My Story Rebellion

When I graduated from college, I pronounced to anyone that would listen that I wanted to make films that had no story.  I had become so tired of story being proclaimed as "king" - and was a bit of an artistic rebel and felt this was the cause I would champion.

After creating a few projects under this philosophy - I realized that no matter what I did, I could not get away from story.  It was around this time that I realized that story is built into our genetic code  Just as we might look at clouds and recognize faces - we look at events and see stories.

If you place two images one after the other to someone, they begin to relate them.  This has been used by propagandists for as long as it was possible to put photographs in sequence.   The cave paintings told stories.  Faces tell stories.  When we sleep, the one part of our brain that never rests it the part that makes sense out of everything - and to do that - it takes whatever random left over memories come up and turns them into stories.

We can, however, escape a lot of the artifice that has been put on stories.  While "The hero with a thousand faces" and "Stealing Fire From the Gods" are two books that both do an excellent job of discussing how as humans we have certain archetypes which we identify with and therefore see again and again in the history of our stories, mythologies, religion, and entertainment - this observation does not mean, though, that every single movie needs to follow the "Hero's Journey."

What I should have been rebelling against was not story - but the generification of story which is why so many movies feel like the same movie.  The various elements of movies have become so required and expected, that every most movies feels the same.  Certainly most movies that get enough marketing behind them for us to actually know about them do.The glory of independent filmmaking is that there is no executive that is going to require that you include a certain beat on a certain page or that you follow any strict rules of story. With the freedom from external requirements being their best tool, I hope that independent filmmakers take the opportunity to make story their own, not just make their own stories.