It’s a go!

It’s hard for me to believe, but it actually looks as if Esther’s film based on *Noise* is actually going to be made. She’s just been awarded a grant from the Fraunhofer Institute for use of their cutting-edge studio and postproduction facilities in Erfurt, is off with a crew of six to London at the end of the month to begin casting, and most exciting of all, has found an innovative production company – Rohfilm in Berlin.

Minghella always has wonderful things to say about making films, and by extension, about making any art:

I never set much store by the result of the film. I remember beginning to screen Cold Mountain and being very tormented, not because I was invested in the reaction, but because I so hated the fact that the process – which had been almost completely joyful – was reduced to a reaction about some element or not. The film becomes a document, and the document is always less interesting than the process of creating it. The reduction of your effort into something which lasts the period of a couple of hours, even if an audience still finds that too long, is such a tiny sliver of an iceberg of endeavour. It’s five years of good work, and nothing that happens to the finished document will ever reflect that life experience. If it’s a huge hit or a huge failure, neither will educate me about the doing of it or modify the doing of it.

Previews are quite a bruising procedure, I think, if you care as much as most film-makers do. You don’t care who loves you when you’re making a movie, and you so much want to be loved when you’ve made it. I think it’s really as simple as that. You have enormous courage in the process, and no courage whatsoever with the result.

Sadly, the process of showing your hand to the audience and digesting their reaction doesn’t really change anything. If only we could learn from our mistakes, how clever we would all be. We don’t really. You just make a fresh set with each movie.

And all of you out there will eventually be able to watch the trailer online, which was my only stipulation for use of the story.

(I wonder if I have to buy a new pair of jeans for Cannes.)