Let's make a snowman, let's make a snowman

A few years ago I was in the swanky Caffe Excelsior in Sendai, getting ridiculously high and zany on a Café Mocha with Chris. I remember the exact spot too, which is good, because it happened to be my favourite in the place and coveted by many. We got talking about making a movie, latched onto the idea and ran crazy with it, thought it was fantastic, and went back to Chris' to watch Fight Club (doubly strange is that tomorrow I'll be watching Fight Club again). The movie never happened, but that wasn't because we weren't keen, but due to two things: crazy Nova weekends (meaning that those who would be good in the movie didn't have the same days off as anyone else) and something to film other than a two minute zombie film. But, Mason would still have been an excellent zombie.

I wondered how long it would take before the same wackiness occurred in Spain. Apparently it took just 150 days of me being here. I'll admit, that was longer than I expected. Last night Valentina was talking about her theatre group and somehow the inevitable happened: "let's make a movie!"

The good news is that I don't have to mess around with stupid weekends, as we all have a lot of free time, being us students and the like. The further good news is that my talent pool is slightly larger than 30 gaijin working in the city. Further good news is that I have more ideas than possible, and they are pretty good, plenty of time to write a script and get something going, and absolutely no money (which I hope translates into an awesome profit margin :) ). But there's bad news. I have two options: make the film entirely in Italian (thanks to the actors not being native Spanish or English speakers), or make it in a mix of languages. Imagine trying to direct while having no idea what your cast is saying. Now imagine trying to edit that coherently. TRY!

You might think that writing a script for a language that I don't speak is completely nuts. But I disagree. Robert Rodriguez wrote his Spanish-language El Mariarchi in English and simply translated it later. He then made a million dollars. I'll just have to explain it to people in Spanish, and let them translate it into their own language when the cameras roll.

So.........do I really think that I can get this off the ground? Considering that I almost got a film going in 2004, failed in Japan in 2005, did nothing really during 2006 and 2007, then wrote like crazy in 2008 only to find that I need a new script going for 2009 . . . honestly? No, I can't imagine it happening. But I'm sure as hell willing to give it a shot!