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Film
March 2008 
Access: Public
It is nearly Christmas now, and I am flying back from Zurich after screening FLYING and teaching at the University of Zurich for the first time. The screening was lovely, and the Swiss approached the film in a way that was different, yet similar, than in other countries and other screenings. I felt people were dubious at first – why would I want to put myself in a film? Did I think I was so important? And then the same people confessed afterwards that they planned to only watch 2 hours, but that they remained in the theater all day because they were so engrossed. At the end men and women came up to me and thanked me for the film. One man said, ‘you have described my life with my wife, she always wants me to talk by I don’t know how to. I feel like I got an insight in to her world that I didn’t understand before.’ Another man said: ‘You talk about yourself, but we think about ourselves….’ I was really moved.
Now I am on a flight back to New York. Beside me, on the plane, sits my boyfriend of several years. He has upgraded us to business class at the last minute before getting on the plane – and I am enjoying an unexpected moment of luxury. What strikes me most right now is how hard it is for me to surrender to his love and affection. To be really honest, it terrifies me. I find myself constantly looking for flaws in him – even after many years. And my terror is a constant test of our relationship. I see ‘control’ everywhere; I see failure ‘everywhere’. Each fight leaves me wondering if part of the reason for my fighting is to see if he is still left standing at the end of the tornado: Does he still want to love me? Does he really love me? So far, he has weathered every storm.I was having another fight with my boyfriend – only now I was in a hotel room in Finland. The locations changed, but the subject always remained the same.
I was here to do press for the TV launch of FLYING on Finnish television, YLE, beginning Thursday, November 1, and Swedish Television, SVT, beginning Sunday, October 28. Both countries were going to air the film in a weekly one hour evening slot, like a real series. I was thrilled. They had asked me to come to help with the press and also to do master classes in both countries about the film. In Finland I would do a seminar for the DOCPOINT with my editor Niels Pagh Anderson who was in Finland to edit a new film by John Walker (and also because his girlfriend is Finnish), and in Sweden I would screen the film at a festival called MDOX and run a master class there.
The film was having a fantastic reception. It seemed like there was a kind of love fest with the journalist here. I have never seen reporters ‘get’ FLYING like those in Scandinavia. I had already been to Denmark to launch the film on DR-2 there, and the reception and ratings had also been phenomenal. Somehow this film was just made for the region. But now, underlying all the excitement was the conflict with my boyfriend.
I was fine till I got back to my hotel room at night and then found myself unable to sleep – with the excuse of jet lag – except I had never seen jet lag like this before! I was averaging two hours a night and going down hill quickly. We had both reached a breaking point. We were having the same fight we had since early in our relationship – and I think we were reaching that point where — we just couldn’t do it anymore.
Our fight was about a seemingly simple topic: talking. I wanted to talk more; he wanted to talk less. I needed to talk about feelings, worries, and dramas in my family life or with friends. He found these things uncomfortable or even tiresome, tried to solve them quickly, and move on. I never wanted things solved; I wanted them explored; and if left to my own devises, I could explore them for hours. He felt I never got to “the point” and was impatient for me to hurry up in my story-telling; I wanted to tell him all the odd details that occurred so he would be able to get a true picture. Synopsizing was against my religion.
I have tried to adapt over the years: I have learned to sensor most of my inner life from my partner. I have stopped sharing many of my thoughts, feelings, and even creative ideas with him. I have learned to talk about the weather, what I did that day, what I ate, and what is in the newspaper. We call each other up each day and ‘report’. I have learned to avoid the frustration of asking him for some deeper conversation – and getting the response that he doesn’t have anything deep to share and – why am I always criticizing him. I feel I have changed and to be fair, he feels he has changed too. But since this is my rant, I get to tell my side of the story.
You see, no matter how hard he thinks he is trying, I end up feeling like I am living in silence. So once in a while I try to share something that is bugging me — because I have to let it out. I am a bit like a pressure cooker with feelings – eventually I’ve got to blow.
