Whenever I finish a novel, I weep like a grandmother, because I am saying goodbye to those wondrous characters with whom I’ve walked for two years. Today, when I finished the film “Tamale Road,” I became that grandmother once again.
The movie is about my mother, me, and a lost family: When Mom was a child, her father was murdered. She was taken away from her family. Two summers ago I, after running around every corner of El Salvador, I found that family. This summer we reunited Mom with her Reyes kin, after a separation of eighty years.
After two years spent in El Salvador and behind the editing desk, it is finished. Of course, there will be weeks of “rewrites.” As any novelist (a literary novelist) will tell you, writing is rewriting. You go over and over the manuscript, tightening the syntax, making each sentence (which is the DNA of a book) spark and crackle and light up the night.
Making this movie has been writing a memoir, only with a Canon XH A1
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camera and Final Cut Pro. You begin with an idea, a story, only to be surprised, even shocked, at its ending. Writing or documentary filmmaking is like driving at night: you can’t see your destination, but the headlights, which show you only a hundred feet ahead, are enough to get you home.You don’t work toward an ending; that kills any story, as it has become formulaic. All you do is follow the characters, watch what
they do. Once you’re in pretty deep, the characters go from stick figures to living, demanding people. And they take you into a woodland that you’ve never before visited.
I suggest this to my students; and, rightfully so, some of them turn afraid. It’s most frightening to follow behind a story, ignorant of where and when it will end. It will take you to the voice–at times loving, other times cruel–of your mother; to the movements of an abusive uncle; to the friend who saved you from some spiritual oblivion. It is excitement, wonder, and pure terror. The writer breaks the rules of the threatening voices in your head (that mother, that uncle). They take you there, safely, to the place you’ve been tauaght not to go.
I write because the words keep me alive.
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