It’s hard to explain why I’m traveling or where I’m going because there is no particular reason and I don’t have a destination. I’m looking for something, but I’ll only know what it is when I find it. Although it’s cliché, I guess I’m searching for myself. I’m searching for my desire, my passion, my purpose, my place.
After a decade of hustle and struggle in NYC and seven years of putting all my energy, focus, and resources into The Long Bike Back, I’m burned out and the prospect of starting all over on another project is too overwhelming right now.
I never intended to move to NYC or to try to “make it” there, but college was close by and I lived off campus, so when I graduated I stayed.
With luck and hard work and a little strategy I got into independent documentary and steady freelance post-production work, where I thought I wanted to be. When Pearson was run-over by a hit-and-run driver, my life and my focus changed and when the dust settled I felt inspired, in a way I never had before, to commit everything to making a film about his recovery and cross-country ride. I never wanted to be a vérité filmmaker (I made compilation/essay films in college) but vérité, showing the story as it happened without commentary, felt like that natural form for The Long Bike Back.
After working on a bunch of independent documentaries I thought I knew what I was in for: the long hours, the lack of funding, the struggle to tell the story in less than 90 minutes… I also delusionally thought that somehow I would be special and finish my film in two years. But all of that is grist for another mill… The upshot is I had no idea what I was in for. After seven years, I’m very happy the film is finished but I find myself reticent to dive into another unfunded feature documentary.
So maybe I’m a decade behind a quarter life crisis and a decade premature for a midlife one, but I figure it’s never the wrong time to find adventure, to explore, to wonder, to question, to find myself, to follow my passion, to seek my endless curiosity, and to pause and gaze in awe at the world. I plan to wander until I find the next thing that inspires me to dive in 100%.
