Life in a Box - 15 min preview.

I was thinking about the production of LIZZIE coming up in Toronto which reminded me of one of my favorite Y’all press quotes from a Toronto paper which made me think of this little 15-minute promotional video we made in 2003, just after Y’all had broken up and Jay and I had separated and I was living in Jersey City, logging the 200 hours of tape we’d shot of our life on the road, figuring out how to whittle it down to a feature-length documentary.

The purpose of the video was to sell the prospective film to a distributor or a cable network. The folks at HBO seemed very interested. I say seemed now, but at the time I would have said were — one of the big lessons I learned during this phase of my career is that the perceived degree of enthusiasm in meetings with these sorts of gatekeepers means very little.

I think this trailer conveys some of the tone and story of the eventual full-length film, Life in a Box, but it’s different. Many of the shots I used ended up in the finished film (there are also a few shots I wish had survived but didn’t). We’d interviewed our friends and family at length. They were candid and funny and full of insights. Some clips of those interviews are in this trailer, but in the end I dispensed with all of that and decided to keep the narrative voice within the trio of us, and honestly, though I showed various rough cuts to Jay and Roger to get their notes because I wanted the story I was telling to feel true to them, too, the narrator is me more than them.

With 200 hours of footage I could have told a thousand different stories in a thousand different ways and all of them would have, could have, been true. A lot happened in those years. Deciding what to leave out was often very painful. Like crying jag painful. I love the film I made, but I think about those other films from time to time. A big case full of mini-DV cassettes is one of the few things I’ve dragged around with me all these years. Maybe I’ll live long enough to revisit them.