boxing day epiphanies

Hey kids. Iggy here, blogging at you from a ice fishing tanker in the Bering Strait.

I just got finished hauling in a big load of king crab-- very common this time of year in the Arctic Circle-- and I thought, after soaking in a hot tub for about seventeen hours (cuz it's effing cold up here, okay?) I would shoot you off a daily update on my quest to become a gigantic, world-famous filmmaker.

My fingers are still a little frostbitten, so try to be understanding when I try to type the word "filmmaker" a hundred times because it keeps coming out as "ftikkmsakjer45". (Seriously. That last paragraph took almost two hours to write.) But I'll try and keep it in check.

Today I'm going to take you back, back, back in time... about six months, to December 26th, 2007. The day after Christmas. The day I woke up as an engineering student, and went to sleep a wannabe Scorsese.

I really can't tell you what snapped in my head, but it had certainly been building for a while. I was coming out of a horrendous fall quarter, in which I took four insane classes-- physics, chemistry lab, linear algebra, and C++ programming-- and in doing so, hopelessly burned myself out on ever accomplishing any school-related thing ever again. I came away with less than a 2.0 for the quarter. Considering the load, I'm surprised I didn't get all F's.

The truth is, I could have tried harder than I did. But I didn't-- because I just didn't care. I hated the idea of being an engineer. Sitting in a cubicle, filing reports, designing widgets for flanges and feeling the more creative side of my soul die, day after day after day.

So the morning after Christmas, I woke up and suddenly had a stunning realization: I didn't have to be an engineer. I could do whatever the hell I wanted. I could go work on an ice fishing tanker in the Bering Strait for all the live-long day, and as long as it made me happy, why not just do it?

Within seconds I was out of bed. I opened up my laptop, and sitting there in my comfy plaid boxers and wild bed hair, I canceled all my engineering classes for the next quarter. I was free-- and I had never felt so powerful, so liberated. It was an incredible moment. One that changed my life.

(I never remember to dress up for these kind of things.)

The following quarter I applied to my school's film department. Suffice it to say, it's one of the best film programs in the country, and the selectivity is unbelievable. I ended up being rejected based on the fact that I was under the minimum GPA required to transfer.

But back on that chilly December day, I had made up my mind: damn the odds, I was going to make movies.

Why movies? Oh, I'm SO glad you asked!

I remember watching Pulp Fiction for the first time at the tender age of fifteen, and being completely blown away by the things that Tarantino did-- not only with the camera, but with the script. These people were talking like real people! Their conversations were interesting, funny, and extremely real. The story was structured perfectly. To this day, Pulp Fiction remains my favorite screenplay of all time... to say nothing of the brilliant camera angles, sequences, music choices, and performances QT managed to pull together for the film. It all came together into a powerfully new experience, a completely different approach to making a movie than I'd ever seen before in my young life.

Over the next few years I hungrily devoured any kind of cinematic experience that could give me that same rush, the exhilaration of watching something fresh, different, and NEW. Films like Memento, Eternal Sunshine, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mulholland Drive, Fargo, A Clockwork Orange, and Man On Fire. They were my bread and butter. I became fascinated by the processes that went into creating these movies-- I watched all the DVD special features, listened to the director commentaries, even looked up behind-the-scenes footage on Youtube. I began to idolize directors like Tarantino, Kubrick, Scorsese, the Coens... and with each passing moment I studied these films, I began to recognize techniques and file them away into my memory banks. I started to think of ways to improve sequences, and I picked apart the reasons why these films were so effective.

Somewhere along that path, I think I became a filmmaker.

Maybe not a good one-- who knows, I've never made a film!-- but that's what I am.

And to this day, I consider December 26, 2007 to be the beginning of my crazy movie-making quest. (Although I think the transformation began a little while before that.)

Okay, I think that's good enough for one freezing Arctic night. Tomorrow I'll fill you in a little bit on the few small steps I've taken since that day in December, including my exciting and fulfilling internship at a creative production company (read: coffee-fetcher and ass-kisser). But until then, I'm gonna go chip chunks of ice off my own face.

Then I'm pretty sure it's back into the hot tub for me.