The following is a faithful if partial narrative of the last three days of the Savannah Film Festival 2007.

Day Six: Thursday, November 1

So far these middle days of the festival are calm. Withstanding the anxiety of finding a parking space in town, there’s a true easiness to its pace. Screening. Break. Talk to filmmakers. Screening. Break. A stable pattern that lessens the fatigue that’s setting in. Everyone carries the expression, that satisfied though dazed look of seeing so many films over an extended period of time. It’s almost hypnotic. I realize I’ve started to lose my focus a bit. I no longer remember in as much detail the nuances of Savannah, of the films I’m seeing, of the festival itself. Perhaps that’s the challenge of getting to know any one place—it becomes unrecognizable as it also becomes a temporary home.

It’s the night here I recall in more detail, how Mark Wynns, as exhausted as I am, sat us in the front for screenings of Reservation Road and Day Zero; how Mark nodded fervently as Todd Wagner, in accepting his Pioneer in Entertainment and Media award, spoke of the need to face distribution challenges with innovation and moxy; how a cinephile sitting next to us declared Reservation Road “emotional pornography”; how I told him I’d steal that, with his permission, for a review; how he smiled at me; how in watching Day Zero my entire focus was cast on upcoming actor Jon Bernthal; how I determined as I was watching the last frame that I needed to speak with him; how I left the theater dazed by an actor so completely in a moment; how it reminded me of theater, of seeing a stage actor staring longingly, with such grace at one blank space on the back wall of an auditorium.

Day Seven: Friday November 2

Today I’ll think of later with some sense of strangeness, of solitude, of shame perhaps too. It has nothing to do with the festival itself or its programming or its gracious staff. I’m happy to say that; I’m happy to say that was always consistent, always so organized. Rather, it has everything to do with this same fatigue mentioned earlier. Only now, I’m well rested, and instead I see the weariness reflected in another’s eyes.

Little moments are only little moments, and they shouldn’t be made more. In logic, that is. In journalism as well. It’s artists who make big things of little things, and it’s art that says these little things matter. Yet, to explain the next interaction without explaining its big consequence is to render null its significance, is to make one human moment just another blip in a timeline of several.

James Franco, in town to discuss his directorial work Good Time Max, looks even from a distance worn down. He slouches onto the stage at the Lucas Theatre, sits on the stool, holds the microphone lightly, waits for questions. His answers are at best poor, his rambling about William Faulkner incoherent, his mention of Pineapple Express the only statement made with any sort of passion. He looks not out to the audience but down and to the right, as if he’s trying with such effort to concentrate that he’s using only his sense of hearing. In the distance away, he seems like an intelligent guy, a really kind guy, in other circumstances, the type of guy people call a conversationalist and mean it without a hint of sarcasm.

I’d arranged with Sunny Nelson a few days prior a 10-minute interview with the director, and as I left the theater, making my way to our meeting point, my heart already knew what my head tried rationally to deny. Whatever would come of this short interview would be far from enough and more than likely worse than mediocre. Franco didn’t need some random journalist grilling him about the strength of his story or the weakness of his stylism. This poor guy just needed some sleep.

“I heard you had a redeye in. Will you be okay?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says, his eyes barely focused yet again down and to the right.

Working with longtime writing partner Merriwether Williams, Franco’s Good Time Max explores the archetypical dilemma of fraternal bonds, already tenuous, further broken through the lens of drug abuse. Precocious and incorrigible Max (Franco) overshadows his older brother Adam (Matt Bell) in both intelligence and likeability. Along with the inherent genius, however, Max also developed a predilection for excess, a quality that throughout the film pits brother against brother, the two engaged in a not so silent battle. Bound to the hackneyed style of traditional drug movies—time lapses, quick, sometimes unjustified cuts and hallucinatory sequences, Good Time Max nonetheless showcases in all cast strong performances and a true understanding of the importance of minor moments of emotion. Digitally shot sequences of a road trip taken by Max and Adam, in particular, surface honest and moving sentiment.

In jotting down notes for an interview, I focused primarily on the relationship between the style and sentiment of the film’s fabric. Our conversation starts on a question about that, Franco sipping a coffee just brought for him and placed quietly, by its carrier, on the table.

“We shot a lot. We shot more than ended up in the film and found that it was really long, too fat. So we spent a long time in the editing room, probably eight or nine months just finding out what the rhythm of the film was going to be and what was necessary,” he begins. “When Max is hitting bottom, with some of the scenes, we wanted to reflect his emotional state, subjective state stylistically, so that you get stuff like the dream sequences. We were trying to find a way to show a character hitting bottom that isn’t just sweating it out in a prison cell, trying to find metaphors or images that would relate that in a fresh way if we could.

“There were recurring motifs—like the bunny, and it happened early on in the film that there are almost flash forwards of what is going to happen, as if it’s a prolepsis. It’s almost as if Max is determining his fate with these early choices and has an inkling of it. The rabbit is a life force that he deals with in the beginning of the film one way and then it comes back to bite him at the end of the film.”

