USED: the 20 dollar bill story
As I look back
to my early days of film-making, sometime in my reminiscing I say, “What was wrong with me?”. For me about a year ago this happened while I was watching the original release of USED. I have a big issue with trying too hard to make the moral of a story be obvious. I love morals and messages in film and sometimes in my love of powerful messages I tend to forget that the power of a messages comes from the process of discovery. Sometimes I force-feed the moral down my audiences throat and well this takes away any chance the viewers ever had for the process of discovery, aka the power of the message. Luckily I have amazing writers on our team now that don’t suffer from this message-itus stuff, and luckily, over the past few years together we have beaten out most of that bad habit of mine.
In further inspection
the issue boiled down to a lack of surety in my audience and too much belief in the message I wanted to tell. Story telling, as I realize now, is flipped: having great belief in my audience and holding back surety in the message I am trying to tell.
And that brings us to today.
I am not a big fan of directors going back into their classic movies and changing “who shot first” or adding on endings that define the moral way more than was ever needed. Yet as our team and I looked back at USED we felt this message had so much more to offer. We hope we accomplished the task of releasing that power, but we will leave the final say up to you.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE ORIGINAL 2013 VERSION OF USED
