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Director's Statement | Q and A | Screenings

“What’s the worst lie you ever told?” “What’s your most embarrassing moment?” When I update my Nerve Personals page, can my answers to both of these questions be the same, and can it be, “The director’s statement for my film, I’ll Come Running?”

Writing and rehearsal and shooting and editing of I’ll Come Running roughly spanned the advent of the social networking “revolution,” from the appearance of online personals to the beginnings of Friendster, through the rise of MySpace and on through the triumph of Facebook, and because of this, I could probably feed you some crap sociology about “romance in the age of social networking,” but come on. Enough with the lies. I justify my Friendster and MySpace and Facebook pages (yes I have them all) by saying I use them to promote the movie, but let’s face it: I’m in it for counting friends, finding bands or getting my ass kicked at illegal, online Scrabble, and fuck Hasbro if they take it away.

But maybe the time social networking sucked away did contribute something to the movie. Maybe I couldn’t help but respond to the easy, sometimes sleazy internationalism of it all, how we chiefly get to know one another through Simpson-ized faces or checklists of pop-culture favorites, how there are real, not just virtual consequences to what we do online, and how it’s an environment where hookups are not just openly acknowledged but there’s a blank you fill in to let the world know how it went. So maybe I wished romantic comedies would do something more with that stuff than drop references to keep their witty chatter hip, and I know I’ve longed for them to incorporate one-night stands in their plots for more than stoking jealousy or signaling spiritual dissolution that only the love of a good woman or man will heal. Could I deal with these widgets of social complication truthfully and critically, maybe even find their poetry, and without making it all about the hardware?

I never wanted to make a “dating in the aughts” number, and I think since we cut out the only shot of somebody at a computer, this thing’s definitely not an internet movie. Nevertheless, Facebook time brought certain issues into relief, and most definitely it made me think of friends, especially the ones I know from having once shared real space and time, who I miss terribly and every day, my high school and college friends scattered over the globe to teach high school and work in law firms or advertising, edit magazines and run travel agencies.If I’m going to spend so much time away from my people in order to make a film, and especially when I’ve got to cross an ocean to do it, I figure the end result should be one hell of a postcard. Wish you were here. CONTINUE»

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