My last post on film lookbooks, in which I printed pages from the reference bible for Sean Dunn’s forthcoming The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford, generated a lot of comments, with one poster wondering about incorporating original images in lookbooks, not just those taken from other films, photography or painting. Because that’s what we did for Elisabeth Subrin’s feature, A Woman, A Part, I thought I’d post this short follow-up to that original post.

Elisabeth’s film, which I produced with Shrihari Sathe, is about a burnt-out television actress, played by Maggie Siff, who impulsively decides to walk off her show and head back to New York City and the group of friends she worked with in her earlier downtown theater days. Viewing her as the one who “made it” and skipped town, her friends are mystified by her arrival, unsure of what she wants from them. When she discovers that friends played by John Ortiz and Cara Seymour have based a character in their company’s latest work on her, she is forced to grapple with the limitations and possibilities of both her past and her future.

A scene in the script’s first act provides a visual set piece that we used as a throughline in the lookbook. The actress, Anna, frustrated by the poor writing on her show, ploughs through a stack of screenplays, hoping to find a more creatively rewarding feature role. With a bottle of wine, she sits by her pool and reads, with each script worse than the next. Upon finishing, she tosses each script in the pool, until, by the end, the soggy pages blanket the water.

Elisabeth went to the house of an LA friend, cast a friend in the role of Anna, and shot stills from this scene on a mixture of a DSLR and an iPhone. (The images here are from the iPhone.)

Designer Carl Williamson designed the lookbook, breaking up the images and juxtaposing fragments with the various required text blocks, which included a synopsis, bios but also testimonials to Elisabeth by those who knew and worked with her.

The pool imagery was then contrasted with another scene from a bit later in the film. Anna decamps to New York and moves into her old and empty apartment, which she’s held onto while she’s been working in Los Angeles. Inhabiting her old space, she finds and pores over photographs from her younger days. She revels in the solitude and empty space of this Brooklyn flat, finding in it both echoes of her past but also, possibly, a blank canvas from which to start anew.

The full lookbook contains much other imagery, including stills from Safe, Red Desert, Opening Night and other titles as well as stills from Elisabeth’s shorts and gallery installations. But as we went out with this film, the fact that we had created original imagery for the lookbook stood out, and the “scripts in the swimming pool” imagery leapt out to readers as an example of the visual possibilities of our story.

A Woman, A Part premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2016, played the now-defunct BAMcinemafest later that year and was released by Strand Releasing in 2017. It is now available on digital platforms.

“An aging tour guide faces an existential crisis when an internationally successful fantasy TV show begins filming in his remote Scottish village.”

That was our logline for Sean Dunn’s debut feature, The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford, which, following its Rotterdam international premiere, is having its US premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival tomorrow. As a logline, it was a good one, but it would prompt the next question: “What will be the film’s tone?” One can imagine an overly broad comedy with this premise while terms such as “existential” hinted at something darker and more interior. Yes, there was Sean’s very good script to hand to people, but these days, you need to do more early on to convey a director’s vision, which is where a lookbook comes in.

We were going out to actors and financiers in 2022 when we asked Sean if he could think about a lookbook that would visually convey the specific themes and references he had been accumulating in his head over the years he spent on the script. (Producer Alex Polunin originated the project with Sean, I joined in late development, and Jennifer Monks completed the producing team before the start of pre-production.) What Sean and Shakti Bhagchandani — the film’s editor and Sean’s wife — delivered knocked us out and proved to be a compelling document as we continued to pitch the film and also source department head collaborators. One potential financier who argued for the film at her company wrote me in an email, “This lookbook will forever live on my desktop screen as an example of excellence.”

When I edited Filmmaker Magazine, I commissioned an article by Meredith Alloway (whose sly horror comedy Forbidden Fruits opened recently) on the role of the lookbook, and I was able to convince a few filmmakers to share examples of theirs. In that spirit, I’m sharing some images from Sean’s here, which I hope will help filmmakers as they grapple with their own visual presentations.

