A dear friend of mine and I have been having an email exchange about this problem we both have, about finishing stuff. P is a filmmaker too, as I used to be, a long time ago. P (he won’t let me use his name) had been working for a long long long time on a film of his own, and couldn’t leave it alone and just let it be. And kept on doing one version after another after… Just as I have been doing in the book I’m writing — excerpts of which I’ve begun to post here on WordPress, since I don’t know how to stop.

Finally, P’s family — his Significant Other and 2 little others — had enough and threatened “an intervention,” though it never went as far as threatening to have him committed, unlike my own family. So finally P was forced to stop, and settled on one final cut, and let it go off on its own for everyone else to see.

But that led me to thinking, as it always does. And my first thought was about how the term “director’s cut” first came about. The director, in this case, being none other than John Ford, who set a precedent for everyone who followed, at least those with enough box-office clout.

It was in the late thirties, and Ford was finishing one of his cowboy flicks (I think it was Stagecoach) and was afraid that after he left the editing room the producer would come back and make changes. So Ford had all the negatives of the out-takes destroyed, so his film could only be seen his way, the way he had envisioned it.

So in a sense, “director’s CUT” is a sort of double entendre, referring not just to splicing scenes together in their intended order, but to removing everything else, in Ford’s case, permanently. (And in a sense, you could say my book — and these posts are also the “director’s cut” — like everything on WordPress — it can be viewed any way you want, but it can’t be changed or re-edited by someone else.)

Which brings Michelangelo to mind (at least to mine), who said that his Method wasn’t to build a sculpture from scratch, but to take a big block, and just remove chunks of it, until only the abs lut ly e sential was le t.

And indeed that’s what my fave director of all-time did. Krzysztof Kieslowski. The Polish film director who blew my mind with his 10-part Decalogue — each episode about one of the Commandments. And the even more mind-blowing Blue White and Red trilogy.

Whenever Kieslowski finished a film, he’d sit there in the editing room and run the cut over and over, and every time he found something that wasn’t absolutely essential, he just chopped it out. And that’s why his films are so great. The viewer has to watch his films VERY carefully, and pay the strictest attention, or they’ll miss something and lose track of what’s really going on. But if you stay with it, then half of what you are seeing is what you are fil ing in yourself, filling the gaps Kieslowski has left for you to fill. So in the end, the film becomes as much yours as his.

Exactly what Abbas Kiarostami does too. My other top film fave. Especially in the scene at the very end of Close-up, made back in 1991 in Iran.

It’s about this poor shlub who was arrested for impersonating another famous film director, a friend of K’s. Who had told a family that he wanted them to be in his new movie, but after they became suspicious that he was really trying to rob them, they reported him to the police.

Kiarostami read about it in a newspaper and visited him in jail to ask if he’d agree to re-enact the whole story in a real movie. Of course, the guy was thrilled. And everyone else in the story also agreed to play themselves.

But when it came time to re-enact the final scene, where K comes to meet the guy as he’s finally let out of jail, Kiarostami pulls a surprise and instead the guy meets the director he attempted to impersonate! What will the fake director say to his alter ego? Like an Elvis impersonator suddenly bumping into Elvis…

So the guy gets on the back of the director’s motorcycle (the director is wearing a radio-mike) and off they go, with Kiarostami in a car, and the cameraman and soundguy riding just behind in another car, in hot pursuit.

But almost as soon as the conversation begins, the soundtrack suddenly starts to cut i and ou and you hear the soundman complaining about the faulty equipment. So you only get to hear its and ieces of what is said and you have to imagine the rest, filling in the blanks. Which is really the message underlying the whole film – that there is no such thing as “reality” – it’s all something going on in your mind, and you are always having to in the blanks. Ultimately, it’s up to you, the “viewer,” to make sense of it. (nudge, nudge)

CODA

Years later, Kiarostami was giving a film workshop for a couple of dozen aspiring directors and one of them asked if the sound equipment had really failed at that crucial moment. And K had to admit that it hadn’t. Everything had worked perfectly.

So why’d he do it? Was it to make a metaphysical point about the nature of… reality?

No, Kiarostami told them, it was because the impostor had become flustered at unexpectedly encountering the real director, a man he totally idolized, and he completely blew the scene on the motorcycle. The take was utterly ruined, and there was no way to do another. Kiarostami was at his wit’s end in the editing room, until he finally realized that he could just remove sections of the soundtrack and instead insert a fake voice-over from the soundman complaining about the “faulty” mike.

So much for Reality. And so much more for Art.

ps. I cc’d this to P for his approval, as P had special access to the Truth, as one of the workshop participants. P added this bit of info: “The real reason was not because the impostor gave a bad performance, but because the “real” director did! Once astride the motorcycle, he waxed poetic about how the impostor was the real director and he was the fraud. It was all too much meta meta – and ruined the delicate scene, so he was to blame, and then Kiarostami pinned it on his soundman, to cover his friend’s butt.”

And that is Art, no ifs ands or bu ts.