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Recently i found an old story i wrote just after we filmed the couch burning scene in “For Catherine.” 

Dig:

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Fifty-four ounces of charcoal lighter fluid and a silver Zippo from another life. That’s how you start a fire you’ll remember.

It’s magic hour and right now only three people in the world understand me.

Where you are is a field. Magic hour is that forty minutes or so when the sun has gone down but there’s still light. When the sky is that deep vanilla color and the clouds look like they were made on a Light Bright. When pink and red creep around the horizon and ostentatious filmmakers get a little aroused by textures and things.

The players here are myself, Ed, Grant and Travis. Four twenty-something kids. This is what you call, “scene-setting.” And the thing about fire is, when you’re too close to it, when it’s blisteringly hot and it’s hard to breathe because all of the oxygen around you has stopped being air and become fuel, when your clothes are soaked through with sweat and your skin feels like how you imagine a Shrinky Dink must feel in the oven, the thing about fire is, in a situation like this, you move. In a situation like this, you turn your flammable ass around and you run.

Only not if you’re framed tightly.

Not if you have only one chance at this and it has to be done well. Not if you’ve spent all of your money and the last two years of your life on a film and if you back up even a foot you step out of the shot. If you’re not getting any younger and all you have ever wanted was to make movies and you know even a flinch could screw this up, in a situation like this, you stare straight-faced into the flames, and you do not move.

But you aren’t here, so you don’t understand. Maybe you’ve seen fires. Maybe you’ve set them. But if you aren’t here, if you aren’t next to me and afraid to touch your own clothes because of the heat, if this very moment you aren’t honest-to-God afraid that you might be swallowed by ravenous flames but are consciously choosing to stay in harms way, you don’t get it.

But don’t feel bad. Only three people in six billion have any idea what’s going on here.

Only the three who stand alongside me, who stand next to this fire can understand me right now. That’s what I’m here for. That’s why I’m telling the story. So maybe you’ll understand. Maybe you’ll take something important away from the smoldering mess before me. And it isn’t your fault you aren’t here. And I’m sure there’s something really excellent on television right now. Or maybe you’re just busy. It isn’t your fault you aren’t here. And those three people, the ones circled around the couch, even their understanding of who I am right now is dodgy. Skewed. Circumspect. Subject to far too many personal filters, experiences and biases. We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.

Everything I see is dry. Orange. Hot. Everything is ember and ash. To me, right now, the world is ablaze. I stand barefoot on streets of conflagration. I exist, evanescent, between flickers of flame.

And only three people know what the hell I’m talking about.

Tonight we set a couch on fire.

If the flames jumping off of this thing are twelve or fifteen feet high, I don’t know, but this is fire.

This scene takes place in November, so despite the June heat I’m wearing a wool hoodie. It’s magic hour in Ed’s pseudo-girlfriend’s parent’s field and I’m watching the little woolen lint balls that have gathered on my sweater spark up and fly into the evening, so close am I to the fire. I am so close that I hear my eyebrows start to sizzle and char and if I could smell anything over the pong of smoldering polyester and foam, I would smell pieces of myself combusting.

Travis, through a stoic, resigned grin, is the first of us to speak. He says, “Jesus Christ.” The words are heavy, slow and long coming off of his tongue. Each syllable is a struggle. Each word is a labor. Travis is the closest man has yet come to proper atheism and, in this moment, I don’t know if he’s cursing or praying.

In truth, both are good ideas here.

In a situation like this, when you’re pretty sure every ounce of water in your body has been either sweated out or evaporated or both, when you are way too close to a colossal blaze, trust me, everything inside of you is screaming to turn the f**k around and run.
In a situation like this, you better have a damn good reason for standing still.

And I squint a little and I say, “Ed.”

Ed is our photographer. He is also an actor in this scene. As the director I am tasked with calling actors out of the scene in intervals related to the progression of the fire. This is nothing timed or calculated, I’m just watching the flames and when it feels right, when it looks right, when what I see in front of me matches what I saw in my head while writing this scene, when the stars align, I call out a name and the corresponding person exits to be dissolved mid-stride in post production.