Something different about Sean’s lookbook is its length — 78 pages! The first few pages are mostly text, but Sean and Shakti used a lot of white space and graphics as they delivered the obligatory synopsis, director’s statement and bios. Here, the bird refers to Weatherford’s filmmaker within the film, a videographer and amateur bird watcher (Lewis MacDougall) who is making a documentary about Kenneth, our tour guide protagonist, played by the mighty Peter Mullan.

One of the reasons so many fantasy TV shows and movies shoot in Scotland is because of the spectacular landscape. Kurosawa’s Ran is a dazzling landscape reference image and also, as Sean has presented here, a somewhat abstract one. Which then is then juxtaposed with a photograph by the celebrated Scottish photographer Martin Parr, who captures, as Sean does in the film, the manmade (and animal) intrusions that can make such lush landscapes odd, funny and sometimes simply weird.

There’s a fair amount of driving in The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford as Kenneth travels from home to the visitor center where he extolls the history and Enlightenment philosophy of Sir Douglas Weatherford, a fictional amalgam of David Hume, Sir Walter Scott, Benjamin Franklin and Adam Smith. The car, an old model, becomes an extension of Kenneth — a character of its own, as Sean notes alongside these above images from Quentin Dupieux’s Deerskin.

Kenneth is a widower, his wife having died just over a year ago, and the film finds him in that moment when the rest of his world has “moved on” while his own grief still lingers. Images from artist Michael Cox, filmmakers Kelly Reichardt and Yorgos Lanthimos, and photographer Larry Sultan were helpful as Sean worked with his various collaborators, including DP David Gallego, production designer Jamie Lapsley and locations manager Richard Brough, to make the home an emotionally resonant site inflected with the past’s joys and sorrows.

One of the comic leitmotifs in Weatherford are shots of the various boulders Kenneth tells his bemused tourists that the philosopher had placed along his walking routes, giving him places to sit as he wrote his various works of political philosophy. In some scenes, the boulders are specifically referred to in connection with Weatherford’s various treatises. In others, they are comically incongruous elements as the workers of the fantasy TV show, The White Stag of Emberfell, go about their days. Here, images from directors Hlynur Pálmason, John Gianvito and artist Peter Graham illustrate both the historical accuracy and symbolic possibilities of this device.

As a tourguide, Kenneth shepherds busloads of tourists around his town, narrating along the way the history of Sir Douglas Weatherford. It’s on one of these tours that he learns from a tourist about the Game of Thrones-like fantasy TV show, The White Stag of Emberfell coming to town to shoot its third season. The tourist wants to know, has Kenneth ever met the show’s handsome lead, Oscar Wright? (During pre-production, Oscar Wright became Oscar Sorenson, played by the brilliant Norwegian actor Jakob Oftebro.) Occurring early in the film, it’s the first moment that Kenneth suspects that his well-ordered life protecting the legacy of Weatherford could be imperiled. As he does throughout the lookbook, Sean included pages with bits of dialogue that set up the surrounding images, which, in this case, are pictures of a tourbus and then of tourist groups by filmmakers Yorgos Lanthimos, Werner Herzog and Jessica Hausner and photographer Roger Minick.

The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford is inflected in places by a kind of eerie folk horror, with the landscape, as Sean specifies here, “anthropomorphized” in places. In the film, Kenneth’s backyard garden is both a reminder of his wife but also a liminal space in which, at one moment, the ghost of Sir Douglas Weatherford appears. To illustrate these haunting landscape possibilities, Sean chose images from artist Thomas Gainsborough and photographer Nigel Shafran.

There’s one flashback battle-type scene in The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford, and, of course, the question becomes, how can you accomplish such a spectacle on a normal-sized budget? Above, an image from Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon illustrates shows how a location and costumery (our costume designer was Elle Wilson) can do so much.

