@ Directors' Guild Theatre

Raya & I attended The New Yorker Festival last Friday. The evening started with low expectations (who the heck is Errol Morris!? Shame on me considering that I too am a producer!) but at the end of the evening, I was thanking Raya for "persuading" me to come along. I had learned some valuable tips for my next documentary film.

Errol Morris is an American Academy Award winning documentary film director. In 2003, The Guardian listed him as number seven in their list of the world's 40 best directors. His unconventional style of documentary film-making is indeed inspiring. Having been rejected from Oxford & Harvard (sounds familiar!), and dropping out from Princeton & Berkeley, and with no film production background; Errol embarked on film-making and produced (among others) 'Gates of Heaven', 'The Thin Blue Line' and 'The Fog of War'.

 Errol invented the "Interrotron", a device similar to a teleprompter: Errol and his subject each sit facing a camera. The image of each person's face is then projected onto the lens of the other's camera. Instead of looking at a blank lens, both Morris and his subject are looking directly at a human face. The feeling of the monologues that Errol captures on film is human and conversational in a way that is usually impossible when a person is talking directly to a camera. Ted Bafaloukos said of the Interrotron, "...the beauty of it is that it lets people do what they do best, namely watch TV."

We also saw some snippets from the soon-to-be-released film - 'S.O.P: Standard Operating Procedure' (about Abu Ghraib). It was simply..... Raya & I can't wait for its release.

Just like Errol who faced rejections and criticisms... well, to all fellow underdogs & the downtrodden, pls remember that people can criticise and belittle us but as long as we stay focused on our goals, we will definitely reach that next star...