Inspiration ... or not.

For three weeks, I’ve been trying to develop a short film in my head. My goal is to outline a plot by the middle of August, have a script by the end of September and shoot through November. I’d like to have it finished by January so that I can submit it to some festivals.

Yes. Heavy goal. I know. Especially when inspiration is little-to-be-found in my not-so-creative mind.

I could make it something easy and simple. Just a straight forward plot with nothing of value emanating from the story. I don’t want that, though. I want it to be something more. I want it to have a little depth and be something of value. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece … it probably won’t be … I just want to do my best with it.

So, in my quest for inspiration, I went to Starbucks tonight to support my good friend Dan who was providing live music and sat at a table with Ian McEwan and Andrei Tarkovsky (both present in text only). I never got around to McEwan and only engaged Tarkovsky for about half-an-hour because I kept getting distracted by people I knew. I did learn this, though.

The main goal of art is to “explain to the artist himself and to those around him what man lives for”; to lead the creator and “consumer” into a better understanding of human existence. Tarkovsky goes on to give this example:

From the very moment when Eve ate the apple from the tree of knowledge, mankind was doomed to strive endlessly after the truth. First, as we know, Adam and Eve discovered they were naked. And they were ashamed. They were ashamed because they had understood; and then they set out on their way in the joy of knowing one another. That was the beginning of a journey that has no end. One can understand how dramatic that moment was for those two souls, just emerged from the state of placid ignorance and thrown out into the vastness of the earth, hostile and inexplicable.

‘With the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread…’

So it was that man, ‘natures crown’, arrived on the earth in order to know why it was that he had appeared or been sent.

More coming later on ... I think.