Earlier this year, a fully formed opening scene dropped into my head—the way you’d see one in a movie theater.
I could see the faces. I could hear the dialogue. I knew exactly how the scene would play.
I’ve learned to follow these whispers when they come.
I didn’t sit down and decide to write a screenplay. The screenplay was already there, demanding to be written. When something arrives like that, uninvited and complete, my only job is to get out of its way.
I read a few scripts from my favorite movies to learn the shape of the page, and then I started typing.
Two months later I had 90 pages—a finished script.
I’d love to tell you that part was easy. It wasn’t.
This was my first screenplay. And yes, I’m an author, but a screenplay isn’t a book. It’s barely the same language. In nonfiction, I can spend three pages unpacking a single idea and call it craft. In a screenplay, there’s no room to explain, no narrator stepping in to tell the reader what a moment means. The dialogue has to do the work that whole paragraphs of prose used to do for me.
I had to learn from zero.
When the draft was done, a quieter voice started to surface. Don’t sell this script and let someone else make this film. You have to direct it yourself.
My inner critic rebutted right away: Cute. You’re 44. You didn’t go to film school. You’ve never been on a set before. You’ll embarrass yourself in front of people who’ve been doing this since high school. And when it doesn’t work, you’ll have nowhere to hide. You have a perfectly good life. Stick to what you know.
You’d think I’d have outgrown that voice. I’ve burned the whole thing down and rebuilt it more times than I can count—rocket scientist, lawyer, professor, writer. But that voice doesn’t care about my past. It just puts on a new outfit and knocks again.
The way through comes down to the difference between performance and experimentation.
Performance says I need to know who I am before I show up.
Experimentation says I’ll find out who I am by showing up.
Performing feels like holding my breath. I’ve decided who I am, and I’m bracing the whole time so no one sees through me.
Experimenting feels like exhaling. I don’t know who I am yet, and I’m here to find out.
Performance keeps me safe. Experimentation keeps me alive.
So I’m experimenting. I’d rather be bad at this than haunted by it.
If you’re reading this thinking you’re too old to start the thing you keep circling, I’m reminding myself as much as I’m reminding you. The clock you’re hearing isn’t the real clock.
I’m 44. If I make films until I’m 74, that’s a 30-year career in film still ahead of me. A whole life inside a life.
The film may not work. I might raise the money, hire the crew, shoot the whole thing, and discover I had no business behind that camera.
That’s not what scares me. What scares me is sitting at the end of my life, wondering what it would have felt like to make the film.
I’m no longer trying to preserve the man I’ve become.
I’m trying to find out who’s still in there.
P.S. This newsletter reaches a lot of people I don’t know, and some of you work in film. If that’s you—producer, Hollywood agent, financier, anyone who knows how to get a first feature off the ground—contact me. I’d love to talk.
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