My Next Film Venture

I feel I’ve come to a point in my work as a filmmaker that I’m feeling very satisfied and comfortable with the experience I’ve gained in the technical aspects, or at least comfortable enough to know that what I have can carry me so I can focus more on writing and maintaining writing stories and scripts that keep a viewers attention and have those arcs and variations that I feel so many independent films lack right now (and I’ve had that sentiment fed back to me by many actors I have worked with). I have also branched out in a lot of my recent work, meaning I stepped outside of my shell and wrote characters that are experiencing things not all that remarkably close to what I have be experiencing personally. Sure many of my films deal with people in hard times and we all personally experience hard times, I feel I’ve focused on individuals independent of me (especially considering many of the leads in my recent films have been female characters). Thinking all of this over and with the epiphany that smacked me right in the face last Sunday while in the middle of church service I came to terms with what I want my next big film project to be.

As anyone who knows me even modestly well should know I am a Catholic and have been for about the last six years. And in those six years I’ve experienced both periods of rapid personal change as well as periods where it seemed I didn’t really know where I was going. But in recent times, in particular the past year or so, I have become quite enthused in finally discovering what it is I want to do with my life. Not so long ago when I turned 26 I think there were still great doubts as to what I really wanted to do with my life and that unfortunately grew and for a brief period led me into making some very bad decisions, some of which I still regret even to this moment. But by the end of last summer, when I was wavering, I rediscovered my love of filmmaking and it has never been stronger. I have practically dedicated my every free moment the past six months to shooting a collection of films and with each one I gain even greater confidence and a much stronger grasp on the particular cinematic style that I like to use. In gaining a better idea of who I am over these past couple of years I have also gained a better understanding of where my feelings about things lay. I feel like I have greater empathy than I did before when I was very confused about my objectives and spent a great deal ignoring them and closing myself off to the world. In becoming a Catholic around the age of 20 it was another interesting transition and something that confused me at times, but I adjusted somewhat quick. However, in becoming more faithful and religious I, like so many others, found myself needing to address things that I had for the most part ignored in the past. And more than anything else, what has attracted the most thought from me since developing a stronger faith has been the issues surrounding Christianity and homosexuality.

When I was younger I didn’t have any gay friends so you could say I conveniently ignored the issue, but in recent years I have become a member of the Christian faith, a faith that unfortunately has been gravely misrepresented by a collection of what I would simply call “fanatics”. Amidst this and the whole issue of “homosexuality as a sin” it still didn’t attract my attention much. But a great deal of that changed once I started actually having gay friends and suddenly I had to accept that this issue had to gain deeper importance in my life. In developing these friendships I was forced to look at these issues more deeply and rapidly the concept of “homosexuality as a sin” began to trouble me because at first it felt like a no way out scenario. For a while I just followed the common line of, well, Christianity says homosexuality is wrong, so I guess it is. But being the reflective person I am, that solution only satisfied me for so long. And again, when you have close friends, all of which that you adore, and some happen to be gay and some happen to not be, you start to notice that there is very little distinction there between the two. I loved all of them equally regardless of their sexual orientation or anything else for that matter. And once I started to think about the issue I guess you could say I haven’t really stopped. I have roughly some 40 pages or so of reflective writings that I’ve done on the issue, just in an effort to help me think things through, and those writings have already been a major help in my preparing for my next film.

In short, my next film, which I am tentatively titling “A Man of Faith” follows a young man who is a devout Christian and a homosexual at the same time. In his personal life just about everybody he knows, family and friends, know that he is gay but he has been keeping it from his church congregation for the fear that it will damage the strong bonds he had developed with those he attends with. He yearns strongly to tell everyone so that he can be free of the secret he has kept, but fear has kept him in check. The film thus chronicles the life he leads and the experiences he has in his efforts to reveal the truth to his church family. Obviously the overall film will go deeper than that, but this is the films plot at its core.

