YES BLOG

It was September, golden light some days, grey and rainy on others.
I had been invited to be a ‘governor’ on the Talent Lab, a four day event for young filmmakers, in which they were to be intensively immersed in sometimes quite contradictory points of view from industry professionals who would be passing through Toronto as they presented their films in the festival. The four governors would provide a kind of holding presence through the four days. My companion governors would be Michael Ondaatje, Jan Chapman (Australian producer of, amongst other notable films, Jane Campion’s ‘The Piano’) and Don McKellar (Canadian actor, writer, director). Also continuously present would be Tainui Stephens (a Maori producer as a roving consultant).
My plan was to follow the four days with a couple of days in the maelstrom of the festival having meetings with financiers about my own new projects.

I was not prepared for the intensity of the experience to come and the sense of enormous responsibility that went with it. Looking out at the group of young filmmakers, with their eager hungry faces, their hopes and fears so palpably evident, I realised I needed to try and meet their unspoken needs with as much force and clarity as I could muster. And as I listened with them to some of the guest speakers, for the most part obsessed by their own work, seemingly blind to the students in front of them, I began to feel the quiet despair of those starting out on the road. How to make a splash, find a voice, find some money? In the white noise of the worship of false gods…fame, money, awards etc…how to remember what really matters?

A fierce protectiveness began to rise in my breast. Protective of the spirit of the artist, protective of the impulse to work in this confusing and confused sphere in a culture which is deeply discouraging about the very nature of the endeavour and in which success is mostly measured in purely commercial terms.
And so, for those four days, I became what I have often resisted, a teacher.

A few days later I found myself standing in the lobby of my hotel, my scripts under my arm, feeling as if I had a begging bowl in my hands. I might as well be starting out myself. Each film is like climbing a mountain. Each one begins at base camp in the ravine, looking up. And sometimes it feels like climbing backwards, wearing high heels, laughing and crying.

As relief from the meetings, the noise, the restless eyes all around me, I visited some gardens. In one of them the gardener said to me: this flower is so ugly, I am going to pull it up. I have pondered this ever since. Can any flower really be ugly?