This is a guest post by Jason Cuthbert.
I am a man who has zero problems admitting that we have been wrongfully taught to believe that males should do all the thinking and women can only do all the feeling. But we all do all the thinking; it’s just us guys that unfortunately ignore those tingly emotions. But if boys and men don’t have real life feminine angels to bless their development like I did, they will need to turn to female storytellers to unlearn the wrong ways to treat women in life and in fiction: those people that so graciously carried every single human being in their bodies for 3/4ths of a year.
I am taking great pride in directing a true story featuring the first two leading ladies of my life: my mother and sister in Colouring Book: The Mixed Race Documentary. As I move closer to publicly putting three generations of our multicultural family’s racial situations into a film, I think back to the valuable lessons I’ve also gleaned from five female storytellers that have made me a better male and male storyteller.
Ava DuVernay
Way before it was ever announced that Ava DuVernay would become my choice for Best Director when she rose her head high above the hills of Mount Hollywood with her Martin Luther King drama Selma – we followed each other on Twitter. I completely appreciate this digital window into her very personal filmmaking process. By adding Ava’s prolific 140 character-or-less points of view to my Twitter timeline, I shared her victory as the first African-American to win Best Director at the Sundance Film Festival for Middle of Nowhere. I watched as she erected her African American Film Releasing Movement (AFFRM) to assist storytellers from a similar experience, building audiences for Big Words and Vanishing Pearls before my very eyes.
There were also those deep DuVernay tweets of solidarity during the Trayvon Martin horror show and the #Ferguson demand for justice. Then my inspiration reached above the clouds when Ava DuVernay began sharing her research trips, production updates and promotional runs as the director and co-writer of Selma. Whether it is a love story in her hometown of Compton, or passionately portraying the biggest figure of the Civil Rights movement, DuVernay has taught me the importance of making cinema personal. If a piece of me isn’t in the work…it aint working.
Diablo Cody
I admittedly was more than fashionably late to the Diablo Cody party that started off with stripper tales told in her popular blog. But once I happily suffered from unapologetic laughing fits in front of complete strangers while watching Cody’s story Juno, I was instantly in awe of this Academy Award winner’s whimsical way with words. I loved how the bold “Diablo Dialect” vomited out of her character’s mouths with zero fear of being considered pretentious. This inventive keyboard killer wielded words that were born to be reincarnated as bumper stickers and t-shirts.
Juno defied stereotypes: she was not brainless, half naked or waiting to be rescued. She was a young mother-to-be that was actually striving to be responsible and take ownership of her actions. These coming-of-age elements normally get traded out for fart jokes and keg parties. But Cody with the devilish first name taught me the importance of coloring outside of the lines and to not be afraid of writing a script that feels like I had way too much fun concocting it.
Sarah Polley
While developing the structure for my first full-length film: Colouring Book: The Mixed Race Documentary, I rewatched Sarah Polley’s super brilliant documentary-within-a–documentary-with-a-taste-of-lime: Stories We Tell. It carries a similar approach to Colouring Book in that I will also be the Sarah Polley narrator in my doc, probably making my family just as uncomfortable with my personal questions like she did.
I love how Sarah Polley uses humor when things get serious while getting us misty-eyed moments later. Polley taught me that documentaries don’t have to stay reluctantly chained to the wall as dusty talking head book reports. You are allowed to incorporate hybrid meta-dramatic approaches and peek-a-boo “its just a movie” moments while you arrive at the truth.
Kathryn Bigelow
As the director of explosive hard-hitting thrillers like Point Break, The Hurt Locker, and Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow refuses to drop to her knees before the feet of gender stereotypes. I dare you to find a single romantic comedy on her report card as of today’s date. Kathryn Bigelow has educated me on the idea that if a protagonist is going to be really violent then there has to be more than just courage and a brain inside that soldier of misfortunate – there needs to be a beating heart.
Bigelow’s opinion on being a female director, or more accurately, a director who just happens to be a female can be summed up in one of Kathryn Bigelow’s many fine quotes: “If there’s specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can’t change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies.”
Francesca D’Amico
The female storyteller I have actually learned the most from is Francesca D’ Amico – the producer of Colouring Book: The Mixed Race Documentary. When I brainstorm out loud or quietly deliver thoughts in cell phone texts, she isn’t brutally honest–she is soothingly honest. She puts my imagination at ease with her clearly drawn reasons to bring a concept to life, or drop a bad idea off the face of the Earth–fast!
Francesca cares about everyone’s feelings and it is her self-less compassion for everyone who will ever exist that has helped to organically attract people to our documentary. I’ve learned from Francesca D’Amico that those silent emotional connections between human beings are little timeless stories of eternal universal truth. If the audience can’t relate to the characters on a primal level, no amount of glamour will remove how useless the story will be.
Jason Cuthbert is a screenwriter, writer and the biracial (African Trinidadian and Caucasian American) creator, director and co-producer of Colouring Book: The Mixed Race Documentary, a full-length film comparison of multiculturalism in the United States to Canada, paralleled by the exploration of Jason Cuthbert’s own mixed race experience.
For more information on Colouring Book: The Mixed Race Documentary:
Jason’s Twitter: @A2Jason
Francesca’s Twitter: @HipHopScholar82
Colouring Book’s Twitter: @ColouringBk
Website: ColouringBook.info
Support: http://www.seedandspark.com/studio/colouring-book-productions