I say, “Ed.”

The details about Ed are that he isn’t made like you or I. Ed is made of reinforced steel.
Walking away Ed looks at the fire as if he were throwing down a gauntlet. As if to say, “Do something motherf**ker!” The fire tears and slashes at the night sky and Ed is unimpressed as he moves toward the camera and out of frame.
Tomorrow I will learn that the scene cost him almost every hair on his right arm.
The thing about a situation like this is, if you’re me, you’re praying that no one drank alcohol before coming out. Just in case.

If you’re me, your hoping an independent film is a, “damn good reason.”
The thing about indie film is it’s a lot like the “G-spot.” You hear a lot about it, but no one seems quite able to put a finger on it. No one can tell you what exactly, “independent” means.

Depending on whom you talk to, an independent film is any movie that cost less than ten million dollars. Or it’s any movie that stars William H. Macy and Parker Posey. Depending on whom you talk to Kevin Smith’s latest opus, coming in just over thirty million dollars and starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez is independent because about a decade ago Kevin Smith made Clerks. A movie is independent, some would say, if it possesses the “independent spirit.” Whatever that means. A movie is independent if it plays at Sundance or Cannes or fine arts theatres. A movie is independent if nothing blows up and someone dies at the end and every other word is “f**k.” Depending on whom you talk to, a movie is only independent if it is produced entirely without studio money and influence.
If any of these are the right answer, I don’t know, but this is independent.

This is one of the final shoots of For Catherine.

This is my love letter to things past.

This is a feature film written on napkins and notebooks and my mother’s computer. A movie lighted and shot and edited with equipment either plundered or borrowed. Every talent is donated. Every second spent shooting is stolen from work or sleep or leisure. This is a picture paid for out of pocket and possible only because I am gifted with perhaps the most obscenely talented and generous friends to ever walk this terra firma.
This film, it’s tiny. The crew is me, Ed and whoever is available to hold a mic on a given day. The actors are grips and best boys and stand-ins. They are drivers and cable pullers and script supervisors. On a film like this, everyone does what needs to be done. And they do it very, very well.

This movie, it’s pure. It’s mine. Ours. It’s unadulterated; it has been since it was conceived three years ago. For three years it’s been growing and shaping and evolving. So old is this production, if it were a horse it could not run in the Kentucky Derby. This film is a labor of love the way you mean it.

And it’s almost finished.

This is the crescendo.

This is my coup de gras.

Two years ago Ed and I bought a couch. Then we destroyed it. Nothing was left but a lump of wood and padding unrecognizable as a sofa to any sane creature. It looked more like a beached sea beast than a leisure device. It was nothing you would sit on. More something you cry about and refer to as a, “damn shame” before cramming it full of dynamite and blowing it to bits while the Discovery Channel watches.
Two years ago Ed and I bought a couch. About a week after that we bought another couch. We destroyed that one, too. But more carefully this time. This time, when we’re done it’s still a couch. For two years this thing sat in the corner of my apartment waiting for tonight. Waiting to be immortalized.

This couch, it would belong in a museum if there were going to be anything left of it after tonight.
And I say, “Travis.”

The details about Travis are things you’ll read about in People magazine soon enough.

And Travis walks toward the fire, toward the camera, and out of frame.

With the fire and the frame and the safety of my actors and the daylight fading and the trillion other things on my mind right now, I’m reminded of a simile a friend of mine once told me after receiving his PhD. This friend of mine, he said that getting your doctorate is like being lined up with all the other PhD candidates and being handed a hot iron. He said the ones who would drop the metaphorical iron, they would never graduate, but the ones that hold on to the damn thing, the ones that refuse to drop the iron despite the searing pain and nauseatingly sweet smell of burning flesh, my friend said, even if they barely make it through, when it’s all over, if they never dropped the iron, you call them doctor.
I’m remembering that simile and I’m thinking, “hot irons are for pussies.”

