The Farewell Wake

Tonight I watched the digital feature I shot last summer, The Farewell Wake. I had an informative reaction. For the first 50 minutes or so, I was thinking, Holy shit, I don't remember it being this good! It was tight, measured, slow but deliberately so, I loved it. Then the infamous second act. Narrative distractions appeared. By the end, I realized that the entire "no poet is safe", hostage taking thread was irrelevant to the story of the brothers and therefore was a terrible distraction. I went downstairs and quickly did some editing, taking six minutes out. I'll look at this new edit more carefully and end up with a SECOND director's cut, the FINAL cut, which will be shorter yet again. But all that hostage stuff in the last half, it's interesting and even heartfelt but it's in the wrong movie.

I therefore will do a final cut one year after the fact. For damn sure I'll never shoot another feature! I don't have the energy. In fact, looking back, it feels like something of a miracle that it even got done. Astounding it got done! I must have been in some kind of trance last summer. I could never do it now, only a year later. So I guess we conclude that I did it in the nick of time.

And now I can re-edit it to make it as good as it can be without doing some reshooting, which I have no desire to do.