Finally, in addition to penning Adam Smith-like economic tracts, Weatherford was, like Benjamin Franklin, something of a medical inventor. But Weatherford’s inventions were a bit darker than Franklin’s bifocals and urinary catheters, extending into the realm of limb amputation and more. Glasgow-based contemporary artist Ken Currie’s Three Oncologists proved a useful reference image for what in the film became something even more disturbing, a vision of surgical horror and secret societies invading Kenneth’s psyche late in the film.

A final equilibrium is suggested by this image by the Romantic-era landscape painter John Constable.

The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford is supported by BBC Films, BFI and Screen Scotland and will be released by MUBI in the UK and Ireland.

Such excitement is precisely the experience summoned by Walker and Auen’s film, which focuses on a French academic haunting a series of libraries — the filmmakers shot at four institutions across New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore — while researching the history of the Chronovisor, a quasi-mythical time-travel photography device “created by” real-life 20th-century Italian Benedictine monk (as well as music professor and exorcist) Father Pellegrino Ernetti. Chronovisor follows the academic, Beatrice Courte (played by an actual professor of behavioral sciences at HEC Paris, Anne Laure Sellier), as she methodically follows a series of clues contained within rare books, old Italian newspapers and journals and YouTube clips, seeking to determine whether the Chronovisor – which picks up on electromagnetic waves to retroactively “film” world events going back to the crucifixion of Christ — was ever more than a Catholic legend. Much of the film’s running time takes place in those libraries, as Courte turns page after page, with the various breadcrumbs of discovery ingeniously highlighted for the reader by English translations superimposed over the actual texts, passages which hypnotically fade up and down to the swells of Gustav Holst’s early 20th-century orchestral composition, The Planets.

While there are debate-filled dinner scenes with Beatrice and her colleagues and one transfixing nighttime sequence through New York’s Central Park, one often reads Chronovisor as much as watches it — that is, until the film’s triumphant final stretch, which takes Beatrice away from dimly-lit reading rooms all the way to the seaside of Portugal, where images from the past do indeed flicker and smear across the screen. (As fictional as this tale sounds, what’s also remarkable about Chronovisor is that the texts and visual materials used throughout the film are, with only a couple of exceptions, entirely real.)

I spoke with Baltimore natives Walker and Auen at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where they world premiered Chronovisor before a festival run continuing at this weekend’s New Directors/New Films and Los Angeles Festival of Movies. The film was also acquired last week by Grasshopper Films for North American distribution, proof positive that boldly conceived work that marches to its own filmic rhythms and intellectual preoccupations can still happily succeed in today’s independent marketplace.

Macaulay: I didn’t know anything about the real story of the Chronovisor when I first spoke with you about your film last Spring. Since then, I’ve discovered that there’s a real group of people obsessed by it.

Auen: We’re definitely not the first.

Macaulay: When did you first discover the story of the Chronovisor?

Walker: I came across it in a book called Angels, Archons and Aliens, by Ambrose Andreano. [The book is subtitled, “An Assessment of the Theological Implications and Psychological Impact of the Close Encounters Phenomenon.”] It’s this huge tome about exo-theology, which is the study of UFOs as it pertains to religious philosophy. I shared it with Jack immediately because it checked so many boxes — academia, religion — of stuff that we were obsessed with. We cover religious themes in a lot of our films, and we really wanted to shift into a more genre-y space. And obviously the [concept of] the Chronovisor is cinematic immediately in both a science-fiction way but also as a mystery, an enigma.

Auen: It was probably Summer of 2024 when you first reached out to me about the book, and it was not in the context of a movie at all. It was just a cool thing that our shared interests overlapped into. And then you made a proof-of-concept short version of the film’s ending sequence.

Macaulay: Tell me about that sequence. What did you use to create it?

Walker: It was made in Adobe Premiere. We’re not particularly skilled VFX artists, although we did do the VFX for the film — hopefully, it’s convincing! But with that sequence, we want to maintain some movie magic around it. Jack, what’s the best enigmatic way of [talking about it]?

