article by E.R. Womelsduff
- Be calm and orderly in your life so you may be violent and original your work. [Flaubert]
- Do not allow bitterness into your work, because your life will inherently become bitter.
- THIS IS YOUR DAY. These are the hours that comprise your life. Love all of it.
- Do hard work, and lots of it.
- Be willing to do work that the dominant culture may consider valueless because it is unlikely to make money.
- Understand that a personal career is worthless if it is not meaningful to you.
- You must love in order to do great work and in order to survive. No other fuel is enough.
- Do not forget that money is a tool for art, not a validation of it.
- Don’t waste time sharpening pencils.
- Don’t feel like you have to work “in the industry.” That’s why there’s a thing called independent filmmaking.
Farrer describes herself with brutal honesty in her article “Armor Up, Get On Your Boots”:
My personal life has shipwrecked not once but twice. I have been married for 20 years and divorced, found true love and lost it, been pregnant and am childless. All who were on the inner circle of me are either dead, gone forever, or never born. I am over half a century old, I am a miserable sinner saved by grace, I have nothing to lose and am not afraid to die.
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| Lauralee Farrer |
I’d first met Farrer a year before when I was going through a crisis of vocation, doubting my talents, my business savvy, and my will to constantly wade through the emotional abuse that Hollywood is famous for. A film professor of mine had the wherewithal to notice my depression, and set up a meeting between Farrer and I, since we were both women, both Christians, and both writers and directors. We talked for over two hours about my anxieties and fears and when I left, I felt more hopeful than I had in months.
When we get to her office, it is filled with abstract paintings done by friends of hers. One wall is full of books and journals, which only makes sense as she has been the editor of publications for Fuller for the past nine years, the Artist in Residence at the Brehm Center for Worship, Theology and the Arts for two years, and the president and principal filmmaker for Burning Heart Productions for five years.
Before I can even ask a single question, she looks at me and says, “I’ve been thinking about what I want to say for this article. It should be called ‘10 Reasons Why You Should Love Your Work, or Quit Doing It.” For the next three hours, all I can do is try to type as quickly as possible to catch every drop of information she pours out. Her passion is incredible, but understated, and I soon understand why: “Be calm and orderly in your life,” she says, staring me straight in the eye, “so you may be violent and original your work.”
This isn’t just a pithy saying--for Farrer, it’s how she has structured her life. “I know how to live simply. I am pleased to live simply.” She tells me that David Lynch once said that he had a certain amount of energy, just like everyone else. He wore the same things and ate the same things every single day so he didn't waste energy on non-creative pursuits, and Farrer instantly recognized this mindset. Like many independent filmmakers, Farrer has a full-time job. She just happens to write, direct, and produce feature films on top of a 9-to-5. Seated across from her, she has the look of someone who has been pushing themselves not just for years, but for decades.
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| Farrer on set. |
But she wishes she’d known earlier on that it was okay to have a non-demanding day job. She would spend so much creative energy at work that there would be nothing left for her own projects. The balance that she has found now seems to be a delicate one that not many could maintain for any length of time. But Farrer isn’t your average filmmaker.
And she stresses that she is a filmmaker. She does not work in Hollywood, in the industry, or in the system. She began working in the medium of film in 1999, but says that she’s been writing since she was a child, folding up text and drawings and stapling them to make “novels.” In fact, she wrote her first real novel when she was 11. It was 300 pages long. At nineteen she got her first paid writing job doing an article about the Salvation Army.
She spent the next few years traveling the world writing for humanitarian agencies “back before it was popular and hip.” Although she knew she wanted to be a filmmaker, she ended up being in “circumstances that were as far away from the film business as you can get.” Despite that, she describes those experiences as seminal--opening up a wealth of stories and relationships and ways of thinking that were beyond anything she would have been able to expect in Hollywood. “I was in Germany when the wall came down, in Spain when Franco died, in Somalia when the war broke up, in Kenya for the two bad droughts in the ‘80s, in Leningrad when it became St. Petersburg again, in Moscow when the coup happened."
Working for humanitarian agencies, her travel expenses were barely paid for, and she thought that what she was doing wasn’t as important as writing for a company like National Geographic or Time Magazine. She was almost embarrassed of her work because it felt like “getting a job at the local church. It felt unprofessional. But it was awesome work; I was just too ignorant to know it.”
By the time she got into the USC film writing department, she found that the classes "weren’t that helpful because I’d already had those experiences.” I smile, knowing exactly what she means when she says, “That being said, I had a mythological idea of being 'discovered' as a filmmaker the way we used to think actresses were discovered."
It was at this point that Farrer had a vision and talent, but no idea how to get her foot in the door. It was decades before technology would make it possible for people to cheaply and easily make films. So she wrote dozens of screenplays and waited.
But she didn’t spend twenty years twiddling her thumbs. Not knowing a soul in Hollywood, she began to research her favorite films and filmmakers, reading everything about them that was in print. She laughs. “I was at the AFI library so often that the librarian asked me where stuff was because she thought I worked there.”
