Creative Partner, True Friend

There are many degrees of creative collaboration - and I can't speak for Dance, because dance is NOT my art, but I can speak for film - and how one collaborates in film varies in the degree of involvement and focus.

I have always subscribed to the Auteur theory - that the director is author of the film.

This doesn't necessarily mean the director WRITES the screenplay (though the director can) but that the director is doing the equivalent of pressing pen to paper when the director MAKES the film. There are so many disciplines involved, highly specialized craftspersons and technicians and artists (often all three at once) working on a film - that the director must carefully select these artists and technicians and craftspeople - and get them to each bring their best game to the table, to concentrate on their art and pour forth their personal best to add to the final piece. It is a true team effort, and a good film requires an all-star team.

Through this team the director "authors" the film - In other words, the Director keeps and communicates the vision, guides the performance, specifies some details, but otherwise gets the hell out of the way.

In that kind of collaboration seeing the sum of the parts become something even greater is the biggest thrill for everyone involved. But there is another form of collaboration - when TWO directors collaborate - a dual role, and I am so blessed in this case to be co-directing this picture with Jeanne. I am proud to say that Jeanne and I have become good friends during these nascent stages of our collaboration, and we complement and support each other's talent and vision in this endeavor in such a way that I know our creative partnership in making this film will be as successful as Jeanne's creative partnership with her true-love and life partner Spider when they wrote the Stardance series.

Of course, we'll be authoring a film together instead of a novel. We each have things to say and communicate, we each have our own concentrations of vision, and the sum of THESE parts will make Stardance something even greater.

Humanity aspires.