Auen: I would just say there’s raw footage that is being processed and then filmed through analog media so that ultimately what you see is of a piece with all of the VHS videos, cassettes, books and stuff [in the film]. We didn’t want [the Chronovisor footage] to feel totally digital and made in a non-linear editing software — we wanted it to actually have some tactile quality to it. So, it started real with some processing and then ended real again.

Walker: We started looking into Blender and doing 3D stuff, and then we realized that what’s interesting about this [Chronovisor] technology is that they claim to have invented it in the ‘50s. That’s also what’s scary about it to me, like how old-time-y photos sometimes have an eerie quality. It’s like this old tech that’s so powerful and still so analog. Capturing that part of it, making it sure it didn’t look contemporary, was the most important part of all.

Macaulay: Which is why you also chose to shoot on 16mm.

Auen: Definitely. That was always the plan from the very beginning, but it was obviously budget dependent. There was a version of the film where if we couldn’t have raised the funds to purchase the 16mm film we’d have come up with something else. Thankfully we never had to entertain that hypothetical. But there was no better way to capture the analog qualities of the archival material than to keep the [whole film] tactile.

Macaulay: You made this film relatively quickly. You shot in 2025 and premiered in Rotterdam in January, 2026.

Walker: We shot between June and August of 2025, but very intermittently. If you count every day we shot something, it was 13 shooting days. Five days at the beginning of June, four days at the end of June, four days in August. That [schedule] was based on our lead actor, [Anne Laure Sellier], who is an actual professor. She was free in the summer, but she visited New York as a visiting NYU professor every June. She only teaches one day a week, and the rest of her week is just her reading and research and stuff. So, she was able to carve out time for us.

Macaulay: And was it through NYU that you first came across Anne-Laure?

Auen: Yes, because she’s listed on the NYU faculty.

Macaulay: But what about discovering her in the first place? It’s an unusual choice to have a working academic as a lead actor. At the same time, she has a lot of experience presenting in front of audiences.

Walker: The role was extremely difficult to cast. We did look into traditional actors, but we hadn’t found anyone who convincingly could do the intellectual dialogue and sound like a bona fide academic. And most everyone couldn’t speak the four languages necessary to match what we’d written through the script.

Macaulay: And the four languages are English, French, German and Italian?

Walker: Yes. And technically, I guess, Latin for stretches. She quotes Latin and a little Greek, but she doesn’t speak it.

Auen: We were scouring the faculty list at Columbia, NYU, Fordham — pretty much anywhere in New York City.

Walker: We were looking at CVs and headshots. We wanted people with at least a tangential academic relationship to the material in the film. Also, we thought it would be easier for us to sell ourselves [as filmmakers] to someone who might be interested in the subject matter. If someone was a STEM professor, we would still reach out to them, but we knew the likelihood [they would do it] was lower than someone who was interested in the humanities, history, psychology or philosophy. We saw [a photo] from a TED talk Anne-Laure gave. She was on stage speaking about creativity and social cognition and was wearing a black turtleneck, kind of like Steve Jobs or something.

Auen: When we saw a headshot we liked, we’d go search them on YouTube. Almost all professors at these prestigious institutions have done some Zoom meetings or conferences or something, so we could usually get a little taste. But Anne Laure had this incredible TED Talk where we really got to see her full performance.

Walker: Up there in her sort of performative mode, she was just exuding the exact energy that we wanted from the character.

Auen: That she had so much [professional] overlap [with the character] really helped with the jargon. She just got what we were going for in terms of capturing the research [process].

Walker: And hearing her French accent – that did a lot of work for us. She became our top choice as soon as we saw [the video of her TED Talk].

Macaulay: Making a first film is often about figuring out how to have the maximum impact with a specifically constrained set of resources. In Chronovisor there is not much sync dialogue, and there aren’t complicated scenes that would have taken all day to shoot. You’ve leaned into a storyline around research and intellectual discovery. And for a film that takes place in, as you say, a bit of a genre space, you’ve made an unusual choice for a lead actor. In terms of making an ultra-low-budget feature that stands out in today’s marketplace, this all feels quite strategic in how it differs from so much other arthouse as well as genre work of the moment. How much were you thinking in these terms when developing the film?

