The panel was called ‘Narratives of Personal Experience’ on the festival’s pamphlet and featured an unlikely pairing discussing the influences of their lived experience on their work. The first panelist was James, an actor who had recently written and starred in a film describing his own childhood. The other man was named Wes, a director of several notable films, although I was unsure of his relationship to the panel’s conversation topic. 

The event took place under a large outdoor tent where a stage had been assembled at one end with rows of chairs lined all the way to the back. Outside the tent, the weather had been fluctuating between drizzles and downpours. I found a seat a few rows from the stage and settled in, noticing the chairs were the kind of lightweight folding chairs that folded side-to-side with a scissors action. The panelists’ last names were taped onto the chairs. The audience began clapping as a group of people walked on stage. Each of them was soaking wet like they had just been caught in a downpour. 

‘Have we come to the right place?’ James said, addressing the crowd and pantomiming confusion. ‘We’re looking for the wet T-shirt competition. We were told it was here.’

The audience immediately laughed. James shook one of his legs, his black jeans clinging to his body. His brown hair was thick and clipped very short, so that it looked like animal’s fur. I recognized him from his films, the strangely childlike manner and the aura of discomfort hung faintly around his body, which he moved often as though to dispel it, crossing and recrossing his legs, leaning forward, turning this way and that way. 

‘From personal experience, being wet is a lot more fun than being dry,’ he added, above a second wave of laughter. 

James sat in the first seat and Wes took the one next to him. The Moderator sat in the seat after that. The Moderator was laughing at James’s remarks along with everybody else, his legs crossed tightly at the knee, his costive eyes darting around the interior of the marquee. He had a notepad on his lap and he opened it. Wes was watching James with a slight smile, his stained teeth slightly bared.

‘I’m told that sometimes I can be a bit forward,’ James said to the audience. ‘I don’t always know when I’m doing it -- I have to be told. Some actors pretend to be shy, but not me. I say it’s the quiet ones you want to watch, the tortured souls, the artists, the ones who say they hate all the attention. Like Wes,’ he said, and the audience laughed. Wes laughed too, baring his teeth even more. ‘Wes is the sort who actually claims to enjoy the writing process,’ James continued. ‘Like those people who say they enjoyed school. Me? I hate writing. I have to sit there with someone massaging my shoulders and some hot tea on my desk. I only do it for the attention I’ll get afterwards -- I’m like a dog waiting for a treat.’

The Moderator was looking at his notes with studied nonchalance. It was apparent that he had missed the opportunity to intervene: the event had set off like a train without him. 

All actors, James went on, are attention seekers: why else would each of us be sitting on this stage right now? The fact was, he said, we weren’t given enough attention as children and now we are having our revenge. Any actor -- or writer for that matter -- who denies the childish element of revenge in what they did was, as far as he was concerned, a liar.

​

‘Although,’ he said pensively, ‘the basis of our profession is just that.’ He turned to Wes, smiling mischievously, ‘the more convincingly you can deceive, the better an actor you are.’

But what most people didn’t realize, he continued, was that actors were fooling themselves, insofar as they thought they could truly escape themselves. The only solution though was to sit down and write about it. If you wanted proof, all you had to do was look at the people who had something to fear from your honesty.

‘When I told my mother I had written a screenplay,’ he said, ‘the first thing she said was, “You always were a difficult child.”’ The audience laughed. For a long time she had refused to discuss the story; she felt he’d stolen something from her, not so much the facts of their shared story but the ownership of it. 

‘Parents sometimes have a problem with that,’ he said. ‘They have this child that’s sort of a silent witness to their lives, then the child grows up and starts blabbing their secrets all over the place and they don’t like it. I’d say to them, get a dog, instead! You had a child but actually what you needed was a dog, something that would love and obey you but would never say a word, because the thing about a dog,’ he said, ‘is that no matter what you do to it, it will never, ever be able to talk back.’ 

