I went into filmmaking from the back door.
I began to make short videos in 2005, recordings of encounters with writers and cartoonists. The only thing I knew is that I wanted to film books – I mean books as objects. Film the paper, the printed words, the pictures. Film a world that was flat and apparently uninteresting on screen. In some way, interviewing writers was an excuse to insert close shots of their books between the other images. Filmmaking is a continuation of my work as a writer and illustrator. Images without words don’t mean anything to me.
It was during the editing process when I realized that I wanted to make films. Editing is like writing. It’s a hard, solitary, patient work, but there’s something sublime in re-distributing time, in cutting rough pieces of reality into sequences. It’s like working with language, with the processes of meaning. Watching the same images over and over, taught me what I loved to see, what I was interested in filming. People speaking. Words coming out of their mouths. And written words. On the screen. On the pages. I wanted to make the screen look loke a page.
But there was more. I understood that I was attracted, in general, to small things. Even filming a road from the car was more about the windshield than about the road. Small things require a great patience and attention to be filmed. Cinema of small things was always a minor, peripheral cinema, living in scientific films, experimental films, documentary films, educational films. I love films that don’t start as pure art or entertainment, but are commissioned, created for specific audiences but then transcend them.
I make films with my wife Rachel Bradley, visual artist and photographer. Without the need to say anything to each other, we always know where we want to put the camera.