Since I started writing on the issue of Christianity and homosexuality a while back I have had the urge to use my film talents to create something that addresses this issue from the way that I see it. I pondered doing a short semi-documentary film, but the idea never really gained much ground. I had bounced around a few other ideas before the simplest and best idea struck me right in the face last Sunday: just make a regular old film about it! And once that thought hit me there was no stopping it. The first thing I did when service ended was ran downstairs and grabbed some scratch paper to start scribbling out all the ideas that had come to me in that short time. Now while it’s exciting to jump into a project such as this that has spawned from something I have put a lot of thought to, it’s a very sensitive concept as well. Fortunately, much of my past thoughts and reflections on the issue have already helped give me a strong comprehension as to the purpose and direction I am hoping to follow with this film.

First of all, it was essential to me to make the lead character a gay Christian for so many reasons. One, it is something that seems to go more or less unknown to a lot of people that there are a good many people of faith out there who happen to be gay. And I am astounded when I hear people say that gay people can’t really be Christians (and yes, I’ve heard that more times than I care to remember). The question I pose then is, “Why? Cause they’re sinners?” Let me remind my fellow members of the faith, everybody sins. Masturbation is a sin, folks. And if that’s the case then just about all of us are screwed if you say committing a sin alone is grounds for not being a member of the faith. But still, it goes so relatively unknown to so many that there are gay Christians out there in remarkable numbers. And thus I feel there is a definitely uniqueness and revelation in having the lead character in my film be this way. But that’s just some surface reasoning. From a deeper perspective, I find it very unfortunate that the issue of homosexuality (of which gay marriage is obviously included) is such a volatile one between people who are gay and those who are more religiously fanatic. I understand the whole issue in this regard less and less because it is just so much useless fighting. The people on the gay side often react with, “Hey, I am who I am. Take your religion and shove it.” And then the people on the religious side counter with the old, “Well you’re gonna burn in Hell if you don’t repent. You’re all horrible sinners”, and so on. Nothing ever gets resolved and the unnecessary fighting goes on. Part of the reason it goes on is because there is not a mediator between the two. If one is gay and not religious, they are likely not going to care what some angry religious person says to them, and thus they have a personal bias towards their end. Just as well, if one is religious and not gay it’s easy and convenient for them to attack homosexuality, again because of their personal bias. I feel a very strong way of addressing this issue and finding some common ground can be through a character who understands the world from both sides, and thus making him both gay and a Christian is very important.

Now despite the subject matter and the social implications, it is my objective to make a film, a legitimate film. This is not going to be some social statement wrapped under the guise of being a film. I find when people try and do films that deal with social issues not only do they damage a potentially great story by overwhelming it with social messages that make their characters more like message boards that real raw human beings, but they also often have a personal bias themselves. And thus when someone makes a film all about presenting a particular social message it is often just what the filmmaker believes personally and thus anyone who is watching is expected to just agree with whatever social statement is being made. This film is not going to be a pro-gay or anti-gay film, nor is it going to be a pro-religion or anti-religion film. That’s a very shallow, one-dimensional way of looking at things that I fear is the way far too many filmmakers choose to function. For me personally the greatest issue here is not weather one side or the other is right, but to me the thing that bothers me the most is the inhumane and embarrassing way in which the issue is often handled (and in most cases I am referring the the way in which the religious side handles it). These people that are protesting gay pride parades and wandering around with signs that says “God hates gays” and supposedly on the same side of the fence as me and yet I could not disagree with their perspectives and their actions any more. To me, the most frustrating aspect of the whole gay/religious fighting is the fact that people, again it’s mostly those on the religious side, are treating each other so horribly and saying things you should never say to another person, especially if that person has never done anything wrong to you. To me this is an issue of humanity and the way we ought to behave towards each other than anything else. And that will be the deeper focus of the film is delving into the feelings of people and showing directly the emotional impact that is felt by someone who may be imperfect and/or different and how such behavior just devalues the human being who chooses to employ it.

