The date is June 6th and we’ve officially begun pre-production on Rufus Rex. What does pre-production mean on a grassroots movie? When you’re the screenwriter-producer-director it means that you’ve set a date for the start of principal photography and you’ve started working backward from there. The date I’ve chosen is September 22nd and we’ll wrap 21 shooting days later, on October 18th.

Between now and then I have to hire the crew, conduct casting sessions, pick and secure locations, raise money and orchestrate a thousand details in addition to continuing to polish the script, think about shots and movement and how 100,000 or so feet of film will all cut together… Basically, I have to be half artist and half businessguy if I’m going to be successful.

This isn’t my first at-bat, so I know just what I’m getting into. I sort of wish I didn’t, actually. I remember 1997 in Seattle when I was at this stage on Men in Scoring Position (released in 1999). I was a single dad of a four-year-old and a six-year-old, trying to run my own business and keep it all together. But it had been six years since I got out of Vancouver Film School and four years since I’d started MovieMaker, and I had the nagging feeling that if I didn’t start speaking the language of cinema very soon I’d forget how. That’s one of the big problems with embarking on a career as a director. The opportunities you get to practice your craft are few and far between and you usually need to make your own breaks—of that much I was sure.

I was ready to make it happen. After film school and several years of publishing a magazine about other people making movies, I was more than ready to pull the trigger. I felt like my biological clock was ticking loudly and I was itching to give birth to my first feature. So I wrote a one-location script about two guys at a crossroads in their lives and with whatever resources I had (chiefly the magazine and a $30K loan), I shot the movie in 14 days and edited it in L.A. over the next nine months. We premiered at the New York Avignon Film Festival in 1998, won a couple of awards at subsequent festivals and got picked up by an international distributor. I’d made a movie, and to this day I get small checks from the DGA and the WGA.

That process taught me a lot. What it didn’t teach me was how to maintain that kind of discipline on my follow-up project, which was a documentary I shot in 2003 called No Limit: A Search for the American Dream on the Poker Tournament Trail. That project was a nightmare, despite the fact that the finished product got some good critical response. It was a nightmare because I made a deal with the devil and agreed to 50-50 control of the cut. Newsflash: There’s no such thing as 50-50 control. One party always gets her way when the inevitable disagreements come. I’d never make a movie that way again.

This time around I’m going back to making movies the French way—the way all grassroots moviemakers should. A feature film is tough enough without getting to the end and realizing the only thing that kept you going—your vision—has been crippled and compromised. Been there, done that, not doing it again. Rufus Rex will be a joyful exercise in the art and business of moviemaking.