Trust

trust   /trʌst/ Show Spelled[truhst] noun 1. reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence. 2. confident expectation of something; hope. 3. confidence in the certainty of future payment for property or goods received; credit: to sell merchandise on trust. 4. a person on whom or thing on which one relies: God is my trust. 5. the condition of one to whom something has been entrusted.

This Sunday will most likely be the first production meeting for our crew before we film our trailer on Wednesday. The first time I am meeting with our cinematographer, production designer and sound person, three of the most critical people on a film crew. And here I am, Mr. First-Time Director. Yikes. One of the items on our school's checklist of considerations to apply to an acting scene is "Trust." You've got to trust that your work is solid, that you've investigated every possible alternative for your character and his relationship to the other person(s) in the scene, that you will remember your lines and hit your blocking when the time comes (and that your scene partner will do the same.) Stage and film are collaborative mediums. A one-man army cannot win a battle in this business. Not only do I have to trust myself going into this--that my script is solid, that I've cast the right actors, that my own acting and directing skills will be up to the challenge--but I now must put myself in the hands of people with whom I've never worked, people who will in turn have to trust me to know what I'm doing. Or at least come off like I do. Again, yikes. So, why am I writing all of this? What seems to be a collection of nagging anxieties from a rookie director spilling his id onto a blog post for who-knows-who to read? Because I have trust. In my excellent producer, Rachael Meyers, without whom this project would still be just a bunch of words on a page. She has helped me to select most of our crew thus far, many of whom she has worked with or were personally recommended to us by people she trusts. And I have trust in our impeccable cast: Michael Perl, Ursula Mills, Luke Cook and Ali Bayless, all of whom we selected from hundreds of very capable and experienced actors here in Los Angeles. The great director John Huston once said that 75% of a director's job was to cast the right actors for the parts. Once that was done, he could sit back and trust that they would do a good job for him. Part of our casting process consisted of me actually acting with each of them in scenes from the script, getting a feel for them as collaborators, of the ineffable energies that flow from them as people and that cannot necessarily be discerned from just looking at a headshot on a computer screen. I trust that each of them will bring their characters to life in exactly the way I need them to. Once Wednesday rolls around and we're all there on the set, all of the trust that I've placed in these people and that they've placed in me will pay off. I have absolutely no doubt about that.

Beginnings...

Welcome to our new production blog, where we will be giving you in-depth updates on what we are working on as "Saint Andrew" continues to take shape.

It feels strange to be writing this, considering that until a month ago this project was nothing but a bunch of words on my computer that I kept rearranging and fiddling with for over a year. With that in mind, I will tell you a little about how this all came to be.

Back in San Francisco in the winter of 2010-2011, I was a student actor with a lot of time on his hands and a vague idea about wanting to write a love story. It was going to be a short film, since I had done a couple of those as an actor by this point and figured it was a manageable way to get my aspirations as an actor/writer/malcontent off the ground. Anyone who knows me has quickly realized that I'm not exactly a hopeless romantic, so this love story was going to be, well, twisted. I went down to the coffee shop a few blocks from my house on an uncharacteristically sunny San Francisco afternoon and waited for my Muse to speak. A love story has to have, at the very least, the boy-meets-girl dynamic in its opening stages. Over the years I've come to know that my creative side conjures up these images from some dark part of my unconscious mind for me to play with. I had written a feature-length screenplay years ago that had come out of one such image: a young man sitting on the edge of his bed on a rainy morning, wearing a bulletproof vest and holding a gun. From there, I started to ask myself who this guy was and how he had come to be there as he was in that picture in my head. About a month later I had a full 120 page script. Not a very good script, but a script nonetheless.

This time, the image that came to me was of a half-dozen beautiful young women, wearing expensive party dresses, lying asleep on a giant bed in a swanky hotel room. Where this image came from I could never tell you but, like the one of the guy in his room with the gun, it offered some tantalizing possibilities. I began writing with that image: girls sleeping on a bed. And then in walked this guy, coming to wake them up. I decided his name should be Andy. From there, the story became its own separate entity, telling me what these people were saying to each other, what their names were, how they had come to be where they were at this very moment.

The story of Andy, Anna and Arkady was born. Why do their names all begin with an A? Who knows. But they were real people who needed to be heard and I just happened to be there listening.

There is much more to the story, but that will have to wait until my next post. Until then: if you're reading this, thank you. Artists are seldom given meaningful encouragement in this world and those who give a damn about this project and what we want it to become are giving me and everyone involved a great and humbling gift.