Confession #4

Its probably time to give a little explanation for the whole I <3 Titanic thing.

Titanic was the movie that made me want to make movies.

I used to insist to people that it made me want to make movies because I was a Titanic buff, and I knew I could have made a better Titanic movie than that.

Which is partly true. In the year or so following the release of Cameron's film, I wrote a 400+ page novel on the subject. While I did most of the actual writing, key story points were provided by my 11 yr old cousin. It was pretty impressive given our ages. I mean, if you don't count the unknowing bits of plagiarism, the naive handling of romance, and the illustrations we made in Windows Paint and inserted into our manuscript. But my parents got it into the hands of a local children's book author who assured me that I was quite talented. Someday when people trust me with billions of dollars, I will dust it off and prove Cameron's isn't the definitive take on the subject.

But that isn't really why Titanic is the film that made me want to make movies. Its not because I was wowed by the special effects. Its not because I was swept off my feet by the love story. Its because "Titanic" left me feeling things I didn't understand. I had been saddened by movies as a child, of course. Who didn't cry during Where the Red Fern Grows? But this was something new.

I saw it with the aforementioned 11 yr old cousin who had already seen it once, and who had to convince my Southern parents for me that the nudity was all in good taste. I was 14, lol. After the movie, we spent that night at our grandparent's house. We gushed and gushed over all the cool parts. We laughed about the way Jack's frozen body sinks into the ocean. We couldn't stop going 'Oh!' and tossing imaginary Hearts of the Ocean over the side of our hide-a-bed.

Later that night, after he had fallen asleep, I laid in bed for what seemed like hours at the time listening to my Titanic soundtrack. It stirred something in me. Some of the lyrics of the song are quite moving if you read them instead of hear Celine Dion screech them at you while she pounds her chest like an enraged ape. I can't say it was really about love. I was still a little too young to be the romantic that I am now. I wouldn't really care much about girls for another 18 months or so when The Phantom Menace introduced me to a certain Miss Portman.

Its hard to say now for sure what it was that kept me up that night. I don't want to rewrite history for the sake of a good blog post. But what I remember is for the first time feeling SOMETHING so strongly that it effected my entire being. I felt like I was going to choke on this lump in my chest every time I thought too hard about what I had just seen. Not so much Jack and Rose, but the rest of the story. The real people. It was the hints of reality weaved around the Hollywood love story that haunted me that night. The heroism. The chivalry. The sacrifice. The terror. It had all really happened. Somewhere out there that ship was really lying in the black depths of the sea. It boggled my mind. It tore my heart up. I suddenly had bile rising in my throat.

That wasn't the moment when I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker. It was a slower realization, but ultimately born out of that moment when I felt something so damn strong that I tasted vomit. I had thought before this that I wanted to be a writer, but now I wanted to tell my own Titanic tale. It became my obsession. My cousin's too. It was the focus of our every moment spent together. And we spent a lot of time together back then. There was nothing we couldn't tell you about the real Titanic. Our parents became concerned. (Though now they should be grateful our morbid obsession did not express itself through eyeliner, spiked collars, and girl pants.) But as slaved over what we thought would be our magnum opus (not that we knew what one was, lol), we became concerned when we realized that publishing this masterpiece would mean that someone could buy the movie rights. My cousin - having read the novel of Jurassic Park (Yes, before age 11. Not all kids need Harry Potter to learn to love books.) - knew they would surely butcher our art. Lol, as if anyone back then would have been remotely interested in another Titanic movie. That was when we realized the only way to keep our work safe was to become filmmakers.

I could bore you with all the details of our growing interest in film, but they're so boring I don't remember them myself. As we matured our styles and tastes in film diverged, but our dreams remained steady. We'll both be going to film school this fall; me returning to my small film program at a regular college, him to a large rather respected film school in Florida. We're not the inseperable duo that we once were, but we'll always have Titanic.

And that brings me the two things that Titanic showed me that are my main reasons for my grown up dream remaining basically the same as my 14 yr old one. The first is that realization that a movie can move someone so much that they want to puke. That is the kind of movies I want to make. That is THE most important reason for making a film to me. To make someone - anyone - even just one person - feel something as powerful as I felt that night... that's my ultimate goal in writing and filmmaking.

The second reason I only recently figured out looking back at my teenage years and what my cousin and I shared those years post-Titanic. Two little dorks in queer Jack and Rose t-shirts with matching Titanic hats lugging backpacks full of Titanic books to our small private Christian school, pouring over them at the end of the lunch table while all the other kids talked about how weird we were. It was us against the world, chasing our common dream even if we never made another friend in the world. Watching Titanic together that night (and way too many times after) was the beginning of an era that lasted until I left for college the first time. We're still friends, but its not like that anymore. Those were the magic years.

And that... that is what movies can do. What I love maybe most about movies. The shared memories. The fact that you can push play on your DVD player and not only can you be taken to another place and time through the action onscreen, but you can be taken to another place and time in your very own life. Now that I'm older, I have lot of these movie memories, many of them my most treasured memories of all. Good or bad, watching a movie instantly take me back to the first time I saw it. From that night with my cousin at Titanic to the moment The Fountain rolled credits and my girlfriend and I sat in akward silence, each of us afraid the other one had understood it, only to realize in a glorious moment I'll never forget, that neither of us understood the significance of bald Hugh Jackman floating through space. And we still don't. And no matter what else in life we may disagree on, we will always be able to sing, "Then I said, 'What about The Fountain?' And she said, 'I think I remember the film.' And I said, "As I recall, we both kinda fuckin' hated it...."

Yes, that's what movies are for. That's why I love them. That's why my soul feels like it will just die if I don't get to make them.

And it all started with Titanic. It may not be cool, but its mine. So that's why I proudly declare on this blog that I heart Titanic.