Almost every film starts with some reading. Researching worlds, characters, stories, approaches, locations etc… is all part of building a film in ones mind, and the project on paper.
But is there a point where you can do too much reading? Is there a tipping point where what you are reading is actually clouding the ideas you have, the judgements you make, and the imagining you have to do?
This is on my mind this morning because I just read Rosecrans Baldwin talking about Lili Taylor’s book about birding. And I’m making a film that is very much to do with birds.
My first instinct was to go and get the book right away. Just go immediately down the street to Skylight Books. But why? I’m sure the book will be good. I’m sure I’d get something interesting from it (yes, that is of course true for almost any book). But would it really be adding something to my project? Would it be helping me in how I think about it? Add nuance and depth to what I’m making? Or is it out of a kind of completist mindset that makes me feel like I have to have read everything about a subject to be truly prepared?
That completist mindset is utterly unhelpful when it comes to research. You would think it might be a good thing. It is not. To keep on the birds theme, there are a thousands of books about birds. Go into any book shop and you’ll be surprised just how many there are. And seemingly more each week, each with a really beautifully designed cover made to lure me in. Even within my specific interest of bird communication, there are hundreds of books it seems. Every time I read one, it references several more and the ‘to read’ note on my phone grows more impossible to complete.
When it gets to this point, I usually just sort of give up reading books on the subject (I’ll still read articles, posts and your substack). It becomes too much.
It’s too much for me to take in and my focus has shifted to what I’m putting out. But is this the right approach? Am I missing out on ideas of links between ideas that would make the film better? Am I too easily swayed by my daughter rolling her eyes and saying ‘not another bird book’?
In the early days of research, everything is going in and fresh ideas come from random pick ups. When this project was still pretty rough in my mind, I was shooting a commercial in Minneapolis and, on a morning off, I wandered into a second hand book shop. In their nature section they had a book about birds and man from the 50s. And in the second paragraph there was a distillation of an idea that had been running through my head, poorly formed, for months.
That kind of connection from research dwindles as the film takes shape. But by not picking up another book for the stack, am I closing off new paths I haven’t yet imagined?
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