The Virgin Queen: In 1998 Shekhar Kapur directed Elizabeth, one of my favorite historically oriented films. It is not accurate historically, but rather is accurate in how it captures human endeavor; it is a political/romantic drama loosely based upon the early life and struggles of one of the greatest Monarchs in history. Cate Blanchett plays an attractive, desirous, intense, educated Elizabeth who grows into her role as an effective power broker in a political world dominated by men and in a period of uncertainty for England. IMDB, Roger Ebert, and Rotten Tomatoes all give it solid, but not astounding, ratings. Nonetheless, it is one of my favorites. I have a lot of favorites. Movies are such amazing vehicles for telling stories...Laterna Magica: Movies are magic. They are magical. They can bring the stories we tell ourselves that craft of image of what we believe right before our own eyes. These stories we tell and watch are ours for our collective inspection, and although the film and sound are the same each time shown, the reception and perception of those stories is as varied as the viewers who watch them. Anything we think can become reality, and those various realities can be shown to us through all sorts of the stories we tell, including film. Walsingham, in Elizabeth, says "All men need something greater than themselves to look up to and worship. They must be able to touch the divine here on earth." We are compelled to find meaning and expression for our beliefs. We hold in our hearts and mind beliefs about the world and the divine, and we construct stories for them that are meaningful, fanciful, mundane, irreverent, whimsical, and so much more. But deep within our stories lie our core beliefs, and in those core spaces might lie the capital "T" truth and the divine that we seek to touch here on earth...
Panic, Chaos, The Source, Waiting to be hit by the universe... Touching the Divine: So today's "meditation" is borrowed from one of these storytellers, the director of Elizabeth, Kapur. These comments about how he approaches his story telling are from his TED talk "We are the stories we tell ourselves." The comments that follow are just a taste of his presentation. If you like what you read you should take the 15 minutes to watch his whole talk. He says:
When I go out to direct a film, every day we prepare too much, we think too much. Knowledge becomes a weight upon wisdom. You know, simple words lost in the quicksand of experience. So I come up, and I say, "What am I going to do today?" I'm not going to do what I planned to do, and I put myself into absolute panic. It's my one way of getting rid of my mind, getting rid of this mind that says, "Hey, you know what you're doing. You know exactly what you're doing. You're a director, you've done it for years." So I've got to get there and be in complete panic. It's a symbolic gesture. I tear up the script, I go and I panic myself, I get scared. I'm doing it right now; you can watch me. I'm getting nervous, I don't know what to say, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't want to go there. And as I go there, of course, my A.D. says, "You know what you're going to do, sir." I say, "Of course I do." And the studio executives, they would say, "Hey, look at Shekhar. He's so prepared." And inside I've just been listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan because he's chaotic. I'm allowing myself to go into chaos because out of chaos, I'm hoping some moments of truth will come. All preparation is preparation. I don't even know if it's honest. I don't even know if it's truthful. The truth of it all comes on the moment, organically, and if you get five great moments of great, organic stuff in your storytelling, in your film, your film, audiences will get it. So I'm looking for those moments, and I'm standing there and saying, "I don't know what to say." So, ultimately, everybody's looking at you, 200 people at seven in the morning who got there at quarter to seven, and you arrived at seven, and everybody's saying, "Hey. What's the first thing? What's going to happen?" And you put yourself into a state of panic where you don't know, and so you don't know. And so, because you don't know, you're praying to the universe because you're praying to the universe that something -- I'm going to try and access the universe the way Einstein -- say a prayer -- accessed his equations, the same source. I'm looking for the same source because creativity comes from absolutely the same source that you meditate somewhere outside yourself, outside the universe. You're looking for something that comes and hits you. Until that hits you, you're not going to do the first shot.
