Filming ‘A Shot in the Dark’
This summer, I wrote, produced, and co-directed my first short film. I still have to repeat this sentence out loud to convince myself that it is real. It really happened. To this day, I haven’t had an experience that was so dream-like and yet simultaneously so incredibly challenging. It was an experience that I haven’t quite been able to put into words, and still find myself falling short writing this right now.
All BTS photos thanks to Layla Wolfberg.
I often feel the need to memorialize experiences by writing about them - it makes them realer, somehow; it works through the ephemeral tangles of reality and smooths them into something I can understand. I feel like sometimes I can be slow at processing important moments in my life - it’s only a couple of days, even months, later, or after a long journaling session, where the reality of what has happened has hit me. “Oh, wait - wow!”.
The journey of making a short film was so long and complex and interdependent on so many communities of people that it was something I really struggled to put into words. When people asked about it, I found myself fumbling - I didn’t know where to begin the story, or where to end it. Because the story of 'making something’ is always unraveling, and in a way it had long been forming.
I remember when my to-be co-director, Cooper, reached out to me with an idea. He asked if we could try writing it together. I love when I’m given the task of writing within restraints of a pre-formed idea - it allows me to be creative but with guardrails, giving the story a sort of tight kinetic energy with an end goal in sight. Otherwise, writing and creativity, for me, can become a very vague, untethered thing - which can be fun at times, but perhaps not for the reader and/or viewer.
And so I adored writing this short screenplay - even though it was a psychological thriller, which isn’t my usual genre of choice. Writing a screenplay can feel like writing out your most far-reaching ambitions and unlikely dreams, especially when, like me, you’re in the beginning of your filmmaking career. Most of the time while writing it, I was thinking, there’s no way this will be able to happen. So I’ll just write it the way I want the story to be, since it’s not possible anyway.
After all, the current name of the film is “A Shot in the Dark”. Writing it, producing it, and dreaming of it becoming something real certainly reflected this title. Especially with the ever-haunting imposter syndrome, it felt like a total shot in the dark. But at least we had a shot.
I always find the moment a possible idea becomes a future reality - the crux of it, the turning point - to be incredibly interesting. Exactly when did the potential of a screenplay draft become something more? The power of deciding to make a film is quite incredible - you tell people you’re making a short film, and people, excited by your excitement, join in and offer their help, and suddenly - you are making a short film. It snowballs in the most amazing way, and this process is completely due to other people.
It’s a truism, but the most powerful stories are those that reach towards a deeper universal story. These stories remain through time, and people read or watch or hear them, and they continue to strike some chord in each individual human, thus bringing us closer through shared human experience, towards something more broadly universal.
Bernard Berenson once said (quoted by Clarice Lispector): “A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there is no self to die.” I believe that these moments of ‘full identification with the non-self’ can be simplified into two categories: love, and art (which, when both done well, merge into a singularity themselves).
Genuine and true art, whether that be the product of it or the act of creating it, lead to this full identification with the non-self; a touching awareness that we are all a part of each other and thus, together, can create something bigger than us.
It is truly a kind of magic when other people get involved with your project, becoming a joint effort. It becomes much bigger, and much more magical. Everyone brings their own lives and histories to the project, and the project becomes a story of this group of people, at this singular moment in time.
We lucked out in having the most generous, talented, and hard-working crew I could have ever asked for. It was an assembly of friends, friends of friends, and even some complete strangers - now no longer strangers. It’s obvious, but we wouldn’t have been able to turn any of this story into a reality without the actors, the crew, the connections that brought mutuals in. Duh, of course you couldn’t make a movie without these people. But it’s a fact I can’t get over, and don’t want to: it makes me joyous to know that the hard drive I now hold in my hands - this big, alarmingly heavy hard drive that heats up my bedroom whenever I edit - would be nothing without the help and passion and interest of so many people. It’s incredible. I feel like I’m not just holding a short film, but that I’m holding a million little histories and stories and selves that all brought us together to create this film in three long, hectic, beautiful days in upstate New York this past August.
For me, the act of making a film most encapsulated this becoming (or unbecoming) the non-self. The short screenplay became a reality when I shared it and started planning out the production of it with my co-director - how many days it could be done in, what crew we would need, how much money we would need, where we could film, what the shots would look like. Suddenly, these words on paper, written in cafes and trains, were very quickly becoming a reality.
We’re now entering post-production, and the film will continue to be molded by the creative minds of other talented people. It will continuing evolving and become it’s best by passing through more and many hands. From the self to the non-self.
My short experience in the world of filmmaking, only just beginning, has taught me so much about life. (And I tend to overdramatize most events in my life - everything must have a deeper and bigger meaning, a lesson or two to learn. I’m sorry!).
Mostly, filmmaking reminds me how much we depend on others, and how that is an incredible thing. How incredibly connected and interdependent we all are. How we endlessly impact one another, and how we are mosaics of everyone we’ve ever loved, ever known. It’s probably something you could find on a sappy Instagram post, but that doesn’t make it any less true: how you still make eggs the way your dad taught you, that you’ll always love that one song from that crush, that you still make that same joke your childhood best friend used to say decades ago.
We are made from each other.
And so what an absolute joy to make things with one another.
