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The Signal: A Collaboration in Three Parts
Three young directors who took Sundance by storm with their experiment in cinematic collaboration share the spotlight once again with an essay on the process
(Page 3)
Part III: Exhibition
Twenty Minutes ’Til Screening: Seeing The Signal Through Fresh Eyes
by David Bruckner
After nearly a year of painstaking post-production madness, the seemingly endless array of fix-its and redos, the creation of an insane indie apocalyptic horror film starts to take on a delusional kind of quality. I’d heard other moviemakers talk about what I might call a “hyper-consciousness” of your own movie, where you lose perspective on what that first-time viewing experience might be for an audience. As a moviemaker, you’ve probably seen the film close to a billion times by the time you first screen it for an audience, so you anticipate every occurrence before it happens, stress over tiny technical imperfections and wonder deeply if the film only makes sense to you.
This was my mental playground 20 minutes before our little movie launched its world premiere at the Egyptian Theatre in Park City, UT as part of the Sundance Film Festival. I never thought it would get in. In fact, I had remarked that our entry was merely an offering to the gods. Don’t get me wrong—I love our freaky serial horror film, and I had the utmost faith in my fellow directors, producers and our badass ensemble of local actors. But when you’ve been slaving away in Atlanta’s underground digital movie scene for many years, screening at Sundance is a bit of a shock to the system.
As the movie began, my hyper-consciousness went into overdrive. On the eighth line of scene two—an obvious beat—a woman three rows ahead of me (and two seats to the left) looked around the theater casually. ‘This isn’t good,’ I thought. Perhaps she hadn’t heard the line? But the sound in the Egyptian is fantastic, so it had to be worse: She didn’t understand the line. Which is bad, because the movie’s paradigm had just shifted—and that tiny spark of information was to put our whole story into motion.
Then the worst of all possible scenarios occurred to me: She understood everything. Simply bored to tears, this woman, who I do not know and have never met, was obviously looking for the door. She wanted out—she wanted out bad. This could not be. I took a deep breath. ‘Have a little faith,’ I told myself.
Twenty minutes later the unimaginable happened: Right as chaos broke out on-screen, two guys behind me got up and left the theater! I was destroyed. Oblivious to everything, I sunk deep inside my own head determined to discover my power animal. I won’t comment on what it was, but when I emerged, I realized the audience was in throws of applause. The film was over and—strangely—seemed to be something of a success.
It turned out that the two guys who left the screening worked for Magnolia Pictures. They were going out to the lobby to discuss picking the film up for distribution (which they eventually did).
The great thing about screening your work at a festival is that you get to see it through other people’s eyes. Emerging from the madness of my own hyper-consciousness, I came to realize that people had an experience very similar to what we originally intended when we made the film. It’s as if the moment-to-moment ideas that spark your imagination when you start out but get forgotten through the rigorous process of actually making the movie somehow remain intact through it all. So when the audience responds, you remember the story you set out to tell. I’m thankful for the opportunity to screen it for a larger audience, and thanks to the festival, I’m now a little more “reasonably conscious” about how people might see it. In fact, I’m optimistic.
The Signal is in theaters now.
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This story was published in the Summer 2007 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Moviemaking in Three Parts
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