“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”
—James Baldwin
I have so many new thoughts to share and threads I’ve introduced to wrap up, but today I want to talk about an unexpected encounter I had on Saturday night. I went with friends to The Union Solidarity Coalition (TUSC) party that was like a giant movie wrap party in downtown L.A. The timing felt pretty extraordinary because the night before, on Bastille Day of all days, we locked picture on our Taiwan film, INVISIBLE NATION, after coordinating teams for weeks in three time zones from the East coast (thank you, Raoul Peck) to the West, to Taipei and Beijing, (make that four time zones, with one participant in Prague (thank you, Evgeny Afineevsky).)
Needless to say, I did not have time to sleep much last week, or eat much or leave my desk, but every team member (all of whom are always holding down multiple jobs to make ends meet and have a career in today’s film business) was coming through for this film, really for Taiwan, and giving it their full attention for the final push. We were all working “in the zone” where communication was powerfully transformative, efficient, clear and meaningful. We all hope that comes through in our film.
James Baldwin’s definition of love describes how everyone, everywhere on our team was working all at once with love for each other, for the film and for Taiwan.
James Baldwin’s definition of love describes my approach to directing documentaries and how I feel about every single person interviewed in INVISIBLE NATION.
I’m reminded by the Baldwin quote that “LEAD WITH LOVE, LOW EGO, HIGH IMPACT, AND MOVE AT THE SPEED OF TRUST,” guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter movement, also guide my filmmaking.
After the band, Fishbone, finished playing on Saturday night when the party was winding down and people had started to leave, we saw a free table in an outdoor seating area that had been full when the crowds were huge. That’s when I spotted Daniel Kwan, Oscar winning, Taiwanese American director of EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE sitting at another table not far from us. Although he and I had never met, I went up to him to thank him for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully to a request from a Taiwanese heavy metal rock star, Freddy Lim (also a former legislator and party founder) who’s in our film and has a new song he hoped the Daniels (Kwan and his partner, Daniel Scheinert) might direct. My friends saw me speaking with Daniel and joined in to heap praise on him for his filmmaking. But our conversation quickly moved from singing Taiwan’s praises, (the food, the culture of many geographic influences, the politics, the genius minds like Minister of Digital Affairs, Audrey Tang, the future of AI and tech in politics being hatched there, the joys of learning and speaking Chinese), into a deep discussion about what’s next for us as filmmakers, as a film community who are part of a larger society that needs our solidarity and collective care. What’s next for the world and how our storytelling can be most in sync with where the world is, and what transformative stories it needs next.
I recommended the books I’ve been reading and re-reading lately, both by an anthropologist, David Graeber, who studied with Marshall Sahlins at the University of Chicago as I did, THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING: A NEW HISTORY OF HUMANITY (co-written with archeologist David Wengrow) and DEBT: THE FIRST 5,000 YEARS. Sadly, David Graeber died of COVID during the last year of the pandemic. Surprisingly, I discovered on Francis Ford Coppola’s Instagram post from July 7th, that David Graeber’s books have inspired his new film MEGALOPOLIS and his “view of the society we live in.” I can’t wait to see it! They’re inspiring my next project, but now so is this ongoing conversation with Daniel Kwan!
Daniel Kwan recommended a book called RECAPTURE THE RAPTURE: RETHINKING GOD, SEX, AND DEATH IN A WORLD THAT’S LOST ITS MIND by Jamie Wheal among other books. I’m already listening to it on audio and somewhere in chapter three, “We Are the World,” I thought I heard “everything, everywhere, all at once” and had found the origin of his film’s title. What I read was actually…
Ground Control to Major Tom
Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. . . . We must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
So we appear to be stuck with each other. The critical challenges we face all require coordinated responses. Somehow, we need to start thinking, feeling, and acting more globally. But making that move to a perspective that includes the whole world is hard. In fact, it’s never really been done. After oxytocin-induced tribalism, everything more expansive and inclusive is up for grabs. Always has been. From time to time, in the lulls and lucky moments, small groups of idealists have entertained notions of equality and mutuality, but it has rarely lasted. And it’s never been tried as a “full stack” project including everyone, everywhere, all at once.
Wheal, Jamie. Recapture the Rapture (p. 51).
and it is with that thought that I want to leave you today. With much to be continued…
I love Baldwin.