Lost in research

How much time to lose down mental alleys and long walks?

This one started, as the good days often do, with a long walk.

A long walk in a park with an actor, who began the meeting by jumping out from behind a building and scaring the absolute shit out of me.

I love a long walk meeting. Moving through space with someone, letting the conversation stretch and loop back on itself. Silences are acceptable. Good distractions happen. It’s so much better than sitting across from each other at a table trying to look like we’re both very focused and creative.

One of my favourite places in the world is Mexico City. And tied very tightly to that are long walks with the writer Brenda Lozano. Brenda wrote The Loop, and Witches amongst others – incredible, entwined books that spiral in on themselves. And she is a fantastic person. Our last walk there, we didn’t talk about projects or work at all. We talked about life and ideas and living.

This recent walk, the one with the actor, reminded me of that. And of how good walking is for my process.

A few days after our walk I bought a copy of Kindred magazine because it had an interview with my patron saint, Wim Wenders. In it, he says this:

“On a plane: Never look at a movie. At home: Never turn on the TV. Get off the internet. Use your phone only briefly during the day. Don’t even think about using social media. Walk! Be around trees! Take your time! Look people in the eye when you talk to them. Go to bed early and sleep well. (What a luxury!) Ride a bicycle instead of driving a car.”

A fancy magazine, the corner of my sneaker.

Buying magazines sent me off thinking about physical magazines in general. They seem to have had a comeback. Beautiful objects, thick paper, smart design, deep pieces. But are they vanity projects? Do they make money? Do the people actually making the work make money?

I would love to think that this boon in beautifully designed, diverse and deep magazines is proving profitable, and letting people make ever more brave and interesting publications. Anyone know?

But as usual, I digress. This post is not about magazines. It’s not even about walking. There are loads of good books about walking and it’s power - like Rebecca Solnit and Frédéric Gros.

This is not a post about that. Don’t get distracted.

Back to this walk. The one that kicked all this off.

The actor (I haven’t asked her about writing this, so she shall remain secret while our project is so nascent) and I looped around the park talking about acting and families and the world, and we ended the walk talking about collaboration. About how we could make something together, and what “together” might actually mean.

I asked if there was someone real she was interested in. Maybe not famous, not a fully canonised “subject,” but someone on the edges of being known. On the edges of history, or culture, or the algorithm. Someone who could be the basis of a film I would research and write for us to make.

She messaged a few days later with a name and a why.

So I’m diving in.

For me, that means attaching myself to the research in a physical way.

The early reading has to happen offline. I need a physical connection with material and notes. I collate notes, sketch timelines, doodle. Printing things out and drawing arrows between them. I like being able to physically move things around.

I’m digging for connections. Not just information, but ways to understand personality – which then helps me understand decisions and context, which helps me understand what the story might be. What questions are already hiding in the material. Where a film could go.

And those aren’t things I’ll just read as bullet points in a book. They’re things that the reading will shake loose in my brain. Over the long, slow process of finding out more, images and questions start to drift up. The right questions, hopefully.

Right now, as I’m writing this, I’m in a café with the names of great writers carved into the floor. Right next to me is Juan José Saer, which is the kind of connection I’m talking about.

I first heard of Saer when researching my bird doc. I’d been learning about Gabo Mindlin and was watching a Ted talk he gave about birds dreams. I was already falling in love with him, but it was his use of literary references like Saer that made me sure he would be a good character.

Which he is. He’s the kind of scientist who has a copy of Mary Poppins on their book shelf.

Mary Poppins and Mathematical Physiology

So how far should one go down a rabbit hole like this? How much is too much? How many books is sensible? (see my tendency to get too many books on a subject here:

Dangerous stacks of books

Am I driving this? Following things? This should NOT be a YouTube rabbit hole where the Algorithm is leading me. Or feeding me.

My research is led by connections, surprises, the way thoughts collide and then come together later. Not just the logical next step or the most obvious “more information.” I keep asking: what does all of this add up to?

For example, this person I’m researching spoke four languages. That fact alone makes my brain start asking questions. Did she learn from someone in her family? Did she read in all those languages? Which language did she think in? At what age did each language arrive? And why?

I love non-fiction adaptation (Did I mention this in a past post?)

Sometimes the reading at this depth can get heavy. Right now I’m reading four books about this person. Two are great. One is a terrible self-published novel that I will politely never name, and one is at least 200 pages too long.

So I bounce around. I drop in and out. I let myself get distracted on purpose.

This week I read The Anomaly (as recommended by Rosecrans Baldwin) just to clear my head, and god, that is a brilliant book. It all counts as part of work somehow, even when it’s a detour.

But I keep going back to the pile.

And I take research until the point I have something to say about it all that feels original.

At that point, the research starts feeding itself – and starts feeding me back. It leads me to a new place, and then I bounce between research and creation: writing, outlining, filmmaking. I don’t abandon the research once I start “making”; it just becomes narrower, more specific.

There’s a point where I know the world I’m creating, and from then on the whole world, in all its random little elements, starts feeding into that. Almost like a lens filter.

Life becomes research because I’ve spent all that time establishing the frame and the questions and the world of what I’m interested in. A line overheard on the metro. A photograph in a bookshop window. A detail from a totally unrelated article suddenly slots into place because the project has given it somewhere to land.

And what if this doesn’t lead to something? What if there’s no film at the end of this one? No treatment anyone wants to finance. Not even a good idea.

Is the research a waste of time?

Not for me. Never.

The whole point of this work is a desire to live an examined life. To explore questions and ideas and try to communicate them.

Over the years I have exhaustively researched:

• The effects of the full moon on a variety of professions

• Football in the former Yugoslavia

• Lighthouse keepers

• Traditional dress in the highlands of Guatemala

• The history of Primal Scream

Were those dead ends? They didn’t end up in any film I’ve made. Not yet, anyway.

They were long walks that left me back at the same place as I started. I haven’t moved on, geographically. But I’m richer - more interested and, hopefully, more interesting - because of the walk itself.

That’s what a day of research is, on the good days. A long walk where you end up exactly where you began, asking different questions and seeing the world in a different way.

A caterpillar, in Mexico, thinking about it’s creative process.