As My Latest Film V13 Nears Completion…

Alan Cumming as Sigmund Freud in V13.

With the actors strike having ended, I can finally take care of the Additional Dialogue Recording (ADR) that was holding us back from completing V13.

Before filmmaking, my first love was poetry—but not by much. I started both of them in my early teens, when I was given access at school to a Super 8 camera. Poetry took over for many years until eventually, living in Paris, my love of film re-emerged and has dominated my life ever since. Nevertheless, my love of poetry has continued to influence how I think of film.

Samuel H. Levine as Adolf in V13.

Paul Valery, one of the great French poets of the first half of the 20th century, once wrote, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Perhaps the affinity between poetry and cinema feel especially close in this aperçu of Valery because editing, the final stage of filmmaking—the one where it becomes a question of abandonment—is also the one which uniquely belongs to the art of moving pictures, as many filmmakers have pointed out.

It is when editing moving pictures that one has the feeling of entering a realm of poetics unique to the seventh art—as fundamental to filmmaking as the sound of words is to poetry.