· Know your story.
· Tell your story.
· Do what works.
· Be mischievous.
· Discover!
· Don’t think like everyone else.
· Don’t talk like everyone else.
· Join no club.
· Learn from the wisdom of the generations.
· Learn from those unlike yourself.
· Listen to the masters.
· Hear the questions of the neophytes. They are the best.
· Seize your own questions. Ask them!
· The student aspires to be the master. The master learns to be the student.
· Don’t rebel against the past, rebel against the present.
· Put what hurts up on the screen.
· Conjure your fiction, address your audience.
· Embrace uncertainty.
· Beware common thinking.
· Beware the ‘industry professional’.
· Deplore celebrity. Respect people.
· Read! — literary fiction, essays, philosophy.
· Feel! Acknowledge your emotions.
· Look! Outside. Inside.
· BELIEVE IN CINEMA!
· Analyze, intuit, dare, explore, challenge, realize.
· If you’re dreaming, you’re asleep! Martin Scorsese.
· Style comes from the soul.
· Don’t be vague — be precise. Render your ambiguities exact.
· Don’t ‘cut to the chase’, cut to the suspense…
· Tension over conflict.
· Drama as journey. Drama as ambush. Drama as stealth.
· Dissonance divides your viewer — for which they will thank you.
· Don’t please everyone. Welcome detractors.
· Subvert.
· Defy your audience’s moral righteousness.
· Defy.
· The integrity of vulgarity. The sublimity of elegance.
· Open the heart.
· Reveal the soul.
· ‘Film production’ is an industrial, not a creative process.
· Filmmaking is a creative process.
· ‘Camera’ as concept and practice, not brand or model.
· Camera as servant. Camera as master.
· Seek simplicity, not reduction.
· Emotion. Cognition. Visceral/Neural/Enteric/Tactile Sensation. Vision.
· Mischief. Magic. Mystery.
· The unknowable in the familiar.
· The aesthetics of the screen are practical.
· Cinema can never be explained.
· Know composition. Know mise-en-scène.
· ‘Coverage’ of a scene is not storytelling.
· Film ‘grammar’ is not film language.
· A size, a framing, an angle relates to other sizes, framings, angles.
· Vista to vignette.
· The flow of energy.
· The power of ‘negative’ space.
· Screenplay. Casting. Editing. (Kieślowski.)
· ‘Prep’ is a misnomer — it’s already happening!
· No, it doesn’t all happen on the set.
· Know your intentions.
· Let your film take you where it will.
· Your film works when it outgrows you.
· Subscribe to no agenda.
· Don’t be ‘well-meaning’.
· Never preach.
· Draw from your community, time, and place.
· Step outside them.
· All fictional worlds are imagined.
· All fictional worlds derive from experience.
· The specific is universal.
· The general is nebulous.
· Realize the moment.
· The actor brings the moment to life.
· You bring the moment to life.
· Support, challenge the actor.
· Every actor is different.
· Spontaneity in performance
· Artifice in performance.
· Mastery of the actor.
· Naiveté of the actor.
· Immediacy. Distance.
· Cassavetes. Bresson.
· Language of the actor. Language of the screen.
· Listen to the actor, especially when you are certain.
· The actor tells the micro-story.
· You tell the micro-story.
· Territory and its boundaries — the primal currency of staging.
· Be a diplomat, a collaborator, a politician, be cunning, be compassionate.
· Be parental. Be a child.
· Be strong. Be vulnerable.
· Don’t play the simpleton.
· You are responsible. Own it.
· Persistence, resilience, application, stamina, motivation, humility.
· Process not product.
· Underthinking is the problem, not overthinking.
· Overthinking is not knowing how to think effectively.
· Never abandon enquiry.
· The partnership of mind, heart, and gut.
· The symbiosis of psyche and universe.
· Trust yourself, not your ego.
· You might be wrong.
· The gift of doubt.
· Bring your mentors inside, then challenge them!
· Look for what lies in front of your nose.
· Seek the truth.
· Make mistakes and learn.
· Stay young. Grow old.
· Diligence!
· From big to small, to big, to small, to big, to small, to big, and so on, and so on…
· Filmmaking the fabric of your hours.
· Keep those in your life close.
· Love!
· Watch cinema!
· Do it!
· Now!
Peter Markham September 2022