For example, I’d just had a big revelation that day when talking to one of my girlfriends, Paula, about my fears about having children that stretches back to when I was a child. As we chatted, I had suddenly realized that I was afraid to be happy. To me having children looked like the most hopeful thing in the world. What if you loved them and something bad happened? What if they got hurt or died? And then it hit me: I had been shocked when my middle brother, who I adored, was hospitalized twice before he was a year and a half old. I remember my mother rushing out of the house with him naked in her arms, screaming in fear. The second time, they threw him in the bath to bring his temperature down and then the police came to whisk her and him away. I stood at the window as the police car pulled away with its siren blaring, thinking I might never see him again. And indeed he had to have a huge operation and almost died.
Now as strange as this might sound, it suddenly came to me that I probably was traumatized by this event and my own fear and the fear of my mother. So honestly when I look at families today – I think, wow you guys are really courageous to take those risks. People think I am courageous to make films, but that is nothing compared with having children!
I was all excited to tell my boyfriend all this; it seemed like a big revelation that if I could get my head around, might actually help me to move forward with the adoption we’d been thinking about for so long. So I ran to the phone to call him, believing also that it would help him understand me better, which would lead to a better relationship. He answered the phone and I laid out my brilliant insight and traced the whole problem back to my childhood. I cried on the phone and felt really exposed. This was what relationship was about, I thought exultantly.
But on the line, his voice was irritated with that tone – oh no, here we go again with the deep stuff. He asked many tense questions and then changed the subject. “Well,” he said, “I don’t think you are willing to change your life enough to have children anyway.” And inside of me, I sunk. I was not talking about the practical side of child rearing but the inner ghosts preventing me from even beginning the process. I began to think maybe I hadn’t explained it right? Maybe he didn’t understand what I had told him? But he claimed he did. I tried to stay calm and not jump on him, tried to understand where he was coming from, tried to get a reaction to the story I had told him – you know connection, commiseration, compassion — but he didn’t have anything to say. Nothing.
I got off the phone feeling lost. It took me till the next day to react – after a long flight to Finland – I realized I was really angry. So once I arrived in the hotel and did my first two interviews, I called him on the phone and told him I was really upset. Of course, we got into the same spiral. He cannot talk more; I don’t accept him the way he is, I am always criticizing him. To me, asking to have a conversation about feelings isn’t criticism but expressing a need, a need that I can’t live without. And therein lies the difference between him and me. He can live with out talking and I can’t.
And of course, you are thinking: for a woman who just made a film about gender differences, this person is pretty stupid! Doesn’t she know by now that men and women are different? Of course I do know, but it is still hard for me to accept…
Before I tell this tale, there are three essential things you must know about me: 1) My entire family is involved in the boxing business and my mother runs a successful boxing promotion company; 2) I studied Russian in college and I lived and studied in St. Petersburg for a year; 3) I am prone to tangents and asides, so bear with me. I promise it will all come together.
I ended up in Moscow for a boxing match my mother’s company was co-promoting. Since I speak Russian, Mom thought it would be useful to bring me along and help the company navigate the cold post-soviet streets. Unfortunately, I could only be there for a couple days. My mother and her crew were there longer than I and they needed someone to help them around town. Enter: my ex-boyfriend. I’ll call him Michael. He was a fellow Slavophile. He had been in Moscow for a couple months and he was the only person I knew who was living there at the time. I put him and my mother in contact with each other then stayed out of it.
I am standing in the theater screening FLYING at the Vancouver Film Festival. The audience is full and we have done our introductions. I have walked up the aisle to the back and the lights are down; now it is only a matter of listening to check sound before I can escape to the anonymity outside. I hate this moment when I have to make sure everything is right. I can feel the pressure in my body rising and I recognize the flutter of something else: it is cool, tight, high pitched. Fear - I name the devil in my own mind. And there is a kind of embarrassment inside of me; after all these years I can still feel fear before showing my film to a new audience.
In the lobby, Pon Chu and I agree to meet back 15 minutes before the question and answer session in three hours, then we will have dinner together and get to know each other better. She has to go back to her office.
And I am suddenly liberated, walking down the street. It is misty but not raining. I am thinking about the fear and the relief and how lovely it is not to have anything pressing on me for two hours. There is so much about my job as a filmmaker that requires me to be sure of what I think, even if others don’t agree. To fight for some unseen vision that I want against the masses of those who don’t ‘get it’. It also requires me to be a perfectionist; because to me a film can be ruined if I’m not being vigilant enough. Especially in the last few days of completion, when all I want to do is stop fighting and rest.
