Letters to a young filmmaker

It was raining most of the way down into Oregon and I was relieved to spend a dry afternoon inside Powell's Bookstore. Going through the store, I was amazed at how many books there were. I picked out Letters to a Young Poet and Tiny Beautiful Things for my week long drive to California.

Like most near university graduates, I had many questions about my life. It was during this time that I found Solace in Rilke's words:

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them.”

Four years later, I feel like I'm on the other side.

I've still got questions, just of a different nature. Two questions I've been sitting on are: what's the long-game look like? and what's the next personal project that I'll be taking on?

The past 4 months have been full with client work and I'm incredibly grateful for that. But I know I want to create my next personal project and I've been hitting a wall. It was a couple weeks ago when I to re-read letters to a young poet and stumbled upon these words of advice:

“Do not write love-poems; avoid at first those forms that are too facile and commonplace...therefore save yourself from these general themes and seek those which your own everyday life offers you: describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty — describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams and the objects of your memory.”

— Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I feel like at this stage in my career, I'm overthinking what I want to make. Darren Aronofsky put it best: “The only thing you have to offer is you, figure out how to communicate that to a cinema at large.” Moving from learning to action is a completely different thing. Let's see how this goes for my next project.

Are you putting time into a personal project? I'd love to hear about it.