“I remember thinking I was brilliant,” says Vita – a young filmmaker and the protagonist of Zia Anger’s My First Film – as she watches her drunk cast and crew shoot what feels like a magical movie moment on the set of, you guessed it, her first film. Vita’s first movie follows a young woman who is taking care of her ailing father, gets pregnant, and decides to escape her hometown in search of her mother who abandoned her at birth. “It’s a true story,” she keeps repeating throughout the firm – except she has two moms, she’s had two abortions, and her dad survived. Anger’s movie is semi-biographical too – through Vita, she revisits her first attempt at a feature film. Moments after Vita recalls feeling brilliant, the production spirals into chaos which leads to a near-death accident that makes her whole crew quit.
Those moments, when I thought I was brilliant – I’ve had them too. I vividly remember the one that happened a little over a year ago when after struggling to get traction for a project I was working on, I finally cracked it, and it started moving along so quickly that I could barely manage it anymore. I was twenty six, I made a lot of money – or at least, the money that let me travel between LA, Europe, and New York non-stop as I tried to rediscover who I was after a very tough year that made me feel like I’d lost myself. I was staying in a nice one-bedroom apartment in Soho, I smiled a lot more and I was a lot less anxious than the year before then, and in that particular moment, I thought I'd made it. It felt euphoric. A few weeks later, the project I was working on spiraled into chaos and soon after, I no longer had the job.
There are two times throughout Anger’s movie when Vita wonders why terrible things happen to her – once when she comes in for an abortion, and once when her feature gets rejected from every single festival she applied to. “It happens to a lot of people, it's just that nobody talks about it,” she hears back from nurses and friends. I think that’s why she made the movie, and that’s why it piqued my interest in the first place. Movies about movies are usually a bit of a circle jerk. They follow a young free spirit that makes it high in oh-so-crazy Hollywood against all odds until eventually, something terrible happens and they fall to the very bottom. The main plot twist is that I walk away from those movies thinking that ultimately, it was all worth it – buzzing with the desire to create and feel the euphoria even if it comes with the risk of throwing my life away. This time around, I am not sure what’s different – Anger’s movie or myself.
It sounds dumb in retrospect, but one of the biggest and most helpful realizations I’ve had this past year is that people lie, and lie a lot – especially creatives. Master image makers, they cherry pick the parts that fit the narrative they write in their IG bios and tell people: the creative director titles, the buzzy clients, and the beautiful trips to Europe stay while the boring unglamorous day jobs that actually pay the bills, the hundreds of times their pitches got passed on, and the dark circles caused by the lack of sleep due to the constant anxiety about the future, get left out of the story. And yet, the most interesting part of it all is that it works – as long as you radiate the right amount of confidence and possess the bare minimum skills to justify it, people want to believe you, work with you, and tell you “you are brilliant” even though you might not feel the same way. Accepting this makes you feel like a kid who used to be consumed by every failure and who used to be eager to say everything on their mind out loud, turning into an adult who know how to present and protect themselves.
“I thought that writing it out and filming it and casting an actress to play me was going to make it all feel better, but I never thought about it ending,” Vita says in one of the final reflections about her first film. I don’t know if anyone does. And at the risk of sounding annoying and pretentious, I’d like to speculate that even if the festival submissions turned out in Vita’s (and Anger’s) favor, it wouldn’t have made her feel that much better in the end. In a victory lap piece in the LA Times, a different filmmaker, Sean Baker, reflects on winning The Best Feature Film at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year: “I was basking in it, just being like, ‘This is it, I don’t have to worry anymore. Everything else is gravy from now on.’ But I remember being on the flight [home] and I turned on my Wi-Fi, and all of a sudden, Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Many of [well-wishing texts] were congratulating me, but most of the texts had to do with ‘Get ready for the Oscars’ or ‘Campaign, here we go’ or ‘You’re not going to be sleeping for the next six months.’ I almost had a panic attack on that flight, because it was honestly the last thing I ever thought about with this film.”
I am not a filmmaker (at least, not yet) and I’ve never been to Cannes, but that feeling of wanting to simultaneously scream and throw up every time something really good happens for me and my career has been way too present in my life lately. Obviously, it’s frustrating when despite your best efforts, nothing is happening. But having had a few of those “I thought I was brilliant” moments right before losing it all, my body gets tense when things finally start moving in a favorable direction because I am terrified of not being able to make the most out of it all. I imagine it’s like driving on an icy road (although I am yet to get my license) – you see the light at the end and you are moving, and you just hope you won’t swerve the wrong way. The light is what keeps you going as long as you don’t let your thoughts wander far enough to realize that one bad moment is all it takes to turn this light into the cause of something terrible.
I’ll leave you with my favorite scene from My First Film. Having lost her crew, Vita finished the movie with just the lead actress, her dad, and one of her friends when her dad points out that the lead’s pregnant belly looks too much like a pillow. She freaks out because “her whole life is riding on this movie” and up until that moment, no one thought to tell her that the belly didn’t look real. Her dad stops her from spiraling: “Reality has never, will never be safe. Not for me, not for you. Reality is not art.” “And I remember this so well,” Vita proceeds to narrate. “It’s just for a moment I stopped caring ‘cause it was so beautiful just to be making something with people. And I wish I had stayed right here.”
I have a theory that it takes no less than three years of constant ups and downs to turn something you care a lot about into something good after the moment you’ve decided to commit to it. I’ve got one under my belt, and I just hope I have two more years of putting my head down and working without thinking too much about what I am doing and where it’s all going, in me. Today is my birthday, and a little over a year ago, after that one big project I worked on blew up in my face, I wrote in my journal: “In this moment, life is very interesting.” My therapist used to frame all the tough, weird, and scary moments I talked to her about as “interesting” before I got a chance to blurt out anything negative, so I guess I took it from her. It was tempting to fast forward to the moment in time where I knew what the hell I should do then, and it’s now tempting to fast forward to two years from today – when whatever is starting to take shape here, works out, and I don’t have to worry about everything so much anymore. But I think I am finally starting to accept that life doesn’t work that way, and the only way to actually get there is to stop thinking about the numbers, the money, and even the kind words, and focus on the joy of being able to connect with passionate, talented people and make something together.