Director’s Statement
Welcome to an age where the “image” is king.
These images don’t simply appear. They are captured, created and authored by millions of people across the globe. Out of these millions, a hundred thousand come to the conclusion that they are the brightest and most eloquent speakers of this new language.
After this realization, they all go to film school or some other visual arts school. I know what I am talking about. I went to a visual arts school and enrolled in the film program. I rubbed shoulders with, listened to, and watched the work of many who believed they were members of an elite class. I, of course, was no different. Every one of us shared the same idea that we alone were the most unique and brilliant image maker.
As members of this visual autocratic ruling class, we were more than simply cool, rad, or hip. We ruled. We watched cool French films, made by directors who wore sun shades. We talked about camera movements and made fun of established Hollywood cinema. We were all members of something special, but in the same breath we hated each other, because each one of us thought that the other might get a chance to make films for a living. It was a chance that we all wanted for ourselves and only ourselves.
After spending four years in this environment, I began to loathe myself and my own pretensions. I still loved the image, but I had grown tired of the image maker. I wrote THE DIRECTED BY to point a finger at myself and say “Hey, look here. You aren’t king of anything.”
Like Wylie Gladstone, the main character of the film, I thought that my work was “perfect”, but in reality I was adding nothing unique to the already constant flow of images. I was one filmmaker in a million and entertained the same delusions as everyone else. Like Wylie’s work, my work was only laughable because I thought it was something serious.
THE DIRECTED BY isn’t about an image maker who is good at what he does. It’s about an image maker who thinks he is king of the court, but in reality he is only the jester.
Welcome to the age of “I created that and now you can see it everywhere.”
Welcome to the age where everyone is an image maker.
Welcome to the age of THE DIRECTED BY.
Originally Brice wanted to make a film about two homeless men who find a lottery ticket, but he soon realized that he didn’t have enough money. Thinking of a filmic reality that could be created with spare change, he opted to make a film that required almost no budget for set design and was inhabited by characters that he met on a daily basis. He came up with a script entitled the THE DIRECTED BY: DIRECTED BY WYLIE GLADSTONE, but he again realized that, although the script was inspired, it was still too expensive to film because it required four locations and more than two shooting days. He started over and wrote the simpler story, THE DIRECTED BY, which was met with immediate disinterest from the student body because he only had enough money to shoot it on a borrowed DV camera and he was, after all, going to a “FILM” school where only quality projects were shot on film, or at the very least, HD. So, scraping together a crew with no experience at all, other than the sound mixer (who stuck around the whole time) and the DP (who quit after an hour of shooting), he managed to make a film about a delusional director named Wylie Gladstone. Of course, Brice was more or less making a film about himself.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1500200/
poster drawing and design by Brice
Brice Habeger spends his time filmmaking, writing, and snowboarding in Alaska.
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