has afforded me the opportunity to have a set time-frame to soak up the world around me – information. people, ideas, etc – and form something from nothing. Or at least reinvent from previously formed ideas.
To clarify, I’m not suggesting I’m not connecting with the places and cultures I’m experiencing here, but more importantly I’m keeping myself open at all times to listen out for a word, or image, or idea, that clicks something in my brain, and of late it has happened a lot.
In order to illustrate how I wanted to make the film version of a certain “thing”, I recently shared this articleon social media, relating it to my previous blog post on the intentions for the next film – namely the goal of avoiding cynicism and irony, stepping away from the post-modern, and finding something new, in particular a “new sincerity”, further with the intention of creating connection, engagement, as apposed to derision and detachment, as we’ve come to accept globally, but instead of leaving a void, creating a solution to fill that void.
As I find more and more connections between the works I’m reading, the online courses and writing I’m doing, the characters I’m creating, it’s all synthesizing into something I have as a beautiful whole in my head, and this is all thanks to being a sponge. This too relates to the intention of reversing the apathy we’ve come to nurture within ourselves. It’s easy to sit staring at our TV screens and smartphones, scanning for something interesting on the next channel, or further down the feed, but it’s rarely there, and so for release we seek irony, cynicism, whilst simultaneously feeding said habit. We detach, laugh at, disengage, achieve nothing, and seek no solution. Be a sponge, soak up, engage, change the habit, do something before it’s too late.
