Up until last June, we opted into the very pervasive idea that one must make short films until some external entity decides you’re worth investing in and provides the financial means to complete a feature. This is not necessarily a bad idea, but its also not necessarily a true one, either.
And then we saw the film My Effortless Brilliance, a Seattle production by the unbelievably talented Lynn Shelton (currently of Humpday fame). It was inexpensively produced, it was made with a small crew, it was shot quickly. But above all that, it was a great film with compelling characters, unique conflict and a wonderful story.
It also made us ask ourselves a very important question: what’s stopping us from making our own feature?
The answer, it turns out, was nothing. We had been kicking around a good idea (no, we’re not biased) for quite a while, but we had never dreamt of spending the time to develop it because we thought it would be such a long time before we could make it.
Perhaps that thinking was based in laziness, perhaps in fear, but My Effortless Brilliance woke us from the slumber. It was as though the film reached through the screen, grabbed us by the collars and shook.
And so it began. Walking home from the screening, ideas kept popping like fireworks and within three months the first draft of Perfect 10 was complete. Now, as Ernest Hemingway once said, “all first drafts are shit”, and ours was no exception. It took another six months of writing, revising, questioning, crying, sweating and bleeding (long story) to turn that first draft into something worth making.
The most important thing to learn from this process of writing and re-writing and re-writing and re-writing and re-writing is that if we never took that risk to put that first draft to paper, we’d never have gotten anywhere. It was incredibly freeing once we said out loud, “yes, this first draft will likely be terrible”, because then we weren’t afraid to just get the ideas out. Underdeveloped characters, clunky wording, obvious or illogical plotting — we had it all. But more importantly, we had committed to paper the kernels that we could eventually shape and polish.
We would be remiss to say that we didn’t feel incredible anxiety once the first draft was complete. “Oh God,” we said after reading the whole thing. “Do we…suck?”
And who knows, we might! But at that moment we decided to ignore the crushing self doubt and press forward.
Six months later, we presented the script at a public reading and, for whatever it’s worth, nine out of ten audience members responded on the feedback form that they would recommend the film to a friend.