The place where he spent his childhood -- just in case anyone here had had the bad manners to turn up here without seeing the film first -- was about a two-hours drive south from where we’re sitting right now. It’s a small town inland where nobody except semi-trucks were expected to pass through, though there were probably plenty of visits from social services departments. It was poverty the modern way. Slum motels and a cheap circus where visitors could stop from the highway in between Los Angeles and San Diego. Everyone was living on benefits, obese, and consuming cheap food, and the most important member of the family was the television. 

​

‘My father,’ he said, ‘spent more time with that television than he ever did with me.’

His mother had left their family before he turned ten, though he didn’t blame her because the motel they lived in was smaller than a one car garage. A faint ripple of uncertain laughter rose and died away again. The reason she left, he continued, was because his father’s episodes had become too much for her. Years before James had been conceived, his father had fought in Vietnam where something had broken him. Of course, he continued, he would never know what it was that happened, only that this event had affected his life more than anything else ever had. And isn’t that the worst, James wondered, to be hurt by something before you even know what it is? In a sense, he was damaged goods before he even knew it. Coming to himself was like buying one of those Christmas trees    from a parking lot vendor and cutting off the net only to find gaps where branches should be.

‘It’s funny,’ he said, ‘how when parents do things to their children, it’s as if they think no one can see them. The truth is, the only thing my father ever gave me of any value is pain.’

His father was there for him, he recognized, which was more than he could say for his mother. His father’s cruelty was of a more refined variety. He would go to any length to underscore James’ inferiority, questioning his entitlement to food and drink, clothing, even to occupying the small apartment itself. You almost had to feel sorry for him, James said, a father who was financially dependent on his teenage son. They lived in a grubby motel only a few miles from the circus where James’ father was a former rodeo clown. On top of that, he was a recovering alcoholic, an ex-convict, and a sex offender. Some nights were understandably a well of self-pity. They had too much pride to go on welfare or food stamps. That obsession, that cruelty, was a kind of attention in a way, he continued, because the fact of his existence was made noticeable in everything that happened. Of course, he didn’t realize this until he experienced attention in another form: acting.

James couldn’t remember exactly when his mother brought him to the studio lot where she was a supporting dancer, but suspects he was around age 12. The boy who was supposed to play a minor role on set never arrived, and so he was dragged on stage. 
 

‘You would have thought I would have been nervous,’ James said candidly, “but performing felt like something I had already been doing all of my life.’ As soon as the camera was pointed towards him, he mimicked his own father actually, borrowing all of the bravado and flame that his own father displayed.

He wasn’t going to say much about what he felt in those years -- which lasted until he came into himself, as an actor that is, and was admitted into rehab for alcohol abuse -- the fear, the physical discomfort, the trauma of having to remind his delirious father that he wasn’t back in Vietnam at 3:00 AM as a gun was pointed at him. That stuff was all in the movie. It was tempting, he said, to consider that the same rage that landed him in rehab had made him an artist. Writing the screenplay had been both a torment and a relief, like pulling a knife out of his chest: he didn’t want to do it, but he knew that if he left it there, the pain would be worse in the long term. 

‘That, and they wouldn’t let me leave rehab until I produced something of worth to say I had acknowledged and processed the trauma,’ he said, chuckling to himself. The audience was silent and the Moderator had folded his hands on his lap, his papers tucked underneath his thigh. He was as much an audience member as I was. 

James made the decision to show the screenplay to his family, to his mother and his father. At first his mother accused him of making this all up. Part of him almost believed her. The problem with being honest, he said, is that you’re slow to realize that other people can lie too, even without knowing it. His father on the other hand wasn’t interested when offered the chance to read it. 

‘All he asked,’ James said, ‘was that I make him look good.’

He wasn’t obliged to get his parent’s permission, but he wanted it anyway, because it wasn’t enough for it to be simply his point of view, his truth. Whether his parents or anyone else were willing to corroborate the events wasn’t as important as re-telling the trauma he had experienced in a way that could be understood. Despite the fact that it was the only thing he had ever truly written that had broken him down and built himself back up -- something that was his understanding of their shared history -- he needed their blessing if he was going to send the screenplay to anyone around town. Of course, they gave him something along those lines because he was up on this stage before us today. 

