Asking and Not Asking

Questions, Responsibility and Nabokov

I recently accepted a ride down to NYC from Saratoga Springs, from someone I don’t know very well. Readers, this is not usually me. I am VERY happy travelling solo. Space to travel and daydream are almost sacred to me.

But I desperately wanted to get to the city, and the train wasn’t until late that night. So I accepted.

This other artist and I had been at Yaddo together (an artist’s retreat which has a ludicrous list of alumni which includes Annie freaking Baker). But we hadn’t had the chance to speak that much. Conversations at these kinds of residencies can be pretty… shall we say eclectic? I thought it would be readings of great writers, midnight walks and emotional revelations. There’s way too much surface-level small talk, or performative niceties. Not enough spark and wit and acidity. Some of that might be that artists and writers constantly feel like they must present themselves to the world.

Which I’m just not that interested in doing in this context. (Is this a reaction to the current dominant model in filmmaking? That you should be pitching your idea in snappy 2-liners with everyone you meet? A generation of filmmakers told by agents and screenwriting books that this pitch has to be rehearsed and polished has led to a load of filmmakers who don’t know how to have conversations or show fragility).

At Yaddo my favourite conversations were absolutely fantastic. Life changing, invigorating, exciting, silly. Genuinely inspiring moments with people who I thought were talented and funny and inspiring.

But the ones who were not that really pissed me off. You meet people at residencies and events who are so desperate to talk about their project by delivering an onslaught of information, and ‘aren’t I amazing’ anecdotes that don’t actually leave any cracks open for discourse. I usually feel the opposite - I just don’t want to be fucking going on about my project. I want to be confessing my fears and doubts about it. Or talking about how you live as an artist nowadays.

A midnight walk, temporarily alone.

After a few days there I spoke with a new friend about this (this person being one of those examples of brilliance) and said that I was over these kind of chats, and was only going to be fully open and talk about things I cared about from there on in. Almost like a challenge to myself and every conversation.

Having made such claims, it felt like accepting a ride to NYC was necessary, and that spending it talking extremely openly was a must. (Thank god this essay has the useful device of a car ride to centre it because these digressions are unruly).

Between short bursts of the audiobook of Pale Fire by Nabokov, we talked about curiosity. About the value of being interested, not interesting.

The driver asked me about my work and pointed out that my films are curious about people who are curious about the world. That they might even be about people searching for something, and me searching for something through them.

That was the second time that someone new to me defined me and my work better than I can. The week before I was showing an artist I love some rough sketches of a new film and she said the film is you - I see you in it everywhere. Which might be the first time that I really realised that not only are my films about me, they are me.

I want to embrace that in almost everything I do. Let that line between me and my films get hazier and hazier.

Back in the car, somewhere north of the George Washington bridge, we got onto family. I think it must have been sparked by a blur of talking about curiosity and being raised as the eldest kid and making a film about beekeeping in Yugoslavia and being attacked by a whole swarm of bees as a child. She asked at what point did I start asking questions? I had no idea. I just knew that I had joined adult conversations fairly young, and that I have always been spoken to like an adult. This led us onto my mediumly-complicated family.

Do bees get jealous of underwear?

We were talking about the idea of asking people questions trying to understand them and how much that is part of who we are. And the times to not do that. We talked about our roles in our families and how that shaped the way we do those things. I talked about my relationship with my parents and my siblings and how we navigated my parents splitting when we were young.

And then she said that she wondered what my Mum’s perspective on it all was. What she had felt about things that happened and what had led her to do certain things. And I confessed that I’d never asked. In the context of this claim to be fully myself and making films openly, this seemed like an admission of failure.

I was once in Arles, at the photography festival (it’s brilliant, let’s all go together one year) and bumped into someone I had been at Fabrica with. He’d made a great photography book. We sat down to share a beer and catch up. Within minutes we were talking about our mothers, like two little artist cliches, and wondering if asking the questions to things we didn’t know or understand was important. Or whether leaving them unasked was a more caring, more loving way to be. What if asking causes pain?

What right do I have to do that, just because I want answers which may be impossible anyway?

I think about that all the time in filmmaking - do I have the right to ask this question? If I’m opening up a part of someone’s life, will I handle it with care? Is it essential to what I’m doing and even if it is, is what I’m doing good for the person who is in it?

And if I’m asking contributors and audience members to go deep, be open and ask questions of themselves, do I have a moral imperative to do that in my own life?

So what responsibility do I have to ask the questions of my Mum?

At this point, we had pulled in Rivington Street and I was unloading my bags. And the driver had several more questions. So I left her wanting more information from me, which I think is a delightful way to leave anything.

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