This is the end.

Or is THIS the end? How about now? Ugh. I feel terrible.

Amelia Sutherland as Claire in my short comedy Miss Responsibility

My fingers were poised over the keyboard, but I just couldn’t bring myself to type the Slack notification. I was still trying to think of some way to make everything work. If I sent the message, there was no turning back, and I would have to postpone everything… again, and I would have to wait another year before I could get another opportunity. I was frustrated and disappointed. But I also didn’t want to be responsible should my cast and crew get sick.

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It was early 2021 and, you guessed it, COVID was still very much top-of-mind. I had written and directed a short film in the summer of 2019 called Hangry and it went on to screen in almost two dozen festivals. But a majority of those festivals were in 2020 and were forced to pivot to virtual events, meaning I missed out on all the things I love about film festivals - the filmmaker workshops, the networking, the Q&A’s, and the excitement of seeing films with an audience.

Confident that things would return to normal if I could just make it to the end of 2020, I wrote a new script based on an idea I had been kicking around for a few months. My goal was to shoot in early 2021 and have it ready for a local film competition by the summer. But then there was an uptick in cases about the time we wanted to move into production and my crew and I were split over what we should do. We weighed the options, but ultimately I decided it would probably be best to postpone and try again in 2022.

That’s what brought me to my laptop, the open Slack window, a blinking cursor, and the message I didn’t want to type.

Because I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to make my film now. After a few moments of hesitancy, however, I finally did manage to send out that message and the production shut down.

The End.

Oh wait, there’s more!

Sure, that production ended, but why not shift and make something different?

• Shoot outdoors in a wide open space, rather than inside a small, two-bedroom house. This would give everyone the chance to spread out more.

• Utilize a skeletal crew so that less people would be on set.

• Use only one main actor so that fewer people would have to be on camera together.

I called up the main actor who was originally slated to be in the short film I had to postpone and told her the plan.

She was on board.

But we had to work fast. We were already into February and the aforementioned local film competition had a hard June deadline. Since a cash prize was awarded to the winner, I didn’t want to miss out.

“Do you have any story ideas?” I texted feverishly.

She started pitching me a premise she had been thinking about; the story of a woman who was an extremely wealthy socialite, used to having everything she always wanted, who suddenly had to prove she could do without. We went with it.

I worked up some story beats and an outline and sent those to her. She added in her ideas and revisions and sent those back to me. I wrote a draft of the script. She sent notes back to me for revisions. Through our collaboration we had a script ready by mid-February. We knew we only needed two days for the shoot so we planned on a late march-early April window, leaving me with about eight weeks of post-production. We would make the competition deadline without any problems.

But then I decided to take my family out for food truck tacos the night before the shoot.

My son woke us up before dawn, incredibly sick. We jumped out of bed to help him. Then, within an hour, I was feeling the unmistakable symptoms of…

food poisoning.

What was I going to do?

My cast and crew were going tp be up very soon, getting ready for the shoot, then making their way to the location. I texted my main actor to tell her what was going on. Incredibly naive in the moment, I was thinking that all I needed to do was push the call time by an hour and that by doing so I could overcome my illness and courageously make it to set.

How very wrong I was.

Again I was faced with another setback. I had to call my DP who was already loading gear.

“You need to make a call,” he told me. “My crew is about to leave and I need to tell them something.”

My stomach (along with my 103-degree fever) made the decision easy.

I punted.

But this time the decision to postpone came at a greater cost - the loss of my main actor; the one who had helped me pivot by pitching me her story; the one who had been with me since the earlier postponement of a completely different film.

The reason? She was pregnant and like a talented football quarterback trying to thread the needle by rocketing a pass between multiple defenders, we were trying to shoot before she started showing. And we missed our window.

So, this has to be the end, right? Just take the “L” and move on to something else?

Not quite. I had a conversation with my main actor about what our next steps should be and she graciously bowed out of the project and gave me permission to recast and move forward with the film.¹

And so I did. I was determined to get something made in the year of our Lord 2021 and I didn’t want COVID, nor food poisoning, nor pregnancy to derail my plans. It just took a tremendous amount of patience.

I was thinking about writing this story after reading this post on X. I wanted to share my experience in dealing with the frustrations that comes with creative roadblocks. Some roadblocks are the result of extremely bad luck; others are the result of people - the decision-makers and purse string-holders of the world.

But whatever the reason, you have to ask yourself if you have the persistence to see it through. I’m just an indie writer/director who specializes in short films and (as you’ve read) I’ve been faced with a lot of challenges in getting my projects over the finish line. Now imagine you’re staring at a blank Final Draft page with the goal of writing and directing an indie feature. Think of the patience it will take to see it through.

You can read a fantastic article from the guys over at Obsolete Media about their experiences in making a feature if you want a better understanding of what the indie filmmaker is faced with:

The Hardest Part of Making a Feature Film

So remember, despite the obstacles, the frustrations, the starts and stops, all of it, keep this one thing in mind…

This is not the end.

1. I want to write more in next week’s newsletter about the film I finally made in 2021 and how I approached the shoot with a slightly different mindset.