I'M NOT THE HERO

The following is an excerpt from a book I am writing about my years as an independent filmmaker

We all think we are and we always will be in our own imaginations but we’re not all cut out to movie heroes and that’s a lesson I learned the hard way. Coming off my first feature, I jumped right into plans for my second directorial effort. If writing, producing, and helming a micro-budget feature-length film noir wasn’t enough, I decided I’d play the lead role. This came after a failed attempt to cast a local actor in the part. He bailed on two rehearsals, both times because he claimed that he was “mugged”, a very odd reason/excuse that I still don’t know what to think of… Anyway, I started to consider myself for the principal character in THE DETECTIVE’S LOVER and without a shred of doubt dove into the part head first (that’s kinda my style). Well, you don’t know until you know and I didn’t know much back then.

I was learning the craft of filmmaking in real time: how to make a successful scene, how to stay on schedule/budget, how to deal with the personalities of cast/crew, how to collaborate, and how to get my vision up on the screen. All these things I continue to learn more about with every project but that was the very beginning, the dawn of understanding. The hardest lesson I learned on THE DETECTIVE’S LOVER was that I’m not the hero. The character, a reporter who is thrown into the crime underworld of Phoenix, was written as a young, romantic protagonist who learns to be a gritty, seasoned detective. That was the arch, the journey. I felt romantic. I felt like I could be gritty. The problem is that I communicated none of that on screen. Nope. I came off as naive, awkward, even silly at times. And it didn’t take till post-production to figure that out… we could feel it on set. I remember my buddy James pointing out how goofy I looked running across a freeway footbridge in what was supposed to be a tense chase scene. Though he always teased me about something, I knew deep down inside there was some truth behind his joking this time. I could feel the movie spinning away from drama towards comedy. Sometimes that happens and as a director you have to steer the tone back. Other times, I soon learned, you should follow what the movie is telling you it wants to be. I should have played into it and shifted my original intentions to create a more humorous riff on the noir genre. But my innocence and pride kept the ship on course and led me straight into troubled waters.

The movie wasn’t good. Now, if you can find it, it’s good for a laugh at best but unfortunately more of a so-bad-it’s-good laugh than one I can claim credit for. But like most mistakes, it made me better. It didn’t scare me away from playing roles in my own movies but it showed me that though I might feel like the hero, I don’t come off that way. I’m an anti-hero at best but I soon saw that the camera likes me when I’m either a bad guy, often a psychotic killer, or a goofball. I’m meant to play the villain or the fool. I would never cast myself as the lawman in a Western, not unless he was demented or was as competent as a Don Knotts character. And it’s important to know your place in the often delusional, rarely self-aware world of movies.

This will eventually be published on my website, runningwildfilms.com, and my Travis Mills Facebook page. For the next week, it is exclusively available here

The picture was taken on the set of THE DETECTIVE'S LOVER in 2012.