"This seems kind of obvious, but filmmaking is about storytelling, and stories are all around you, no matter where you live. You need to tell those stories."
Spout's founder, Rick DeVos, said it, making what I thought was the most inspirational point of all at the Waterfront Film Festival panel "3,000 Miles Away." (OK, maybe I'm a bit biased, since I'm a Spout employee, but what he had to say truly resonated with me.)
A similar sentiment apparently resonated with filmmaker Colin Gray about five years ago. Colin is half of the team known as "The Sibs" (the other half being his sister, Megan Raney). After clipping an article from the newspaper, he was struck by the realization that he had a story to tell. It was important. No one else was going to tell it. Even if it seemed like a bizarre concept, he had to do it. He had to tell the story aboutâ€"get thisâ€"water polo and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
The film that came out of that realization, Freedom's Fury, premiered at Tribecca 2006 and then screened twice at Waterfront. We watched it Friday night. I went pretty much because Colin is a really great guy, not because I have any personal connection to water polo or Hungary. But this is what happens when a story has to be told: it transcends subject matter, plot summaries and genres, sucking you in because it came from a real human in touch with his gut. What are we, the audience, if not real people, trying to stay in touch with our deepest instincts and desires?
I talked to Colin and Megan on Saturday afternoon, and they told me how many times they doubted and second-guessed themselves and their story during the years they were working on it. So many people questioned their judgment ("You're making a full-length film about Hungarian politics and water polo?") and so many barriers presented themselves (try working on a film in English, Hungarian and Russian, just for starters), that it was easy at times to agree they were crazy. But at the same time, Colin told me, so many amazing things fell into placeâ€"unexpected connections and sub stories and access to materialsâ€"that they became even more sure, more determined to make it. (Get this: Colin found out after he started making the film that his water polo coach at the University of Michigan had been coached by the same man who was captain of the famed 1956 Hungarian Olympic team. And Quentin Tarantino fell in love with the project and offered to help in whatever way he could. And Mark Spitz turned out to be an incredibly talented narrator.) The project kept gaining momentum.
In the end, I guess this is what I think: not only that you must make the story that's gnawing at you, but that you don't use lame excuses to avoid making it. "I don't live in LA. I don't have the funding. No one will care about this story." Whatever the excuses are, they are just excuses. And in many cases their existence actually might indicate that your story is even more worth telling, because it isn't easy, it isn't expected, it isn't homogenized.