After doing her homework, she wrote letters, asking filmmakers to give her an hour of their time. Out of 20, 15 said yes. Farrer has a deep respect for people’s time, and made sure to only ask questions that could not be found out any other way. “In every case,” she tells me, “I left the room with them saying they’d work with me. But I was shy and had a huge ethic about not taking advantage of them. And I couldn’t fully take myself seriously in that field. The one person that I did follow up with was Sydney Pollock. He extended his generosity clearly enough that I said yes. But it was bad timing; the film he was working on at the time crashed and burned and his studio contract with it--so we lost touch."
Farrer says her greatest regret is that she didn’t know how to take advantage of those opportunities.
She has tried to make up for that in the latter half of her career. “I’m never not working,” she tells me. “It’s not a very healthy answer, but it is always either in my head or I’m writing it down or shooting it or editing it or working on the next one.” Oddly enough, there’s not much about the filming process that she likes to do in a vacuum--and she actively dislikes writing. “I don’t like writing, I like having written.” She’s the kind of person who must work, or else wonder “why I’m here at all. The angst of that is intolerable. Learning that was very destructive to me when I was younger and I lived closer to the edge of sanity than anyone should.”
She says she must go somewhere deep to get material for writing. “You can’t dive deep in the shallow end of the pool. If you only have two hours at the end of the day, you’re not going to be able to get there. It costs more than that. Some material requires you to be in an altered state.”
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| Farrer and her crew. |
She says it is not her goal to stand in the back of a theater and watch a film of hers and say, “I did that.” It’s too inconsequential. She wants to see something happen in the audience that she can’t account for, that is beyond her, and to know that whatever it is going on in that moment, it’s transcendent, and she transcends with it. “The hard work is worthwhile because life is worthwhile. Therefore it must be worth it to grab your work by the teeth and drag it into existence.”
This seems to be the core of Farrer’s message: that a person’s work and a person’s art and a person’s life are their own responsibility.
“I’m not going to wait for anyone to give me permission or fund me. I don’t have contempt for the idea, but I’m not waiting for it. If a project doesn't resonate with me, I won’t do it just for money. I don’t want to spend my life in pitch meetings. The odds are too great against it for it to be responsible. When I meet with God, I don’t want to say that I didn’t do my job because no one empowered me or funded me. I am not going to spend all my time sitting in Starbucks talking about being a filmmaker. Making films makes you a filmmaker.”
QUICK ANSWERS
Was any of your family in the industry before you?
I was the first person in my family to be a filmmaker; no artists.
If not, were they supportive of you going into it?
I was such an anomaly in my family that I often heard my dad say, “I have no idea where you came from.” But they loved me unequivocally, and made me feel there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do, which for the most part was a great gift. But I grew up and realized there were forces out there that didn’t believe the same.
When you were a kid, what did you want to grow up to be?
When I was little I read in Ecclesiastes that the greatest thing was wisdom. I thought that if I could get wisdom, I would “win.” I was really young. I always knew wisdom was more important than writing or art. Took me a while to discover that love trumps even wisdom.
Brecht said, “Art is not a mirror of society, but the hammer with which to shape it.” My dad was an English teacher and he loved his work. I learned a love for that, too. I knew that that kind of art was a vehicle for something else, it wasn’t a thing unto itself.
What is one piece of advice you received when you started out that ended up being totally wrong?
What I received from the American culture I lived in, and the religious culture, is that women played a certain role in society. It wasn’t advice, so to speak, but more the zeitgeist. I didn’t know how anything different could occur to me. It didn’t even cross my mind. There were eventually a series of “ah has” as I got older. I had no role models that were women when I was growing up. I was 40 before I met someone who was a Christian and an artist. Back then connecting art and faith was confusing to people.
What is one piece of advice you received that ended up being really helpful?
Sydney Pollock told me not to spend too much time sharpening pencils, by which he meant, “get to the writing, don’t worry about the rest.”
What are some of the stereotypes about Hollywood that ended up being true?
I remember the first time I heard that Hollywood was the only industry that eats its young. There is an animosity towards the young, a competition; never let them see you sweat, don’t let people see you as human. Luckily, that way of thinking is going the way of the dinosaur nowadays.
I also thought when I was younger that I had to be accepted into the halls of power in a completely different way than if I wanted to be in any other industry. I had to be “discovered” – in a way that was beyond my ability to achieve, it had to be done to me. It’s not true anymore. It’s a business like any business where you can start at the bottom and work your way up. Be consistent, reliable, confident, show up, do extra work, learn, expand your network.
What upsets / angers/ depresses you about life in Hollywood?
What I hear from friends about how they feel about working in the big machinery of the studios. They feel like they have lost their first love, like they’re working on shows or films the only saving grace of which is that people have heard of it. They feel demoralized working on something that is not only meaningless but in some ways humiliating to them. I have friends who started out with the idea that they had a love for art and storytelling that felt communal and exciting and they thought that was where they were going and now they just feel sad and bitter about the idea that any of that can come true. “Why am I spending 80 hours a week away from my kids working on a show that I wouldn’t even want them to watch?” It’s disturbing how much I hear stories like that.
