Turns out blogs are hard to keep up. :)

I'll try to do better in the future, but until then, here's a bit of information about how things have been going since I last posted -- the Cannes Film Festival.

I spent the first couple of months of the summer back in New York, doing some work. It was an odd few weeks -- to save some money, we took a cheap sublet in Chinatown, and my God, Chinatown is a hostile place. It's funny how, where Little Italy is like a Disneyland version of Italy, Chinatown is properly like China. It's a whole different world, and oddly not a welcoming one. There's this feeling of a mass there, of people just trudging along rather than elevating themselves (which is one of the most amazing aspects of New York usually -- people are vibrant), and a hostile fear of anything different or unusual or unexpected. And, to call a cat a cat, the hygiene's pretty dodgy too. So we worked with that for a while, and then flew back to London for a wedding. Shortly after that, Maz and I took a road trip around the Scottish Highlands, which was an amazing experience -- we started down in Jedburgh, in the Borders, and then worked our way up the East Coast, to Inverness, then along the North Coast, and then back down the West Coast, all the way to Oban, and from there drove to Glasgow, from where we flew to Barra (the ONLY place in the world where the plane lands on the beach -- natch) for a few days, then back to Glasgow, from where we drove to Peebles and back to Jedburgh.

It was a fantastic thing to do (Maz's idea, to give credit where credit is due), and at the right time, too. You develop tunnel vision, working in something like the film industry, trying to get ahead -- you forget about anything else. You wake up, look up film news, work on film stuff, go see a movie, work on some film stuff, go to bed, start again. Even when you're not doing film-related stuff, you're thinking about it, it's dancing in the back of your head, it's worrying you, it's obsessing you. Every disappointment sticks with you like a bad smell, and every success only serves to make you worry about the next step. Ultimately you just end up running in circles, more busy than productive, trying to check things off your To-Do List rather than actually growing in any way. And Maz and I had both gotten to that point in the past few months. I personally had been focusing way too hard on how to get that short film finally off the ground, on how to get onto Indiana Jones 4, on how to find a producer I respected to work for, on how to make a living, on how to find a project to produce next...And for weeks I had been trying so hard to get it all done, I stopped getting anywhere.

So the road trip was really good -- couple of weeks with virtually no Internet, no cinemas, just talking and doing things and landscapes and reading and writing. Suddenly rather than anxiously bouncing in every purposeless direction, every day narrowed down to getting into the car, going somewhere fun, and having fun -- and talking in-between. Scotland's a gorgeous country, one where the landscapes, history and activities combine to instantly make all the bad energies just seep out -- and I personally came back from it in the best headspace I've been in in months.

And unsurprisingly, since getting back, things have been going much, MUCH better. After obsessing over it every single day since January (I'm serious.), I finally got my few days' work on Indiana Jones & The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, worked on the same set as Steven Spielberg, and saw Harrison Ford in the outfit -- it cost me nearly a grand for the privilege, flying to L.A. and putting myself up and working for free, but fuck, man, it's Indiana Jones. I can't talk about it much, non-disclosure agreement oblige, but it was a great experience, and as far as I'm concerned the film looks amazing fun. After it comes out, I'll post a longer post with the bits I saw, how they did them, and what was great about them -- and hopefully Lucasfilm won't sue me then. :)

I also started doing some book reading for Walt Disney Studios, and a bit after that, I got to work on a series of commercials for H&M, as a camera trainee for one of my all-time favorite DPs, Darius Khondji. We've also gotten a film into a film festival, and I've initiated contact with a bunch of directors and writers I'd like to work with as a full-fledged producer, and things are going well.

It's funny how things aren't always necessarily about putting your mind to it, but putting your right mind to it. Trust me, the world's full of driven people, but driven people who go about things in the right way, with the right mindset, beating their own drum at their own pace... I truly think that's one of the keys of getting wherever you're going. I'm not one of those people yet, not consistently, but I'm starting to tell when I'm in that mode and when I'm not, and I can tell the (huge) difference.

I'll keep this a short post -- no point writing too much today, and then not doing it for a month, as I tend to -- but I'll be back over the weekend, asking myself several questions that have been swimming around in my head, all centered around one issue: why is the film industry so keen on killing itself?