Reviewer: Tanya Cushman Thank you and good morning. So, it turns out that the phrase "I'm making a movie" might just be one of the best pickup lines I've ever had the opportunity to use. And it works especially well when that phrase is actually true.
Unfortunately for me, the first time I did use it, I'd never done anything as complicated as even make a YouTube video, and yet that didn't stop me from playing along when my cousin, wonderful fellow that he is, on one spring night on the London Underground, approached a really beautiful woman and told her that I was a budding filmmaker. I took some story out of nowhere about a janitor who had fallen in love with a thief who may have stolen from him, and sort of made it work. It turned out pretty well until we realized that this woman was, in fact, a professor of film at the University of London.
(Laughter) Right. Nonetheless, I woke up the next morning with this woman's business card in my pocket and the idea for what would eventually be my first feature film, "Steal Away. " Just as I had done that night, I pieced together some story about a janitor who falls in love with someone who's stolen from him, and it sort of came together in that I arranged the film around the idea of what happens when someone whose job it is to keep things locked dates someone whose job is the exact opposite of that.
Tension, right? In any case, writing the film was hard because I was conflicted. I couldn't quite put away the thought that that woman on the train platform had not really bought a word of what I'd said.
And why would she? She knew everything there was to know about film. And although I could answer the "hows" of the things, how I'd gotten this great group of friends together, how my roommates had, like, hid in our basement for 20 minutes while I filmed something - which ended up happening.
I couldn't answer the "why" of the thing. First off, why was I chasing a woman almost 20 years my senior on a train platform? Second, why was I lying about a movie that I had not yet created?
And third, why tell stories at all? Why are stories important? To answer this, I started with just going back to my roots, the portion in the notion that stories tell us where we're from and who we are.
For me, Emmanuel Dzotsi, I am the grandson of Ghanaian and Dominican people who moved, emigrated, to the United Kingdom just after World War II. For me, growing up as a child, stories were a way to connect who I was and how grateful I should be for the opportunities I'd been afforded. Because of my dad's job, I had the opportunity to move a lot as a child, moving from England to Belgium and then to America.
Stories served a definitive purpose for my parents in trying to connect these different people and creating context around them to describe them, these relatives, these wonderful people who'd done so much for me but I only saw and talked to maybe one or two times a year. These stories were important. They served an important utility, and that utility was that they were meant to be shared.
For me, however, when I first started writing "Steal Away," I couldn't understand what on earth there was worth sharing in it. I held onto it for months, and even though friends asked about it, I wouldn't share it with them. And yet by November of that year, I'd been convinced.
I took a deep breath and pressed send. And the response I got was so positive. People from all disciplines, all of my friends - music majors, pre-med students, pre-law students, engineers - were taken aback at the fact that I'd written a story.
They took the time to read it and gave me comments. And that's the thing about getting comments: when they're positive, when you receive positive feedback, you want to keep doing something, so I kept working with it. These email exchanges turned into production meetings.
And before long, it was January, and suddenly I had a whole cast and crew of people looking to me for direction. Because I was just that: I was given to direct this movie. We embarked on a really, really ambitious schedule.
We said, well, everyone has class from nine to five, so let's shoot from seven to nine. The problem is you only have about half an hour of daylight in that time at this point in the winter, as you all know. So what we would we do is we planned a series of all-day shoots, all days and Saturdays.
And here, I was banking on one thing. I'd taken all these people from all these different walks of life, none of them really of any professional film-acting experience, and I was just hoping, hoping that the answer to why one of the reasons storytelling is important would help me out. And that is that stories bring us together.
I decided, as well, that I was going to film the hardest scene in the movie first. The hardest scene in the movie served pretty much the same purpose in that it brought all these different characters - a janitor and thieves - together in one place. I needed a place where bad life decisions were being made, where people were more comfortable with talking to people that they don't normally know and where maybe things could be a little bit predictable to cover up some of my naïveté as a a filmmaker.
