Uncertainty Film

reblog with your story. here’s ours:

D: Scott and I met through his sister Kelly, who I’d become friends with earlier at the Art Institute in San Francisco.  At the time we first decided to make short films together, we were both still in grad school (Scott was studying Japanese Film at Berkeley, and I was finishing my MFA at RISD.)  It happened during a Christmas break over a chat and a cup of coffee, and it remains a bit of a mystery as to us where the idea even came from.  But it seemed right.  So we agreed to share a house together the following summer, and go at it for at least a year.

But late that spring, I got a call from Scott telling me that he’d been awarded a fellowship from the Japanese government to study in Tokyo for 18 months.  It was lucrative, prestigious, and not something he’d ever expected to receive.

S: Somehow the fellowship brought a whole life path into focus for me:  the film research in Japan, the PhD, the academic job.  It looked kind of appealing.  And it looked like the life I had been defining for myself for a long time.  Now I was about to give it up.

I remember calling David in Rhode Island and saying to him a little pointedly:  are we really going to do this thing?  I had to make sure he was as committed to the idea as I believed he was.  In a way, I had to hear in his voice that he was more committed than I had believed he was.  Because the path we were talking about going down together was totally new to me.  And kind of terrifying, frankly.

Looking back, the choice of direction seems clear and right, but at the time, the leap of faith was anything but.

D: I think Scott’s willingness to sacrifice something so precious really forced our hand, and set us off on our work together, in a way, with a commitment we wouldn’t have had otherwise.