Making Earth Rising Heaven Descending blog

Making It 4

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 11:22:11 +0100

Making It 3

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 01:23:59 +0100

In the couple of weeks before leaving for the US I was engaged in setting up filming with Varadakini (for Paris), Nagadakini (for Russia-Ukraine) Lokamitra (for India) and especially Vidyajyoti in London. I was hoping to get include some family members in the film and had suggested covering a visit to her ailing 90 year-old mum in New York. As I didn’t know her ‘story’ that well we arranged to meet in a restaurant and asked if I could film an interview. At that stage I was hoping to avoid using interviews and rely on observing natural conversations. For example with her mum. The interview was fine, we may have had some common understanding though, as it turned out, she seemed quite unprepared to do anything I suggested when we were both in the US. Two days later I arrived in New York and navigated the subway system with the help of a map a black fellow on the train from JFK International gave me. Strangely, despite our mutual friendliness there seem a tension that, as Vajramati explained it, was racial and endemic in every sphere of New York life, at least from a white person’s view which I suppose is the one that matters (irony intended). In the 300 days of filming I must have made some 50 to 100 arrivals in strange places and only on about 4 occasions was I met. So I had a few scary arrivals in foreign places where my contact was made through emails of days or weeks beforehand. Anyway, having arrived at Vajramati’s street door about 19.00 with a pile of luggage I was surprised to get no answer. Fortunately I’d only just bought a mobile phone and received no answer I was able to establish with the miracle of my first mobile (cell) phone and miraculously found out he was leading a class somewhere and he’d be home in three hours. I looked around a couple of blocks and squeezed everything into a tiny taco shop and, afterwards, a quiet C & W bar.
From Vajramati’s arrival onwards things went very well. He’s so at home in the city and is in close personal contact with a sangha that values and appreciates him as a real friend. Though I was able to meet some, others were away or else like some of those featured in the centre’s newsletter issue two had moved on. At least half seemed to be involved in the arts which suited me. The days went by very pleasantly in Varjamati’s company and whether at his tiny apartment, on the subway or in a restaurant we never stopped talking. With my bed unrolled there was not a spare inch left on the floor but the company was great. However, mounting situations to film was very challenging as I had in the first place to deal with super-occupied people, though in fact the sweet voiced Vajramati was undertaking that. After a few days Vidyajyoti arrived in NYC and though she was staying part-time across the landing getting to meet was not at all easy. For days on end I filmed a very willing Vajramati and while enjoying all our various little trips out I was experiencing the beginnings of the frustration that accompanied my month or so in the US. To Be Continued

Making It 2

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 17:39:16 +0100

What follows is a belated account of the earliest shooting for the series written up from memory apart from looking up a few dates in my diary. Christmas 2004 was spent on a meditation retreat at Vajraloka where the idea s for the new film came up hour by hour. Since the August 2003 Order convention, I’d been between the desire to make a film facing out the problems people were clearly struggling with, placing them in wider or more balanced context and so on or giving a helping hand to objectify what was just under the surface, offering to pin the demons, flush them into the light, set up some Dogme inspired grand events. And so on and so forth. I was fired up and set about doing research and talking to some of the people who I saw could be healed a little bit by joining in the new project. Except nobody really wanted to much. I rounded up a focus group (though I was unaware of the term) and asked them what I should do now that I was unprepared to carry on doing histories (actually I’d stopped that in 1997!) Other than to say there was no money so I should do exactly as I wanted with my energy. But during that retreat I let go of all that well-intentioned problem solving. I had a much simpler idea: just a day in the life, around the clock and around the world. A focussed, concentrated contemplation of whatever there was there.
News that I’d got some money came through. A couple more months of research and purchasing equipment and I was ready to shoot.

Shooting began 8 March 2005 and finished in Sydney Australia exactly a year later. The first shoot took place at the first ever FWO community set up in 1968, Sarum House or Aryatara in Croydon, South London. This was at the third attempt to film - the previous two having failed to materialise. I had been trying to ‘do something’ about Croydon for a decade and it wasn’t getting any easier to assemble people. So, I was still in problem solving mode and the the ‘cast’ wasn’t having it and kept dropping out.
Then, towards the end of the month, over a day in Cambridge the last day of February 2005 a So, over two days, I filmed the person I was featuring, the soon-to-be ordained Abhayamati, in the Windhorse warehouse where he now worked and the community at the beautiful old abbey where I interviewed him at his home (I was put up in a more ordinary men’s community around the corner). The next day, I drove with to his old home, Ipswich. We had lunch with a KM, Jnanamitra, visited the Evolution shop he’d worked in and his old centre in town. These stops were all filmed as was the old port area. The light was pretty good but I don’t think I’d a strong sense yet of the new camera, a Sony HDV Z1. Later that day I did some night shooting (this was still winter) of Jonathan with his preceptor-to-be, Saddharaja who was finishing a painting of the visualisation practice for the Abhayamati-to-be. The two days were relaxed and spacious - and that’s how it had been thus far in filming within the FWBO context over nearly 20 years. Looking back, I am horrified at my unpreparedness for what was to come. I had filmed for three weeks in India some years before and there had been some difficulties but with just a little patience and determination I had got everything shot and had had a week’s holiday on the coast. To Be Continued

Making It 1

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 12:49:36 +0100

Premieres of Background and Once Free were two weeks back. Enthusiasm and disagreement which was the better film. Gradually awareness from myself and amongst others that theses two films are best seen and judged within a five-part series as a whole. It is a 200+ minutes search for a meaningful way of life. Indeed the 100+ hours were shot with one film in mind.