As I write this, I’m a week away from an Open House (see flyer!) for our film, NORTHSTAR that I will be hosting with Nathan and Jason in my hometown of Iron Mountain, Michigan. This event marks the culmination of a few things. First, it will kickstart the next phase of production, which will throw us into a year-long process of actually shooting the script. Second, in introducing our film to the community in Iron Mountain, I will be realizing a dream I’ve always had of making Northstar in a place I’ve cherished for the better part of my life. Third, it means that I will now have to relinquish a story and a set of characters that have safely existed in an imaginary world that we’ve generated and shared together as a team for over 5 years. As the script goes through the process of being translated into a film, I’m coming to terms with the fact that it will become something others can interact with and possibly pick apart. In other words, it will go from a safe, protective zone in my mind, to something that exists outside of me.
In the last post, I wanted to talk about the process of actually writing this story, but I started thinking about the habits I developed for myself to actually generate the work, and it felt right to share that first. In this post, I’m ready to talk a bit about how deeply I had to dig into myself in order to bring Northstar to life. I won’t go into the story details too much, because that’s something you will have to understand on its own terms when you see the final product.
Northstar started as a germ of an idea that came to me just after I graduated from College in 2003. I was eager to continue making films outside of school and in that summer before I moved to Los Angeles, I was keen to do something that dwarfed my senior thesis movie (which to this day is a monolith that remains basically unfinished). When it comes to the next project I’m going to tackle, I’ve never been able to sit down, look inward and carve out a story idea from nothing. In that way, creative work for me is not conscious excavation work. New ideas typically arrive in my life, just as new people do, and like with new friends, ideas have a timely way of showing up at the right time. Anyway, in 2003, I started to see images of a family living closely together in a multi-room house that’s been cloistered off from the outer world. I soon realized that something happened outside, and that these people had decided it was best to shut themselves in and rely on each other to face whatever happened. That was the idea in a nutshell, and I’ve been able to sustain interest in that blessed nugget for going on 10 years.
Just recently, I found the original script I wrote in 2003. It came to 30 odd pages and I recall the plan was to shoot it with friends on the nicest camera I could find in the middle of a summer that turned out to be unbearably hot. That summer came and went, and I drove out to Los Angeles the following October with my Mom. Lots of life happened that you don’t need to hear about, so we can cut to that Spring. I was with Nate and Jason and we started talking about making films again. After purchasing a beautiful 16MM film camera, we started a 4 year cycle between 2005 and 2009 that ended with us producing two short films that we’re still very proud of (you can learn more about our previous and future work HERE). By the fall of 2008, we decided that whatever we did next had to be feature length, and when we cast about for ideas that were laying around, the story of the family living together in seclusion after the world has ended came back. When I brought it to the guys, I don’t think we ever discussed another option. We just knew this story was it.
Nate’s first sketch of Northstar’s heroine, Noreen. Winter, 2009.
I’m not going into every detail of the 5 years it took to write Northstar. I can give you impressions. As with all stories, it started out radically different. At first I hacked out a 10 page piece of crap that crudely sketched out the story from beginning to middle to bitter end. We had long discussions about that version in our small apartment off LA Brea avenue when Jay came to visit after just moving from New York. I remember thinking hopefully that it wouldn’t take long to write the story after that weekend, but I’d never written a script before and I didn’t know any better. With that version of the story, I could never nail the ending. I wrote and wrote and wrote until I got to some arbitrary terminus. I emailed that rambling mess to the guys with a message tacked to the end of it that angrily read: “Look guys, It could go this way, or that way, or some other damn way, but in the end, I don’t like any of the options, because they feel like ideas others have done, (and done better). This is not the story I want to tell, EVER.”
That dark episode might have happened in the first year, or the second year… I forget. I know that after I wrote that screed to the guys, Nate ordered me to take a week off from active engagement with the writing and I went to bed wondering if we should throw in the towel and go back to the queue of ideas. After all, I’d been writing for years and it didn’t seem like the story was improving despite me throwing everything I had against the wall. It was one baaaad week, let me tell you, but at the end of it, Northstar was still there, battered, but resilient. I’m not sure I can describe the feeling adequately, but when you are engaged in a creative project, after awhile, the notion of giving it up becomes akin to separating from a loved one. At times, it can be more intimate than that — at times, the notion of walking away from Northstar was like contemplating which hand I should cut off. I guess I needed to realize I was that attached to it.
So guys, it’s not like it got any easier once I committed to working on it again. Creative work is still work. Building a story is still building something from nothing. You get up, you devote daily time to it, you push through, you produce the pages. We reformulated everything, I know that. Then, during a winter walk one Christmas, Nate and I struck upon a new plot element to inject in the story that made every other piece come alive. It was as if before that we were putting the wrong current through a set of disconnected circuits, and with that new idea, everything lit up. Moments of insight like that are what you wait for. You mull and meditate over the same story elements over and over, you explore every avenue you can, and then one day, it crystallizes. But you have to give it time.
Nate’s painting for Northstar’s hero, Alex. Summer, 2012
Even after the breakthrough, we still had maybe another year there where we hashed out the details, and even at that point, the final product was an outline of the story that detailed the plot. It was not a finished script with dialogue, it was basically just a cold blue-print. People could read the story in skeletal form, but the skin and bones were still waiting to be laid on. By January of this year, I started translating the plot into a fully articulated script, and the final product was ginormous. 5 years of starting with the germ of an idea, 5 years of sitting daily in a gray creative limbo, 5 years of wrestling with yourself, trying to grab that elusive gem that seems to sit at the edge of your vision, taunting you to quit, while at the same time beckoning you to chase it. 5 years, and then there’s a white brick sitting on your desk. A white stack of pages representing the hard-won manifestation of your imagination.
I’m about to enter a sixth year where this story will continue to dominate my creative life and work. As I’ve worked through this process of chasing a long-cherished goal, I’ve had many chances to stop. I didn’t. That said, the Northstar that we envisioned when we started is unrecognizable compared to the Northstar we have now. We gave it the time needed to explore every nook and cranny that the idea suggested, and many times that led to dead ends that required us to back up and start over. At a critical moment, I realized the idea wanted to find a final form, so I didn’t give up on it. Understand, that if I thought the idea didn’t warrant the work, I would have stopped and moved on to another project.
Know that in life, many voices, both internal and external to yourself will chime in to give you advice. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t listen to those voices, or that you should shield yourself from outside input. Sometimes, I think you really need to listen to people that are trying to help you, so long as their advice rings true to you. In the end, you must always, always adhere to what your heart tells you in those nights when you are at your lowest ebb. Regardless of what others might say to help you correct course, you alone are are ultimately navigating the waters of your life. If someone says something that makes sense, take it in. If they don’t know what they’re talking about, throw it away.
So, that’s that for now. As my Mom says to me every other day, if something is overwhelming you, step back, sit with it and if you can, get a nap in honey. Wherever you find yourself in your work and life, Happy Holidays.
Steppelands 