I feel that now a days people are so spoiled by the contrivances in their lives, and few of us truly appreciate all these things we have like the internet, ipads, smart phones and so on and the positive things that they can make happen. Instead so many of us now a days shut down and do the bare minimum. Nobody can argue people now a days in many regards are incredibly lazy and so few of us want to take the time to think things through and discuss them and thus we seldom ever really fully understand the things that we claim are important in our lives. We pick a side and assume that side is always right, even if we haven’t taken the time to truly grasp what being on that side means. In the unfortunate fighting that goes on between some gay and religious people there are so many misconceptions that have been allowed to occur. People have been led to believe that homosexuality is so much worse than other so-called sins when even someone with a novice understanding of Christianity knows that a sin is a sin. So no matter which way you look at it, if we just drop everything and say homosexuality is definitely a sin, it still shouldn’t have this aggressive attention focused on it. Unfortunately, as I believe, so many of these “Christians” that protest things such as gay pride gatherings are more people struggling with an identity crisis than anything else. Most people who feel isolated or like they don’t know who they are will often join up with some group so they feel they have a sense of worth. Unfortunately, most of these people join up with some specific group of people strictly to feel wanted or to feel like they’re a part of something without taking the time to understand what it is they have attached themselves to. And, as anyone knows, those who feel isolated and want to be recognized will try and throw themselves out there and be seen. Many of these protestors we see I feel fit in with this type of person and that’s why they’re out there screaming, hollering and shaking their signs around while at the same time practically violating almost everything there is to be in Christianity. I doubt many of these people even know where to look in the Bible for scripture references that may or may not discuss Christianity, and if they do know it’s likely just because someone else told them where they are. They forget all about the reoccurring theme of not being judgmental of others, or what about not playing God? Being a human on earth and telling others that they are positively going to Hell is totally a way of playing God because they are telling others what God is going to do. And what about loving your neighbor? Forgiving everyone, including your enemies. If one feels that homosexuality is a sin and they see someone else practicing it, by the conception of Christianity you should forgive that individual for what they do and move on. But you never see these people doing this and, from a religious perspective, I am confounded as to how these people can act so hateful and erratic, and it’s become obvious to me that most of these people just don’t think through what they do. Then they go out and do it and create a total misconception that religious/Christian people are all these crazy, unbalanced hate-mongers, but these people that we often see represent such a small part of the Christian population and I cringe to even discuss them as being Christians since they violate practically every core requirement in being one. I can wander around and call myself an astronaut all I want and still have no real conception of the job or any background studies or training on the matter. Anyone can call themselves a Christian as well, but it doesn’t mean they are. And unfortunately those that openly hate religion too often don’t try and think things through clearly, but rather try and push the agenda that whenever people go out and protest and make asses out of themselves, as is often the case with these protestors, they are representative of their religion as a whole, and thus everyone who practices religion is like that... Well, I’m not. And just about every Christian I know isn’t like that. But again, people want to believe what they want to believe without thinking things through and thus we have wide spread confusion about what is and what isn’t. In producing this movie and creating a character that forges together the dynamics of Christianity and homosexuality I hope to bridge some of these misconceptions and have a character that is true to both sides and thus doesn’t have an agenda against either one.

Currently I am still in the midst of finalizing the structure of the script, making sure the story comes together the way I want it to; it’s definitely a challenge to create a story like this while preventing aspects of it from going awry. But I am going into the project with a pure motivation, as pure as I can make it. Hopefully what I have written leading up to this point bears that out and I hope everyone will understand that. This is intended to be a humane film in a time where such projects are few and far between because we’re busy watching slasher films and marveling at characters being tortured and killed in remarkably pathetic ways. I say that in the hopes that people will understand why I am doing this and not look at it as though there is some ulterior motivation underlying the whole project. It’s a fairly significant undertaking and I wouldn’t be taking on such a project if I didn’t feel it was worth it. So here’s to another fun film production!