What had bothered him was that the reviewers for the film seemed to misunderstand his intentions. They called it obnoxious and self-indulgent, forcing paying audiences to endure all the endless suffering a boy could remember about his childhood. His decision to portray his own father was, apparently, a bravura evocation of resentment, not an attempt to understand himself. Even the film’s director, Alma Har’el, was accused of having no sense of narrative trajectory, jumping all over the place like a spastic bullfrog, and that the story was a dizzying series of anecdotal swatches, whatever that meant. All he knew was that the act of making it was meant, ostensibly, to help others. 

A few people have called him brave for writing about it, but in fact, once he’d done it, he’d blab his story to anyone who’d listen. Once the cat was out of the box, he said, you couldn’t put it back in. He’d moved to the East Coast and started the process of becoming himself, he was a bit of a mess. He was like the closet rammed full with junk: when he opened the door everything fell out. It took time to reorganize himself. And the blabbing, the telling, was the easiest thing of all. Getting control of language was getting control of anger and shame, and it was hard, hard to turn it around, to take the mess of experience and make something coherent out of it. Only then did he know that he had gotten the better of the things that happened to him: when he controlled the story rather than it controlling him. 

Anyway, he said to the audience, he’d taken up enough of their time. Agonizing as it was for him, he had to let the others get a word in. And on top of that, he’d gone and done what he always did which was give away the whole story so that some of them wouldn’t have to see the movie. Frankly, he didn’t care whether they saw the movie or not, so long as they bought a ticket. 

The audience laughed and broke into spontaneous, heartfelt applause.

‘I’ve been called a self-publicist,’ James added above the roar, ‘but I learned everything I know from him.’

He pointed at Wes. 

‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about,’ Wes said, red-faced from being put on the spot. 

The truth was, Wes went on, he was confused when the event organizers had first asked him to appear here for a conversation between artists, writers, and directors on how their work reflects their own lived experience.

‘It was obvious why James had been asked to speak,’ Wes said coyly, ‘but me?’ 

The audience laughed again, with only a little less enthusiasm. 

The question of translating personal experience into visual storytelling, was something he hadn’t given much thought to. Over the course of his career, he had made nine feature-length films, all of which he’d directed and written himself with the same recurring cast of actors and performers who, he liked to believe, emerged from their caves for him only. In fact, these actors were so familiar with him and each other by now that the most recent productions had begun to feel like the same cast of a long-running sitcom. None of them, though, had ever mentioned what they thought about the relationship between these films and his personal experiences.  

What Wes had been accused of was being a hipster which, as his wife had pointed out, was better than having an obsession with violence. It was no secret that he had an affinity for the colorful: eye-catching decors, pastel-colored buses and newstands, and anachronistic furnishings, or for the symmetrical. He learned a long time ago that he preferred to devise scenes and contexts that were a little surrealistic, but with characters who were real, such that the emotions would come through anyway even if things were a little unusual. Building sets were more fun that way anyway.

‘The trick,’ he said, ‘is to be fiscally responsible so you can be creatively reckless.’

The rain outside was pouring down even harder now, making it difficult to hear anyone. I adjusted myself in my seat and wiped the sweat off the back of my neck.

He felt he could relate to James’ frustration with being probed by critics, Wes said, because only a few months prior, he had been featured in a prominent magazine for a large spread where the journalist had attributed his visual style to, if we could believe it, his parent’s divorce. It was no secret that his style had, for a long time, been misconstrued as a gimmick, a sort of confection, an amusement, but this journalist had gone so far as to suggest that in fact, his style was an intensely personal thing, very much a part of his character and mode of expression. 

His mistake, as he saw it, was letting this journalist on the set of his most recent production in the first place. Access to a place he had no business being in. He drew a relationship between Wes’s directorial approach and his need to exercise control over one part of his life. As tempting as it was to believe there was a relationship between his profession of constructing fictional worlds and a childhood with a messy divorce, he just didn’t believe it was true.