I’m thinking of producers who will tell you that you need only two things to make a movie: a camera and some way to record sound. “So and so and such and such used to record his dialogue on a Sony Walkman,” they’ll say. This is an example film professors throw around when they’re trying to inspire you to follow your dreams. Like reading Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” at a high school graduation, only without missing the point entirely.

People who have been doing this a lot longer than me, they say you need only two things to make a movie. But they’ve got it wrong. You need tenacity. Because if you think anything in the world is harder than this, you are mistaken.

Making a movie, with the myriad of elements and people and gear and with Murphy and his law omnipresent is almost impossible. And that’s exactly the way it should be. If it were easy to make a movie, to climb Mt. Everest, to discover radium, everyone would do it. If it were easy it would mean nothing.

If it were easy to feel like you were being burned alive, there’d be no point to this story.
It’s been three apartments, three years, a bachelor’s degree and about ten lovers since we started making this thing. I’ve smoked almost 15,000 cigarettes during production, lost countless hours of sleep. This little moving picture of mine, it’s almost killed me. And I have loved every second of it.

Thanatos and passion as one. Freud would have a field day with that.

With all of the good things in my life, it’s this tiny film that keeps me going. I don’t get out of bed and process paperwork for eight hours to pay rent; I do it to buy more tape, to secure a location, to get a new hard drive for editing.

The details about me are things you can learn from watching the movie.

And I walk toward the fire, toward the camera and out of frame.

This leaves Grant alone in the shot. Grant is the star of this picture. He is Duo, our protagonist. Positioned on the right third of the frame, this shot is supposed to be something of a parody of the funeral pyre scene from Return of the Jedi. I don’t really care for Star Wars, but I’m referencing it anyway because it strikes me as funny.

Along with this, this couch is something of an effigy of his character’s previous life. It is a symbolic phoenix; Duo will be reborn from the ashes of his shitty couch. Along with this the fire is meant to be cleansing. Distilling. Cauterizing. It is meant to weld shut the hole left by the departure of a girl he thought he loved.

And along with this, I just really wanted to set a f**king couch on fire.

Now out of the scene I grab a second camera and move around the edge of the master shot. As Grant stares into the flame I rack focus on his eyes, the fire dancing in his pupils. It’s a shot I’ll never use, but it fascinates me endlessly regardless. The fire moves. He doesn’t.

Ed is creeping around the other side of the frame with a third camera. His are the shots we will keep.

I am a good photographer. Ed is unreal. Grant and Travis onscreen, it’s like printing money. Evan, you haven’t met him, but he’s our editor. Put him behind the wheel of Final Cut Pro and take notes, it’s like watching Michelangelo sculpt in real time. Ed’s pictures and Grant and Travis’ performance, that’s the marble. Evan chips away at the excess to reveal the masterpiece.

When this number of varied and indisputable talents come together in unison, when they combine like Voltron to form something greater than the sum of their parts, it has a way of feeling like destiny. When you watch artists coalesce in pursuit fineness, it almost has to be providence.

The fire is almost gone and I say, “Grant.”

The details about Grant are he is so immensely talented in such a host of ways that if I didn’t unswervingly kick the crap out of him in video games, I might be jealous.

He turns and walks toward me, away from the flame, toward the camera and out of the shot. Grant wipes his brow and looks like he’s just been swimming.

Grant wipes his brow and he says, “That was f**king crazy.”

Tomorrow we will lament the charred and missing hairs on our eyebrows and arms.

Tomorrow we will be sore and dehydrated. Tomorrow everyone will tell us we look sunburned. Tomorrow we will go to our day jobs and we will process and sell and data enter and none of it will matter. Because tonight we stood too close to a fire. Tonight we stared straight-faced into flame. And we did not flinch.

Tomorrow someone will ask me what I do and I will say that I’m a filmmaker.