12 Films. 12 Weeks. There are worse ways to spend a summer.

Filmmaking is a notoriously collaborative process.  No matter how hard some people try to see film as an auteur‘s medium — and no matter how alluring such theories may be, especially to the auteurs themselves — it’s hard to escape the fact that most directors barely even know how to operate a camera, much less construct an eleaborate lighting set-up, and would consequently be helpless without a good DP.  Most directors don’t write their own films, either.  Heck, some directors don’t even say “action”; they have an assistant for that.

Okay, Kubrick was an auteur. But he was also crazy.

Even when a director is wearing many hats, the question of authorship is far from clear.  “Sublet” is a prime example.  I wrote that movie, directed it, edited it, chose the music (from the generous outpouring provided by composer Stu Watson), and we filmed the whole thing in the apartment I was subletting.  Textbook auteur situation, right?

But let’s go back.  I wrote the movie — after Mike walked into my sublet for the first time and said, “We have to film something here.”  And then Mike read my first draft and gave me a ton of useful feedback, including — most crucially — the idea of giving more lines to the female character (in the original draft, the guy handled probably 80-90% of the text).  The “rewrite” was mostly just a reassigning of lines, but that process made both characters more vibrant and distinctive.

And it was Mike who proposed the idea of having the apartment’s owner appear in “ghostly” form at some point, to underscore his omnipresence.  Mike and James Creque gave important notes during editing, too.  This is without even counting the crucial contributions of the cast and crew, whose work speaks for itself.  So whose movie is it, exactly?

Well, it’s my damn movie, of course.  And I won’t hear anybody say differently.  But in the back of my mind, there’s always the nagging knowledge that it wouldn’t be half as good without the contributions of others — credited and otherwise.  As humbling (and terrifying) as that thought is, it’s also exciting.  My own creative resources are, alas, limited — but if I gather the right team of cohorts, there’s literally no boundary to what we can achieve.

And then, of course, I’ll take all the credit.

Posted by Keith