Yesterday afternoon, as I was turning to walk home after having greeted some friends of one of my producer's under the Cinema Village marquee, I heard a sound every filmmaker longs to hear. A man had just approached the box office window to announce: "One ticket for 'We Pedal Uphill,' please."
I would probably not have turned to look except that as I passed the window, he turned and tapped me on the shoulder. "Excuse me, but: Are you Roland Tec?"
For those of you who haven't made a film, I feel the need to interrupt to explain something. There's something about film that is quite different from theatre and I'm not sure where it comes from exactly but people generally feel far greater license to insult a filmmaker to his or her face than they do about works of theatre. I don't know if it's because there's more money to be made in film or because theatre people are generally more polite. But it's true. No matter what you create for the stage, no one would ever have the nerve to walk up to you and take an accusatory tone with you, as though you had set out to create a piece of shit and sell it for profit.
Not so with film. I remember once at a cocktail party at the Harvard Faculty Club, a complete stranger strode across a crowded room, tapped my name tag, interrupted the conversation I was having to exclaim: "You're Roland Tec. I saw your movie. I was on the selection committee for [blank] film festival. I voted against it. I still can't believe they accepted it." And all this was delivered with a tone of anger, as though I had personally offended him by making a bad movie.
And that is just one example. All of this is to say that when someone approaches me on the street in close proximity to the marquee bearing the title of one of my films and asks if I am indeed the guy responsible for said film, experience tells me odds are good I'm in for a flogging.
So when this kind gentleman instead told me that we had met six or seven years ago after a screening of All the Rage and I had signed his program, I was surprised and touched.
And then he said: "I loved that film! When I saw you had something new playing now, I just had to see it —anything you do. Please, please, keep writing. We need your voice!" Or something to that effect.
Honestly the precise words he used are a bit of a blur because I found myself so moved by the encounter. The combination of several vitriolic reviews and disappointing box office sales had left me emotionally raw, so much so that one stranger's kind words nearly brought me to tears. Right there on 12th Street.
And as my boyfriend and I walked the two blocks back to my apartment, I wondered: Why is it that praise from a stranger on the street can shake me to my core yet the same praise from my family, my friends, my collaborators, doesn't have the same effect? In the light of day, it strikes me as somewhat absurd, really.
The people I know best—their opinions ought to matter the most. And in truth, they do. But there's always that tiny little suspicious voice inside one's head that wonders: "Do they really like what you've done or are they just being kind because they love you?" Not fair, I know. Not fair at all.
My friends and family have generally been brutally and lovingly honest in their critique of this film and I am grateful for it. I just hope I can learn to take it in as much as I took in the praise of that kind stranger I met outside the Cinema Village one Sunday afternoon.
