The morning after…
When you come home after an insane shoot like our roadtrip and finally get a few hours of sleep and start to think like a semi-normal person again and then sit down to deal with the post-production process and are confronted with 236 hours of material (yes, no kidding, that’s actually what we have) … then you finally realize just what you have gotten yourself into. Phil said on the trip that he came to realize “just how lunatic a lunatic Neal Cassady was”. Well, we came to realize just how lunatic we lunatics must have been to think that we could handle this.
Don’t you worry: This is not the post where I tell you that what happens next is that we give up. Actually: quite the opposite. What happens next is that we realize that we are absolutely insane enough to pull this through til the end. The reason that we shot all this material is that we really did meet that many amazing people, that we really did see that many unbelievable sights, that we really did drive that many miles, that we really did it. So the question is not whether there is a story here, because there so definitely is. The question is whether we will be able to pick and choose and compile and combine and connect and layer and mix the material to tell and sing and show and illustrate and transport this story to you, our audience.
So what do we do? Well we start by watching the material. All of it. Every single second of wobbly camera-adjusting, of driving past the picture car instead of alongside it, of the protagonists sleeping in the car or chewing gum and looking bored… Someone has to sit down and watch it all, because you never know when the shot will look awesome despite the camera still being adjusted, you never know when the sun will come out and reflect on the hood of the car with unbelievable beauty as we slide by, when Anna will pull her gum out of her mouth and stick it into Phil’s (true story!). These are the moments that weren’t planned. But they are also the moments that will tell the real story of a group of mad-men driving across the country. And the mad ones are the real ones. As Jack wrote:
“They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn…”
And so we burn to present you very very soon with a film. A true documentary film, that documents what happened, what we saw, what we experienced, what we loved, what we lived.
Stay tuned…
