On Screening a Feature for the First Time

Yesterday, I attended a screening of the feature I directed last summer, "Glimpse".

The screening was held in a beautiful screening room at the headquarters of "RealD", a company that specializes in 3D movies. I was anxious before the screening, and strangely, that anxiety didn't really dissipate after the end-credits rolled. I'm still feeling it a little, an awkward knot in the pit of my stomach.

We didn't show the film to "the public" -- just to the cast and crew, and to a select handful of friends in the industry. I don't know what they thought of the film, and I'm too scared to ask. I enjoyed seeing it on a big screen, and took a lot of pride in some of the scenes that really accomplished what I wanted them to accomplish. On the whole, I think I did a good job with the thing, but until it gets evaluated by someone uninvolved (that is to say, until it's reviewed, or until it's screened at a festival), I have a hard time trusting my own response to it, or the responses of friends and family (who, more often than not, choose to say nice things). So the knot in my stomach remains.

Last night, I asked my wife to be candid with me, specifically about what she thought of my directing. She admitted, bravely, that she didn't really know what to look for. She liked some of the performances, and attributed that to the actors. She liked some of the shots, and attributed that to the DP. I found her observation fascinating. To me, the film is completely covered with my "fingerprints". From the extreme camera angles to the way some shots linger for a while to the function of music in the tonality of a scene... there are thousands of little details that I had a hand in creating, or that I pushed my collaborators to create. But to my wife (who, perhaps, is much more like a typical viewer), those are all simply bits and pieces of the story, impossible to separate from the story itself. The conversation was a reminder of the invisibility of the apparatus in Hollywood-style filmmaking, the notion that the filmmaker tell a story without being seen or heard or felt. It's difficult, to think that my own wife couldn't recognize my own work in the film, but it's also something I'm a little proud of. It means I told the story without getting in its way.

-Arnon