Narrative Workshop etc

Narrative Workshop. Frank Pierson started our screening by making a joke on the title 'She Cried Alive' - it was good to see that he understood the duality of the phrase but disappointing as his amusement set the wrong tone, none the less the film played well and there was a marked silence during the reveal.

Then on stage for the reaction. Firstly Frank thought it was about a transvestite, having said that he was more or less in isolation on this point. Though interestingly Jennifer thought the same at first and then she felt a bit stupid at the end when she got it and realised that she had been in Hollywood for too long! So the comment came as no surpirse. Afterwards, a number of people came up and thought that his comment was stupid especially with the nude shot at the front where Fanshen clearly doesn't have a man's ass! What is good is that the initial tone of the piece indicates vanity.

Well in summary there was a strong reaction. It divided people, some liked it some didn't. At the core of the discussion was the content of the film - we were accused of being sexist which then provoked an outcry that the film was not sexist, we were told that we needed a woman's input to make the film as there were no women on the team, again people jumped to our defence and said that this was stupid as it clearly had a strong woman's POV and handling (for the record we did have female input on the research side) what then transpired is that a number of our advocates piped up and defended the approach we had taken and the carefully handling of the subject matter. Sure the film didn't work for all people, it was never designed that way as the topic of breast cancer is too great to be definitive, but where it did work was to spark awareness and debate. Interestingly the quote at the start was not mentioned which is a shame as this is essentially what the film was about and as such it seemed to work:

'Things are not as they are, but as we are' - Anais Ninn

Oh Frank was extremely complimentary about the look of the film, and one compliment he did make was 'a lesser director would have shown the reveal' so I was flattered. Had some other great comments from Dave Herman, Zeke Hawkins, Tamera Fields and Danijel Sraka.

Strangely latter in the day when we sat down with Frank and looked at the film scene by scene, he started off by apologising for missing the point and his subsequent comments. He then went through the film and was extremely complimentary re the work and Fanshen's performance. He did make suggestions on how to improve the piece, the key one being the staging of the end scene which was much better than the idea I used. All in all he was extremely complimentary and interested in what we were going to make next. I think the team were relieved and delighted as Frank can be pretty straight with his comments. So we seemed to come out smiling.






Oh the Betsy debrief was excellent. We set a pretty high standard and met all the demands required for the project. We actually came in under budget with something like $7 L&D. It was by far the most ambitious project shot wise, cast wise and location wise to date. The team did really well.

Some photos of the day: