Here is a bit of correspondence between myself and renowned film critic and Boston University Professor Ray Carney. I wouldn't normally post something like this, but it was already posted on his website
In fact, the only reason I even knew that he replied to my email was because someone I didn't even know Facebook requested me and sent me a message about it. Anyway, I wasn't aware that he simply posts emails and replies publicly, but since it is out there anyway, it might as well be here...
Subject: bursting through concrete
Dear Professor Carney,
Hi. I'm Wes Tank, I'm a filmmaker from Milwaukee. I first came into contact with your work four years ago when I was writing the screenplay for my first feature film. It was Cassavetes on Cassavetes, and it changed everything for me. We spent a little over a year shooting the film, and shot nearly 60 hours of footage. I was revising it, going in new directions and keeping it intuitive every step of the way (this proved very difficult as I found out that change made some people very nervous and sometimes paranoid...I wonder if this was the case on Cassavetes' sets). I have been editing for over six months now, and I am just beginning to find the structure.
I recently read The Films of Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies, and it has changed everything again. Your work is incredibly inspiring. Your writings contain the same combination of true sprawling open-endedness and eloquently dire and explosive precision that Cassavetes' films contain. I have also become exposed to so many inspiring films and filmmakers that I would have never heard of without your online recommendations. Thank you for doing what you do.
I'm curious...what are you working on now? I hope the comprehensive, all-art-encompassing, creative biography is still in the works. From what I've read it sounds amazing.
Lastly, I want to mention that I have been seriously looking into Boston University for grad school after I finish up my film. I have a BFA in experimental film production from UW Milwaukee. My fiance wants to get into Tufts to get an MA in Law and Diplomacy and an MS in Nutrition (food systems and society) so it seems like a step in the right direction. I'm planning to go into Film Studies so I can teach the films of Cassavetes, Tarkovsky, Herzog, Mallick, and others. while making my own. Do you often take on graduate students as a professor at BU? If you do, I would be interested in the possibility. I feel that I could learn a lot from you.
Thanks again, and all the best to you,
Wes
PS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLiMhXkpOXY (Trailer for my film...its kind of old and has less and less to do with what the final product will be, but gives you somewhat of an idea. It looks better if you click 'view in high quality' right under the player. If you click on 'stumblesome' you can see some more recent short experiments i have been doing with video.)
RC replies: You might enjoy and benefit from Boston U; you might not. I just can't say. That would be true of every university. The best thing is to come to an Open House (several take place every year) and then do the same thing I would tell anyone in your situation thinking of attending any university in America: Take time and talk hard with the faculty, not in a group but one on one--hard, hard, hard. By hard I mean: refuse to indulge in "small talk" or "chit chat" or "cocktail party talk." Refuse to do that. Get them in private, off to the side, and ask hard, specific, focused questions: ask them what films they have made and how you can see their work; ask them to send you a copy of their syllabus for the first class you would take with them; ask them what films they like, and -- if they name some work you know -- quiz them about why they like it and what it does to them. Don't let them try to avoid answering. Don't let them give you vague responses. If they do, you can be sure they are frauds. If they do, you can be sure they will have nothing to say in class of interest. If they don't want to have this conversation with you, if they say they are too busy, that's the way they will be as teachers. Also keep in mind the obvious: I am not the Department. Many of them hate and despise me and my work, many of them hate this web site, many of them love Hollywood movies, many of them dislike filmmakers like Cassavetes or know little or nothing about independent film. That's just the reality -- See page 101, the boxed material at the bottom, for more on that subject. Read the last five or six paragraphs in particular. Finally, for more background about the program go to the menu at the top of this page, where it says "Boston U." and read the material on that page too. Good luck! May our paths cross (I don't come to all Open Houses, but I am at a couple of them each year.) If you come here, I do have many grad. students in my courses. But keep "blasting" (that was Cassavetes' word to me--harder, tougher than "bursting!") through that concrete!!! Blast away! It's the only way to go!!! Love, Ray
P.S. All of the above quizzing can be done by email or on the telephone. And be sure you look at their films or read their essays. That will reveal their minds, just as my writing (here and in my books) reveals mine. Every potential student should do this before spending a hundred thousand dollars or more. You'd kick the tires on a car. Quiz, cross-examine your future faculty. Beware of salesmen and salespitches!
P.P.S. An afterthought: I just re-read your note to me and now am thinking that you are almost certainly wildly over-qualified for the program. Though it varies from year to year of course, most of your classmates will not have made films or even know very much about filmmaking. Don't faint but, based on what you tell me, you're actually better qualified -- with more film experience at least -- than many of the faculty you'd be taking courses with! You actually have experience with writing and directing a feature film. They don't. I could be forgetting someone of course, but I don't think a single one of them has made and released a single feature film -- ever -- at least nothing I've ever heard about or seen screened in my years here. In other words, you've wrestled with narrative issues and organizational problems and editing concerns they themselves haven't..... You could teach them a thing or two.
The larger and more important question to grapple with is why you feel you need to be a student again? What's the pull, what's the fear, what's the need? Most of the greatest indie filmmakers in America (Robert Kramer, Mark Rappaport, John Cassavetes, Tom Noonan, Elaine May, etc. etc.) never went to film school at all. So I'm asking an emotional as much as a technical question: Why do you need this certification? Why do you want to be a student sitting comfortably in a classroom rather than a creator struggling out in the world? The first is easier, of course; but is that the right reason to do it? And wouldn't the hundred thousand dollars (or more) that you will have to spend on your film school tuition be better spent making a movie? You can learn the technical stuff in six weeks by apprenticing yourself to Rob Nilsson or Tom Noonan or Caveh Zahedi. Why this need for school? (Click on this link to open a window to some more thoughts about the function of film school, and its being unnecessary for many students.)
