Inspiration

Over the year as a whole, but especially these past couple of weeks, we've been bombarded with what I think is supposed to inspire us, to make us want to be better filmmakers. Martin Scorcesse is talking about how his generation would just go out onto the street and make films (the whole world may be a sound stage, but you can definitely tell when the sound has been recorded away from one) and the stalwarts of British political drama are bemoaning the standard of modern television, where real people are never shown.

I'm glad the course covers this kind of thing, it's as close as you can get to teaching art and if it produces thirteen people who make a better kind of film then fantastic.

It's also good that we're taught something about the moral responsibility of programme-makers; I'm not a believer in the everything-must-be-suitable-for-children's-consumption doctrine, and I do think that people have a responsibility to take care of themselves, but there is a line to be drawn. The film we were shown yesterday made me hate reality tv with even more of a vengeance, and it opened all kinds of questions - put bluntly, some people shouldn't be trusted to say anything. The internet has allowed anyone and everyone to have their voices heard and what results is page upon page of drivel, much of it untrue.

Putting together the two strands, it seems that what you get is reality tv being the only respresentation of "real" people, while drama descends into more and more fantasy. I loved Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes but it ended up being a bizarre representation of some belief system I've never heard of, casting Gene Hunt in the role of Charon. Where is the BBC's The Wire? There needs to be reality outside of reality television, and I'm painfully aware that I'm writing this when my script submission deals with the question of dieting through the medium of sci-fi.

So, I have been inspired - to write and contribute to things which do have something to say. And, by the filmmakers of the 70s - to just go out and do it. They produced a lot of indulgent nonsense movies, but they also produced some of my favourite American films. I suspect that what they can't see is that the current democratisation of filmmaking, where anyone with a mobile phone can make a movie, will have a similar effect. There will be (and is) plenty of people falling down stairs, of pretentious hat wearers plonking together "meaningful" and "symbolic" images which you're just too sober to understand, but then one day someone will make All the President's Men, and it'll all be worth it.