Auen: It’s definitely something we were aware of. We knew whatever first feature opportunity would come our way would not be super well resourced. So, in the writing process that constrained us in the scope of ideas we were thinking about. Once we got into the actual Chronovisor side of things and the archive material, though, one of the things that excited us so much was that it felt like very little compromise was required in order to achieve the idea on modest means. If we had two or three times as much money to make this film, it probably would have ended up very similarly in terms of the finished product.

Walker: Everyone would have been paid better. We would have had better food for lunch.

Auen: It would have been easier on us, in some ways, but the idea was so exciting, cinematic and achievable, there’s nothing we [needed to have] spent money on that we didn’t. So, yes, of course for a debut you’re always trying to stand out with whatever means you can stand out with, and if the budget’s not one then you try to get creative. That freedom is one of the exciting things about working with so little money, both in terms of not having certain interests to answer to but also, in some ways, because you get more time to work on things because each new day on set isn’t $150,000 like it would be on a bigger-budget film.

Macaulay: The texts in the movie are all authentic, I believe. You didn’t write them, is that right? But did you have to recreate them, or are what we see in the film the actual books?

Walker: They are all authentic texts and actual books except for one single text. We’re letting people do a treasure hunt to try and figure out which one it is.

Macaulay: It’s a text you made up or just one that you had to recreate because you couldn’t get a physical copy?

Auen: I wouldn’t quite call it fiction. We wanted a specific headline to really get a point home, but [the text itself] is not fiction. It’s all information that’s out there, and it was useful for us in one particular instance to have it consolidated into one single document. We just consolidated a few separate but real pieces into one story that could make a crucial narrative point that we needed.

Macaulay: Were all these texts ones you found in libraries?

Walker: There were a few we checked out from libraries, and a few books we bought online, and the large majority of texts were possessed by random people in Europe. Those were insanely difficult to track down. Probably 70% of the texts that we bought for the film, whether they were magazines or newspapers or books, were the only copies available on the internet. If somebody tried to make this movie next year, they would basically have to buy [these texts] from us.

Auen: We probably have the most comprehensive library about this subject in the world. I don’t know if that’s something to be proud of or not, if it makes us crackpots or something. But it was six months of sourcing these texts.

Walker: And about that process — you buy something from eBay, the shipping cost is like five times what the book actually costs and it takes two months for it to arrive. And then half the time, we’re buying every issue of this magazine that was published in, say, 1972 in the hopes that one issue has one article about [the Chronovisor]. So, there was a lot of sifting through.

Macaulay: Fascinating. So the pre-production of the film is essentially a mirror of the process we see in the film.

Walker: Yeah. That’s something we didn’t understand at first — prior to [making the film] we did everything that Beatrice does in the movie.

Macaulay: And then how did you handle the language issues during the research and scripting process? I presume you do not speak four languages?

Walker: No. I took high school Spanish, Jack took high school French. We both have a little bit of Latin. A little bit of Greek. And we have a little Italian.

Auen: Just enough to be able to read a headline and get a keyword or two to send us in the right direction. [We had] enough knowledge that we didn’t feel like we were looking at an alien language or anything. But I wonder if this film could have been made without these new apps that can take a picture of a text and visually translate it. We had real translators come in once we had selected all the text to put on film, but for the initial discovery phase, being able to on the fly turn a page and in a second [receive a translation], I don’t know how we would have made the film otherwise. We’d have spent a tremendous amount of money to have people translating entire books. I don’t think the film could have been made ten years ago.

Macaulay: As I’m talking to you, I’m comprehending the complexity of the process. Yes, you have some language skills, but at the same time, you’re looking through entire books, and these books could be hundreds of pages long, and you don’t know where in the book a reference to the Chronovisor might be.

