ARTISTIC STATEMENT
I think Palate Absentia was the first film I made that I didn't immediately want to disown.
That isn't to say I haven't soured on it since, but at the time, I considered finishing this film the most important thing I would ever accomplish. It was my first film with producers, with a crew, with an actual camera and not just an iPhone on a ten-dollar tripod.
To my crew's credit, Palate Absentia looks and sounds fantastic even today. My actors were good, the props were beautiful, and the actual production went off, more or less, without a hitch. So what went wrong?
To put it simply, I wrote a script with no characters. There were people in it, sure, but the people were more or less just mouthpieces for this giant subtextual framework I had spent my time on instead. I couldn't tell you anything specific about it today, but just know I was very pleased with myself at the time for coming up with it. There were no feelings, no character traits, no arcs. Just a vaguely postmodern thesis that I had spread as thin as I possibly could. And I looked at this thesis alone and made a movie about it.
After around ten months from conception to the final cut, it came time to send the film to festivals. In a twist of fate that nobody could have predicted, most festivals were uninterested in a movie with no feelings, character traits, or arcs. I attended one of the few festivals that selected me, still hanging onto the notion that I had made something that couldn't possibly be improved upon. Even before the first film there had ended, I found myself totally humbled. People want to see themselves onscreen. They want characters. They want ideas, too, but delivered a lot more subtly than what I was capable of at the time. Ah well, onto the next :)
-S
