Late last year we were quietly informed a few days before the rest of the world that our film Half Life, the film that has been part of my life in one way or another for more than two years was selected for this year's Sundance Film Festival. For the independent filmmaker Sundance is one of the pinnacles of recognition, a chance to show off our film to a discerning audience of peers, industry folk and, of course, those people who buy films for distribution here and abroad. For us the announcement came just as we were finishing post-production the film, a process that had been somewhat more complicated by the fact that the script of Half-Life also included a lot of animation and CG effects shots. So this gave us no time at all to lick our wounds and recover from the post ordeal to prepare a screener for the festival.
The last few weeks have been almost as busy as the process of film making itself. As soon as we had got over celebration of the selection itself, we began another round of creative decision-making.
Everything had to be figured out quickly: posters, web site, and the logistics of the festival production, trying to get actors, crew, producers and family to Utah to be scattered in condos and hotels. So here I am, several months later, sitting in front of a gas fire at 5 in the morning, trying to sandwich this blog between the last of last night's meet-and-greet parties which finished at 4 and an 8am screening of a movie made by new friends that are also in the festival.
From a filmmaking perspective, the festival is the sharp end of the stick. However well the film is received, it requires an enormous meeting and greeting and tireless on-the-street publicity to try and coax extremely busy distributors and critics to choose to see your film over another in highly competitive viewing slots. Even if they come, there's little guarantee they'll stay, as every screening can have its share of walkouts from buyers who either get the point quickly or suddenly have a pressing need to be elsewhere (thankfully we've had much much less of this kind of thing than we were warned about).
These screenings are also a chance for many of the cast and crew to see the film for the first time as well so for me to see it in its entirety, on a large screen, in front of strangers. It's been a real family reunion and so warming that they love what we've done with all their hard work.
We're now exactly half way through, two successful screenings down, promising distribution conversations, and for me as the director it's also been a whirlwind of meetings: one minute interviews to camera, email, and microphone, and moving from party to party, press event to press event, all to meet as many people as possible to talk up the film, learn from others and meet future collaborators. This has all been tempered of course by the news of Heath Ledger's sad death which fell on us as we came out if the second screening of Half-Life. We all tried to digest the news with television cameras in our faces alternately answering questions about how happy we were about the film and how sad we were about his death. It felt unreal.