'The Portrait' - Finding My Way Back

The Portrait marks my return to the kind of filmmaking I stepped away from eight years ago.

That film was The Guard, a psychological thriller completed in 2015 after years of writing and development. It was conceived as an attempt to immerse the audience in the recursive, destabilizing logic of obsessive and intrusive thought, and the process of making it proved nearly as demanding as the material itself. When it was finished, it did not travel as far as I had hoped, and I came away from the experience needing some distance.

Afterward, I found myself wanting to return to something simpler.

So I went back to my roots.

My childhood friend and I returned to the first film I ever made, a ridiculous comedy we had created together years earlier, and spent nearly two years making a sequel - because, why not? No one would see it. Let’s throw everything out the window.

I also returned to doing nearly everything myself: writing, directing, shooting, editing, lighting, producing, recording sound, and acting.

And it was enormously fun.

It reminded me that a film does not always need to justify its existence through ambition or outcome. Sometimes the making of it is reason enough. I had started to forget that.

Which brings me to The Portrait.

I have been quietly writing this film for years, and in many ways it feels like a meeting point between those two sides of my work.

The Portrait is a dark comedy set in 1850s New England, rooted in the peculiar Victorian practice of post-mortem photography. It has some of the absurdity and physical comedy of my earlier films, but underneath it is something much more personal.

It is a film about grief.

Over the past few years, grief has become considerably less abstract to me. I have become interested in its contradictions: the way love can coexist with resentment, tenderness with anger, sorrow with moments of absurd and unexpected humor. The deepest moments of grief rarely arrive as one emotion, but as all of them at once.

That collision of emotions is where The Portrait lives.

We begin filming in less than four weeks with an extraordinary cast and crew, which also represents a major change in the way I work. I have spent most of my filmmaking life as a one-man band, partly by choice and largely by necessity.

This time, I am surrounding myself with people who are exceptionally good at what they do and allowing myself to concentrate primarily on writing and directing.

I am not entirely sure what I am supposed to do without a camera in my hands.

Our cinematographer, Mike Magilnick, has suggested bringing me a toy one to hold on set.

More soon.