At Film in Focus, Mike Figgis has shared a couple of brief journal entries, one of which burst a small light bulb above my head. First, Figgis writes: “I guess I’m in a period of thinking about film and filmmaking. I made a feature last year, it’s called Love Live Long but everything about [it] was far removed from the what cinema has become… I have read lots of scripts and written a couple for other people. The ones I read were not interesting and the ones I wrote all ended up in studio type confrontations. Executives who had big ideas about character and plot and particularly the 3rd act…. [T]he main thing that strikes me is this – Plot has killed script. Back in the day plot was a slightly sketchy framework for character development. The scripts I read now, the characters are there to supply the plot. It’s all to do with a misguided idea that the function of cinema is somehow to be realistic. I think the function of cinema is to be poetic and magic and original.” My revelation: I worked a couple years on a script with a New York-based director about watching. This was while the recording industry was beginning its slow, then sudden decline. Our plot points, unless couched in a period piece, began to fall in the present moment, let alone the indeterminate future in which movies are shot and released. Still, we worked variations on watchers and watchers watched. A male musician, lost in his meld of melodies and drift from session to session, wouldn’t, at first, even notice his most ardent admirer, always holding herself two steps back into shadow, admiring what she intuitively saw as his embodiment of rock performance as contemporary Dionysian spectacle. Once he saw her, and was struck, and he loved and pined, what if she grew immediately bored with her cock-of-the-walk? (Gamine on.) An elegant and truthful and telling dance of point-of-view was always our intention in several rewrites. Still, it startled me a few weeks ago when I shot an unbroken take of a friend at a clandestine basement post-Pitchfork party. There, freed from plot and finance, in a single shot—an image—the emotional swells we worked and worked to write were right in front of me, there to be simply seen, captured, distilled. (All you need to make a movie is a girl and a postpunk band.) Plus, it’s a turn I never thought to write: with the implication that this was shot by a man—me—from a male perspective—the idea of fixation or staring or “stalking” is all the more distilled, and if it had been in the context of our unproduced screenplay, it would be the musician’s gaze upon his unseeing suitor—jealous at her transport, even rapture, at the band in front of them, performers of another stripe. And when she’s not looking toward the band, what face or figure is she looking up toward? Her transport is lovely, but to confabulate a context for the point-of-view is sorrowful, perhaps poignant. A simple exercise was rich with what our sustained carpentry work had failed to capture. It makes me happy I happened onto Mike Figgis’ easygoing journal. The same illumination from two different experiences: my two-minute scene is after the jump; the band is No Age.

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