Director's Reflection:
To me, the scene I made feels more like an entire piece than a scene from an
actual movie. The slow, slow, slow pace of the tilt and the boxy framing combined with the pacing—where we get mostly static air rather than a person on screen—makes me think it succeeds as something sluggish and frustrated, but sort of contained to this particular scene. Like, I don’t know if I’m putting this into the right words, but I feel like this isn’t a scene that actually exists at the beginning of a real movie because it’s too slow and too independent (which isn’t a good thing in this case because it’s supposed to act as a segment of a larger work).
Furthermore, the whole elaborate thought process I went through with this piece was cool in theory but possibly kind of a miss in execution. I wanted to play with gender norms and what was literally being said vs what was being shown (and thus interpreted by the audience). The lines in Kaufman’s script are all about being an old, fat, bald man and in the actual movie, an older, overweight, bald male is on screen and doing the voiceover. However, because the character talks about his Body Dysmorphic Disorder, I had the idea to give the script a less literal reading and dive into modern beauty stigmas and female self-esteem disorders, since the vast majority of people suffering from Body Dysmorphic Disorder are young women. Thus, I cast a thin, 22-year-old female to play the part of Kaufman to start a conversation about the exaggerated way women view themselves vs reality. But a funny thing happened where I cast a girl with very short hair and put her in an oversized sweater that sort of tones down the femininity of her body, which possibly overrode my vision and sort of came across as looking like I maybe cast her and meant for the audience to believe she could pass for an old, fat man? I really don’t want this to read as lazy casting because it was super specific and intentional, but I think I maybe should have played up the gender disparity a whole lot more. Dang it.
actual movie. The slow, slow, slow pace of the tilt and the boxy framing combined with the pacing—where we get mostly static air rather than a person on screen—makes me think it succeeds as something sluggish and frustrated, but sort of contained to this particular scene. Like, I don’t know if I’m putting this into the right words, but I feel like this isn’t a scene that actually exists at the beginning of a real movie because it’s too slow and too independent (which isn’t a good thing in this case because it’s supposed to act as a segment of a larger work).
Furthermore, the whole elaborate thought process I went through with this piece was cool in theory but possibly kind of a miss in execution. I wanted to play with gender norms and what was literally being said vs what was being shown (and thus interpreted by the audience). The lines in Kaufman’s script are all about being an old, fat, bald man and in the actual movie, an older, overweight, bald male is on screen and doing the voiceover. However, because the character talks about his Body Dysmorphic Disorder, I had the idea to give the script a less literal reading and dive into modern beauty stigmas and female self-esteem disorders, since the vast majority of people suffering from Body Dysmorphic Disorder are young women. Thus, I cast a thin, 22-year-old female to play the part of Kaufman to start a conversation about the exaggerated way women view themselves vs reality. But a funny thing happened where I cast a girl with very short hair and put her in an oversized sweater that sort of tones down the femininity of her body, which possibly overrode my vision and sort of came across as looking like I maybe cast her and meant for the audience to believe she could pass for an old, fat man? I really don’t want this to read as lazy casting because it was super specific and intentional, but I think I maybe should have played up the gender disparity a whole lot more. Dang it.