Auen: Sometimes you would be blessed with a chapter heading that would have a key word, like “Ernetti.” But there were instances where Kevin would do that translation process for every page in the book. Two-hundred and 20 pages for just two paragraphs.

Walker: I can’t describe how daunting it was to receive in the mail every single edition of a magazine from an entire year and sometimes there wouldn’t be anything [relevant].

Auen: But then sometimes you would go through a 600-page book and on page 450 there would be the best “this has to go in the movie” quote ever. So, you couldn’t flick through the books because every page was potentially a gem and a key shot in the film. The [process] was very rewarding, but it was not one we would want to do again tomorrow.

Macaulay: Tell me about how you landed on the way in which you visualized and then translated that text for the viewer. You don’t do traditional subtitles. I saw Joshua Minsoo Kim referencing Michael Snow’s film, So Is This, which I’ve actually never seen.

Auen: We had not seen that either. Anything remotely new that we thought we were doing Michael Snow beat us to it 50 years ago – not surprising! But superimposed titles as opposed to [normal] subtitles was actually a pretty early [decision] that came out of the experience of doing the live translation. It was like we’re showing the research process because that was just how we were ingesting the material the first time we were ingesting it.

Walker: We’re very happy with it, but first we thought it would seem gimmicky. You know when [in a film] people are texting and their text messages pop up on screen rather than [the film] showing the phone itself? I was like, “Are we just going to be another one of those [films where] you can tell they’re trying to make something uncinematic cinematic?” But when we started editing we tried it out with both subtitles and superimposition, and it was so much more seamless an experience having [the titles superimposed].

Auen: [Being able to] bold, highlight or underline certain sections, especially one sentence at a time in the same shot, unlocked a whole new set of tools to guide people’s attention through each scene and keep those sequences engaging.

Macaulay: When did you decide to license Holst’s The Planets for the score?

Walker: We shot some exteriors in February and March, 2025, because it’s a winter set film. And when we were putting those into our edit system, we were looking for music to set [these shots] to because there was no sync sound. We stumbled on The Planets pretty early. It has this cosmic, grand quality, which is interesting as counterpoint to a story that’s so intimate. I mean, the film takes place primarily within a span of three feet — [between Beatrice’s] face and the books. A suite called The Planets that’s about the vastness of outer space as it pertains to human life — it’s a really interesting combination that I think is reflective of the internal experience of being a researcher. Externally it seems so simple and so small but internally it’s this mission to Mars, almost.

Auen: The grandeur was the first thing that struck us as feeling like an interesting counterpoint to the other elements of the film. You really feel like you’re in some Gothic library at 3:00 AM. If we were going to go with any other music it would just be trying to aspire to what The Planets was doing for us.

Macaulay: Was the decision to end the film in Portugal driven by the research?

Walker: That was serendipitous. We shot our previous short film in Greece, where my wife’s parents live, and we were going to shoot [the ending of Chronovisor] there because we have a place to stay and it’s the cheapest place to shoot. But just fortuitously Anne-Laure told us she has a summer home in Portugal. And then we remembered there’s a very heavily featured figure in the Ernetti story: one of the 12 scientists he claims to have worked with on the device happened to be Portuguese. In a lot of texts he’s referred to as “the Portuguese scientist” or “the Portuguese physicist.” What are the odds [Anne Laure] would have a house that could fit so well into the story? We had to contrive a few aspects in order to take [the story], which is obviously not a documentary, where it goes to at the end, and the [Portugal setting] was this perfect little connection that allowed us to tie a bow on the mystery.

Auen: We knew early on that Beatrice was going to leave New York and her ivory tower and head into the real world, so it was just a matter of where. Filmmaking is always a combination of practical and narrative choices, and we were so lucky that [Portugal] ended up being the ideal place given all the research. When the opportunity to shoot there presented itself to us, we realized that’s where it should have been set all along.

Macaulay: She walks uphill past this incredible religious procession all going downhill — was that planned?

Walker: That was dumb luck.