So, of course, I decided to film a college party. The way we did this was pretty much just by placing our actors inside a real party. And of course, predictably, it was a disaster.
But it turns out that even when you drop your camera into a bucket of ice, and that even when you shoot four more hours than you were supposed to and like a two-hour shoot turns into a six-hour one, and even when by the end of it, your lead actor is too drunk to even function, deliver his lines, you can go in the next day, sit at a computer, pull up Adobe Premiere, change the lighting, cut a couple things, do some voice-overs, and after an hour and a half of work, you have a wonderful scene. The magic of movie making. But even after all of this, I kept questioning why people were coming back.
There had to be some element to storytelling that was bigger than my film. Sure, I'd put a lot of work into the story, but it was no Oscar winner. I didn't see myself as being a particularly Christopher Nolan type.
But I was missing one of the most important ingredients about storytelling. And that is that stories come from somewhere. Stories have real elements, and here I was making a film about struggling college students using struggling college students.
There was a sort of a equality there, an égalité. For me personally, though, the real element in my story was the character of Reggie. Reggie, in my life, had been a janitor at my high school, a janitor who spent his days working at this all-boys school and telling us all these amazing stories about how he had been a backup guitarist for nearly every act that ever came to Toledo.
Picture this: Coming into school late one day, and listening to a guy singing something, a bass line, that sounds like the intro to Seinfeld, like that (Seinfeld theme intro), and then saying, "Oh, hi, man, you know, how's it going? " He was nuts, absolutely crazy. And because of that, we didn't really believe him.
It didn't matter that we'd heard Reggie play a few times, that we knew he was a good bass player. We ignored it, we ignored that fundamental element to storytelling, that is when it comes to personal stories, anyone can tell them. Everyone has a story, and it's not just the general facts of our lives.
It's that whole narrative. Sure, the facts of Reggie's life - it turned out later that he had been this great musician who, for one reason or another, had ended up cleaning toilet bowls for a living. But that didn't change who Reggie was.
Just because Reggie had changed his profession didn't mean that he wasn't a performer, that he wasn't capable of expressing the unknowable, the unfeelable. And that's something that is really important about storytelling. I realized it on the night of our premiere.
There had been a joke that even through all of the process of writing had somehow escaped the clutches of even my most steadfast critics. It was a terrible joke, and I realized that even before it was said. I remember sitting there in my seat, looking up gingerly at the silver screen at Gateway Film Center, and I'm thinking, "Please, please, please laugh.
" And the audience did laugh. And it wasn't necessarily because the joke was that great, but they connected with me in that moment; they understood just how bad a joke could be. (Laughter) And that was fine because that's what we do, we connect with elements of stories.
It's the same thing that draws us in when we watch a child that maybe can't sing too well at a Christmas program. It's that same thing that warms our hearts when our parents tell the weird story of how they met. Personally, somehow the line, "Do you come here often?
" did it for my mother. But at the end of the day, when I looked around and saw my actors looking at themselves up on screen, I was so proud of them. They'd put themselves out of their comfort zones, they'd embarked on something, they'd tried that noble, noble mission.
The ancient tradition of storytelling - and that's what it is, starting all the way back from Sophocles - the idea was to watch something occur on stage and to be able to connect with it. To watch ideas that are "worth spreading" in a sort of dramatic context. It's funny how just one woman on a train platform, who could see through all the BS that I was telling her, just by listening to a personal story that may or may not have been real, really changed my life.
There are times when I think back to that train platform, and I think of that woman. I've sent her an email telling her all that has happened since, how I made a film, how I had lied about making a film previously, of course. And as of yet, strangely, I haven't really gotten a response.
But that's okay. I like to think that the story that began on that train platform nearly two years ago now isn't necessarily over, that maybe one day, on a cold night just like this one will be this evening, unfortunately, I'll be on the train platform, and I'll see that lady again. And she'll ask me all these different questions, and we'll catch up.
But it might not happen at all, and that's okay. Because that's one of the real gems of telling your own personal story: we decide when it ends. Thank you and stay gold.