What makes you hopeful about living in LA?
The capacity for the same bitter / repressed full-hearted person who wants to believe in community. It can be reactivated like a dried sponge meeting water.
People involved in industry films who want to do something with substance. People that truly believe in the possibility of things. It’s wrong for people to believe that people can be treated cruelly for the sake of creating art.
Can you tell me about some of your recent projects?
Not That Funny is in festivals right now. Praying the Hours is in active production but will take another six months to complete. It’s not even on IMDb yet.
What would you tell people who are waiting for their big break, or waiting to be discovered?
Don’t wait. There’s no such thing as a big break. There’s no such thing as being discovered. Just do it.
What would you say is a “good” reason to come to Hollywood? And what reasons would you say are “bad”?
Bad reasons are fame, money, or running away from something.
Good reason: if being in Hollywood furthers your calling as an artist to contribute meaningfully to the culture, to your own life, or to your family. If this industry is the way to do that, then come here, because there isn’t any other place in the world to do it. Yes, you can make a movie anywhere you live, but LA is the place to be. Resources are here. People are here. Cameras and lenses and special effects coordinators are here. Everything you need. Times ten.
What would you tell independent filmmakers?
Don’t stop making films. Keep doing the work. You will get to an age where, when you look back, your only regret is that you did not do more of your art. You will not regret that you didn’t get a yacht. The thing that tyrannizes me most is that I don’t have enough years to accrue the experience to make films as I envision them, as fast as I would like. Ha. There's the tyranny at work right there.
What would you tell aspiring directors?
It’s important to know whether you’re a director or not. In our hierarchical way of thinking, being the director is being the president, and we give it a value over other jobs that it doesn’t deserve. Being a director is a set of skills akin to someone being born a tenor or a soprano or a bass. You either have that set of skills or you don’t. And if you don’t that’s fine, there’s no point in you trying to acquire them. Find one of the other six thousand things needed by the process of filmmaking and learn that. Then come work with me.
As president and principal filmmaker of Burning Heart Productions LLC, Director Lauralee Farrer is the creative energy behind the award-winning documentary Laundry and Tosca (2004) and the feature-length documentaryThe Fair Trade (2008)—launch film for the Film Baby, Ryko, and Warner series of “Powerful Films.” Farrer is currently writer/director on the feature narrative Not That Funny (2011) starring Tony Hale (www.notthatfunnymovie.com), and in development on narrative features Regarding the Holidays (2012),Praying the Hours (2013), and others.
Farrer was co-producer for Lovestruck Pictures’ award-winning feature romantic comedy The Best Man in Grass Creek and has been writing and producing professionally for over thirty years. Her first personal film project was Laundry and Tosca, which investigates the life of soprano Marcia Whitehead, and explores the idea of whether simply following a dream can be enough to build a meaningful life. An event combining the film screening, Whitehead singing, and Farrer speaking has been presented in the years following its completion; similarly, her feature documentary The Fair Trade has continued to have a rich life beyond festivals and international distribution. Events with various combinations of film screenings, music, social activism awareness, and Farrer’s public speaking have been presented in recent years at film festivals, panels, conferences, colleges, summits, churches, and professional and private environments which has increased the occasion for her public speaking.
Much of the material from which her directing and screenwriting voice emerges comes from Farrer’s freelance work for humanitarian organizations. This work took her to Spain when Franco died, to Kenya during the droughts of 1981 and 1991, to Somalia when the war broke out, and to Uganda to write about early outbreaks of AIDS and the plight of its orphans. She wrote of the Sisters of Charity in Ethiopia, was in Moscow when the 1991 coup took place, and when Leningrad became St. Petersburg again. She was in East Germany before and after the wall went down, in Mexico City to write about cultures of poverty, and in U.S. cities like Philadelphia, Houston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Boston to write about American life. She lived in a Benedictine community in Denver, Colorado for three years—a providential experience that formed much of the basis for her current book Praying the Hours in Ordinary Life (Cascade Books, 2010) and feature film, Praying the Hours. She is the editor of journal Theology, News & Notes of Fuller Theological Seminary—a graduate institution for the study of theology, psychology, and intercultural studies. In 2011 she was named Artist in Residence for the Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts.
bio taken from http://www.burningheartproductions.com/people/
Farrer’s article “Open Call for a New Amateur” can be found here:
http://cms.fuller.edu/TNN/Issues/Spring_2012/Open_Call_for_a_New_Amateur/
Websites for Farrer’s films:
www.burningheartproductions.com
www.prayingthehours.com
www.laundryandtosca.com
www.thefairtrademovie.com
www.notthatfunnymovie.com
What a great article! This comes at a transitional time in my life, and I found it great encouraging.
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