Auen: It’s in Santa Maria, and it’s a local religious ritual where, every year, there’s a procession that goes from the church at the top of the town down to the water, and then the whole town moves the statue [of the Virgin Mary] and everyone gets on these ornately beautiful decorated boats. We had already bought our tickets [to Portugal], and Anne Laure mentioned to us that there was a religious ritual on one of those days. “All the shops will be closed and that might ruin your plans,” she said. We were like, “Maybe we can get lucky and find a way to incorporate it.” We went in without too much of a plan and scouted the path of the procession that morning, trying to find the best vantage point for the camera and where to place her. We had just one take.

Walker: We were trying to figure out how her story would work into this event, and as soon as we envisioned her walking upstream, that was the perfect metaphor. It was as simple as that.

Macaulay: In terms of references, I thought about Benjamin Labutut’s book, When We Cease to Understand the World, which also has the mingling of scientific research and the metaphysical.

Auen: We actually read it in preparation for the film. It was as we were going into shooting, just kind of last-minute cramming anything that could inspire us.

Walker: Anne Laure read it as well for the same reasons you thought of it. I was incredibly impressed with that book. It was fascinating, but I don’t know if we ended up pulling any direct ideas.

Macaulay: I thought of it because you talked earlier about the bits of fiction elements in Chronovisor. I think that book, which is comprised of a series of stories about pioneering scientists, starts off with about 5% fiction and by the end it’s almost entirely fiction.

Auen: That was part of the reason we picked it up. We were nervous, thinking, “Is this going to work, taking this real story and putting our own spin on it?” Novelizing what would otherwise be very straightforward science non-fiction. I thought, if this [book] works, then I feel pretty confident that our film will work. And what’s so interesting is that it’s even harder in that book to tell what is real and what isn’t, and that’s its beauty. What that book accomplishes and what we hoped to accomplish with our film is to combine documentary and fiction to be capture a truth larger than either could accomplish by itself.

“You should do an issue about inspiration,” Ted Hope said in the summer of 2003. “Ask filmmakers who’s inspiring them.” It was a good idea, I thought, so a couple of months later, the Fall, 2003 issue of Filmmaker was our “Who Inspires Us” issue. Sofia Coppola was on the cover with Lost in Translation, Andre Salas wrote about filmmakers shooting Bad Brains and the Cramps, and I interviewed Gus Van Sant about Elephant. But our biggest page count went to that section on inspirations, where 36 filmmakers responded to our (or, rather Ted’s) query as to who, or what, was inspiring them in their creative practice. Director Derek Cianfrance wrote about a Cirque du Soleil performer, the only one in his troupe who dropped two balls, a sign that he was trying to surpass his personal limits. Screenwriter Howard Rodman cited the artist Andreas Gursky and author Julio Cortazar, among others. Joe Berlinger named his kids and his fear of retirement. Screenwriter Naomi Foner picked “people who tell the truth, even when there are personal consequences.” The late editor Jim Lyons brought up Andy Warhol. The experimental filmmaker James Fotopolous provocatively listed Richard Nixon.

This issue has been a favorite of mine, so when I saw Ted’s Filmstack Inspiration challenge, I knew I had to participate. But looking back at that old issue, I realized something: we never really defined “inspired.” What qualities produce inspiration? What makes inspiration different than influence?

If, as Filmmaker’s editor, I had looked outside of my film bubble I might have come across the scientific work of T.M. Thrash and A.J. Elliot, who, in the same year, began a series of research papers with titles like “Inspiration as a psychological construct” and “Inspiration: core characteristics, component processes, antecedents and function.” In a 2014 article in Frontiers in Neuroscience, Thrash along with several colleagues continued this work, analyzing why “inspiration” had been so rarely studied in the scientific literature. Among the reasons are two that resonate: “ambiguity about whether inspiration is distinct from related constructs” and “preconceptions that inspiration is unimportant relative to ‘perspiration.’

