And I believe that this liberation speaks to something completely outside of anything as specific as filmmaking. So when I thought about James Baldwin’s quote again in the context of my own work and the work of people I admire, I realised it’s actually very liberating. The outsider wrestles with their status, both suffering and drawing strength from it and in the end they use it to ‘reset’ themselves and create a new identity. Each one starts with an outsider looking in. When I look back at these films, I know that I approached each one with a very different story in mind but I also see the parallels emerging. One is a science fiction thriller, one is an LGBT teen drama and the other is a tragic comedy which places a robot into everyday life. On the right something more recent which I worked with our team to produce here at Raw London. On the left of the image below are two short films I made independently (I cannot stress this enough: please don’t look them up). So I looked over my own work and found some interesting trends. By and large, his narratives revolve around people who’ve been wronged (usually by a white man) and ultimately seek revenge. This is the “story” to which James Baldwin is referring.įor example, for Quentin Tarantino it’s the revenge story. Think about any director, writer or author, and the chances are they’ve produced a wide body of work featuring lots of different stories.Īnd yet – if you look again at any artist’s body of work, you’ll find running themes, motifs or a base story which runs throughout each one. He said: “Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.”Īs someone working in a creative industry, I was shocked to hear this because I thought it was really limiting. James Baldwin was an American novelist born in New York and died in France in 1987.
Let me open with a question: what’s your story?