Have you ever had a problem?

The problem with being a writer is that you have to write.

As it has turned out, that is also one of the key problems with being a filmmaker. We just haven’t found a way of getting completely past that point of writing page after page about a possible film production in order to achieve some sort of funding or distribution. In order to explain commissioning editors and others what the hell we are trying to do. And we all more or less accept that that is how it’s supposed to be, even though only a minority of us really believes that a written text can say anything profoundly intelligent about a film or a television show which in itself will be progressing through pictures, a sense of time and space and sounds (which of course, granted, also can be actual words).

Personally, when I started writing for its own sake more frequently a few years back, it was almost a revelation. After having written dozens of synopsises, outlines, treatments and scripts, I found it so rewarding that the words on my laptop screen was meant to end up as just that: words. Even though it would be rewritten and erased (and cried on after printing), I knew that I was fumbling with the actual outcome. In the end, these words were meant to be a text. Not a film, not a TV documentary, not an interactive IT-program, but sentences and paragraphs… (not quite daring to say literature).

It was almost like getting into the editing room on the first day of a documentary: You have all the elements, and now you have to order it in a specific way. You are dealing with the actual elementary particles, because you are now finally handling the video/audio material – as if you were writing a book.

“Writing a film” is a completely different matter in my mind. And I tend to shy away from it these days.

PS. Oh, if you enjoy looking at the Danish language, I have a travel article from Mexico on this site, Peblish. It’s not prize winning material, but… you know… a writer has to write. And now I have to pee.