The first of these reasons is undoubtedly referring to that related issue of “influence.” “Who are your influences?” is the most common filmmaker interview question, and answering it produces a kind of genealogy — references that look backwards in very specific, material ways. But I don’t think any of would say that we’re truly honoring inspiration by making work similar in some ways to another’s. The second reason is more interesting, and gets to the heart of the inspiration question. Do you need inspiration if you can just work hard? Keep going until you nail it? Again, I’d argue not — to get yourself out of your creative comfort zone, there needs to be some spark of ignition, whether registered consciously or not, that sends you down a new path. Nietzsche described the experience of inspiration like this: “One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form - I never had any choice.”

In 2017, on the magazine’s 25th anniversary year, I published in Filmmaker a series of pieces reflecting on articles past, and I revisited that “Who Inspires Us” piece, asking six filmmakers to review and update their choices. For most, their inspirations had moved on. Except for one person: Derek Cianfrance. Fourteen years later, his thoughts around the appeal of that Cirque du Soleil juggler had become clearer. He found in the failure of him fumbling those balls an enduring spark. He wrote:

I am reminded by the profound effect this moment had on my life and mission as a filmmaker. Failure has become my constant rallying cry for every project I’ve worked on and every collaborator I’ve worked with since — although I might warn from espousing the virtues of failure to any would-be financier. It seems that to get any project off the ground, you have to prove its success and virtues beforehand - you need proof. This result-based approach feels, ultimately, anti-creative to me. If you have proof of something, if you know what the outcome will be, then what is the point of doing something? To me, the thrill of life and work comes from the experiment. Some things succeed; some fail. And so for every moment in every movie, with every actor, composer, DP, etc., I lead like a scientist who doesn’t know the end result. And I continually push myself and my collaborators to be like that juggler from so many years ago. Embracing failure is the wind beneath my creative wings.

Thinking about who’s inspiring me at the moment, I’m reflecting more directly on filmmakers who I don’t think are failing but who are definitely making work that risks that failure — and for whom the perception of that risk is part of their work’s creative reward. These are also filmmakers, mostly younger ones, who are recalling for me a time when I myself worried less about falling flat on my face. Three come immediately to mind. The first is Yashaddai Owens, who made Jimmy, a feature-length bio-pic about James Baldwin in Paris on a five-figure budget, heading there with his Bolex, leaving little business cards in cafes with Kickstarter QR codes, shooting guerrilla on the streets, just trusting that somehow 2020s Paris could pass for 1948. The second is Debut, by Julian Castronovo, a devilishly original autofictional feature touching on many of my literary (Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Bernhard, Paul Auster) and art world (Ana Mendieta, Sophie Calle) loves, and on a production budget of just $900. And, finally, there’s Pete Ohs, who has been making what he calls “table of bubbles” movies. Once a year he gathers actors, works out a scenario, co-writes the script with them, shoots six days, takes a one-day break and figures out with them the second half of the movie, and then shoots again for six more days. He’s his own DP, editor and sound person, and he works with crews of just three or four people. He’s made five of these films so far, beginning with 2022’s Jethica, which had a production budget of less than $10,000. His latest, Erupcja, co-stars Charli XCX, a bit of star casting that occurred near spontaneously, after he met her in a bar. (Robin O’Hara and I produced a film almost 25 years ago that used somewhat similar methods, although the budget was $300,000, and the crew was about 11.)

After seeing Erupcza, as well as thinking about the work of Owens and Castronovo, I was inspired. These filmmakers have reminded me of what’s still possible.

The reason I say this is tied to something else I’ve been saying about my departure: “I’m looking forward to having a different relationship to time.” Meaning, relating to film and film culture without the constant need to track every release, festival slate, and news drop, and without the pressure of daily deadlines. I want to produce more while also seeing what new ideas and energies this rhythmic shift will generate.

But I like to write, and I like to be in dialogue with readers and other filmmakers. So, I’m breaking my vow before I even step down with this modest first post, which comes with a promise not to bombard your inbox going forward. (Posts here will be infrequent and purposeful — and if they’re not, show up at my door with as many of my friends as you can corral.)