“I saw that image of the rabbit in a converse manner, that being that it represents the unattainable, and so until the end, until Max hits rock bottom and ends up in prison, cleaning up, everything is unattainable for him—“ I counter.

“Yeah, but he approaches it in a very different way in the beginning. It’s kind of like how he approaches life—“I’m just going to take what I want,” and it’s a very self-centered and limited approach. Hopefully when he hits bottom and has that hallucination, it’s more of a surrender to this life force, and hopefully he finds some sort of peace after that.”

The last five minutes of our conversation devolve into awful. I’ve gotten, as is my tendency, too cerebral, asking Franco about peace and whether or not his characters, and by association human beings in general, are born with it. I’m working off a passing line of Max’s dialogue, “…They instigate their own problems to look at them with greater insight.” Meanwhile, Franco’s losing his battle with exhaustion.

“It’s a weird debate to get into. I don’t know what it has to do with my movie,” he says. “The quotation you used about geniuses creating their own problems is taken from James Joyce, and that was just a way to show Max’s arrogance. He thinks that he’s in control of his own life, and he’s really, really not.”

Festival advisory board member and all around professional miracle worker Bobby Zarem saddles up, moving in slowly, as if he’s approaching someone as delicate as glass.

“They’ll hold Mrs. Wilkes’ open for us if we can get there right now.”

“Okay,” Franco says.

“Okay. Is that—Do you want to—Would you like—,” Zarem tumbles over his words, too concerned and polite to ask perhaps the most logical question, “Would you like to head back to the hotel to rest?”

“Let’s do that. Ask one more question,” Zarem finally says. “Is that okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright. They’re holding it for us.”

“Yes,” Franco annunciates.

“He’s worth holding it for.”

“Absolutely,” I say.

“One more question,” Zarem mumbles as he walks off.

And, so I ask the question I always ask, the one that either gets a wonderful answer or none at all. “What is one question about your film that you’ve wanted to be asked but haven’t been?”

Franco keeps his attention focused down and to the right, a small sigh of laughter escaping.

Without thinking, with only a welling heartbreak reaching to my throat, I place my hand on this stranger’s shoulder, my thought that he seems to have so little choice right now. Did he even want to come here? Fly all these miles to promote a film he has too little energy to explain? Why do this “right” thing when he’d clearly rather be anywhere else?

“You okay? You waking up?” I ask, and my heart is full of this heaviness—because this is the little thing with the big significance. For the first time in ten minutes, Franco looks up and meets my eyes, and there is nothing there but the boyish purity of weariness.

“Yeah,” he says.

Nelson comes over to me as Franco, Zarem and the crew leave for Mrs. Wilkes Dining Room.

“I’m sorry that was cut so short,” she says.

“No, it’s okay,” I say. “He just really needs a nap.”

I rush downstairs to meet up with Cynthia Gore, or just Cindy to me, the woman I’m staying with through Couchsurfing.com. She’s not a moviegoer in general, but on her afternoon off, I’ve convinced her to see Ed Burns new film Purple Violets. I’ve already seen the film earlier in the week, but it’s commercial enough, I think, to appeal to a viewer who’s just hoping to see the next iteration of Saw.

Recommending a film is about as nerve-wracking as watching babies swim underwater. You’re always sure both will drown. And so we sit there in the theater, Cindy watching the screen while I steal quick glimpses of her reaction. She doesn’t seem moved. She doesn’t hate it either. It is, for her, a nonentity of a film. She doesn’t have to tell me that when we walk out of the Lucas Theatre. I just know.

We get ice cream at Leopold’s. She tells me she’s self-conscious eating a Sunday by herself. “I’m just not in the mood for ice cream,” I say. I ask her to tell me about something that matters to her, and she tells me about her life, her family, her future husband. A few nights before, I mentioned that I was just now learning to be an adult, and she as a reflection, said “I was an adult as soon as I learned to use a microwave.”

“How did your fiance propose?” I ask.

“Oh, I wanted it to be really romantic, but it wasn’t at all,” she says. “I’d made a really big deal out of wanting it to be big, and what does he go do? We were just sitting in my living room, and he starts asking me what kind of ring I want and where I want to be proposed to, and, I tell him that defeats the purpose of him surprising me, and then he’s down on his knee, and I’m thinking, “Don’t do this now. We just talked about it being romantic. Don’t do this now.””

She shows me the ring. It’s Claddagh.

“You’re Irish?” I ask.

“No,” she says.

Although Cindy would kindly stay longer, and while I’d love to spend more time with her, I have to head over to the Marshall House and prepare notes, get ready for the night’s screening. As I watch her walk in the opposite direction, I realize that there are so many good people like her, so many people for whom film is merely a luxury, a once a month. The fact puts my ego in check, and suddenly the festival fatigue couples with a sense of existential worthlessness. I wash over in memory meeting Franco, how tired he looked, how it seemed to me that I’d failed him, not understood the right questions to ask, that some of that humanity was blanketed by work that might, just might not be all that important. This is reality. We make ourselves important though we don’t know if we are. We just hope. By God, how we hope, we are.

Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages screens that night, and next to me Mark exclaims repeatedly in a whisper, “The editing. Look, the editing is wonderful.” I’m not focusing on the editing though. I’m involved with the story, a simple and quite beautiful one of brother and sister misfits Wendy and Jon Savage (Laura Linney, Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who place their father (Philip Bosco) in a nursing home. The quirky sadness of the piece complements my pensive state, and suddenly, this other strange thing happens today—everything starts to matter again. “Film is important,” I think, and it happens so fluidly that I don’t realize until well after the screening, in fact just before I’m going to sleep that night, that Jenkins’ long awaited follow-up film has had that exact effect.

And, there’s one other moment, a little later, at the party hosted at First City Club that makes me feel that same way. As Mark and I wander around the venue, later parking ourselves at a table, he turns to me and says, “I’m glad you’re here,” and I, having just sipped my drink, can only, whole-heartedly, sign back in large gestures, my fingers outstretched, “I’m glad you’re here too.”

Day Eight: Saturday, November 3

In the morning I see festival Managing Director Len Cripe, who as always, is walking quickly and with purpose.

“Are you happy it’s almost over?” I ask as he passes by me.

“Sad actually,” he says, half-smiling and continues on his way.

When I meet with him later in the day, Executive Director Danny Filson is of much the same buoyant constitution. On an idealistic jumping off point, we start our conversation talking about the experience of movie watching, how it can be so much of the time magical.

“I don’t remember the first film I saw,” he says, after a pause. “It was either Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or Song of the South.

“To me the experience is primarily about the story. My background is primarily in theater and performing arts, so knowing and experiencing a sense of letting go and falling into the story that is in front of me, whether that’s in theater, whether that’s in a book, whether it’s in film, has always been something that’s been part of life. The ability to see yourself in the play, in the book, in the film or to be able to place yourself in there has always been something that people resonate with and respond to. You can go way back into the oral tradition where tales, stories were passed down from generation to generation. In many ways, those are the same things we do now on a television screen or film screen. Those kinds of experiences, whether you come from a theatrical background, or you come from a film background, or—this is what’s most exciting to me when I think about filmmaking—the response of a visual artist. That to me is one of the most exciting things that you can possibly see.

“An artist, across the board, no matter what, an audience member, across the board, no matter what, responds to images. That’s just a normal part of our process, so watching people respond to the story or the images that unfold, and then just watching the different perspectives that people have with those images, has always been something that I’ve enjoyed creating, presenting or being involved with.

“What I think is really wonderful about the Savannah Film Festival is that although the festival has audience members from around the country—actually globally has audiences that come in, people from all over Europe, France, England, Asian countries—is that response of students at SCAD, who are artists, the response of the audiences to the story and the image that generally are the most rewarding.”

“Do you ever get the rush of nervousness and excitement that you’re doing something big?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Filson says. “The volunteers and staff at SCAD who are doing the festival, there is no better job. You get payoffs all the time—you get people who enjoy good films, people that relate to the stumbles, the trips, when the words don’t come out. That’s happened to me before, but here’s what’s at the heart of that nervousness. It’s not necessarily standing up in front of an audience. It is understanding that you are hosting the work of another artist, and that is an awesome responsibility. You want to be perfect.”

“You’re recently brought up in other interviews that as (the festival expands), you want to make sure to remain true to the integrity of what you’ve built over the last ten years. So, I was hoping that you could quickly give me an idea of what that evolution’s meant and as you spoke about before, what the heart of the festival is now.”

“The challenge is always to grow but to grow successfully, and I think we have established a ten year track record of exceptional growth. There is the danger that you lose some of the magic of the Savannah Film Festival if it gets to “big,” but if you asked me ten years ago, “Could I see us producing a festival this size?,” I would have said, “No, I don’t think we could get that big.” But, every year it’s bigger. Every year it’s a higher caliber filmmaker, artist or student coming in. Every year there are things that surprise me immensely.

“What you have to remember is that the Savannah Film Festival is the Savannah College of Art & Design’s project… And so the festival has the opportunity to capitalize on that infrastructure to continue to grow, to be tremendously successful, to get larger and larger without losing, at its heart, that whole experience of young filmmaker, audience member, established celebrity, well known director. They can all still have that same experience because the infrastructure is in place and the support is there. Without SCAD, there would be no Savannah Film Festival.

“I think we can be tremendously successful. We can be a larger festival. We can continue to grow by leaps and bounds. And, yes the challenge is to make sure that at its heart it is that wonderful experience, but I think we can do it.”

Separating the festival, and SCAD itself, from the city would be a misstep. Walking on the streets of the Southern belle, its easy to see how the two complement each other, Filson explaining it here better than ever I could surmise.

“I hope we’re doing a good job,” he says in ending note. “I hope we fulfill many, many important needs that our students have, our community has, our region has.”

The evening steals in without notice, and now we find ourselves in the Trustees Theater for the last screening of SFF 2007, a showing of Marc Forster’s The Kite Runner. Screenwriter David Benioff, who I’ve spoken with earlier in the day, is in line to be honored with an Outstanding Achievement in Cinema Award along with Charlie Rose, in town accepting his Lifetime Achievement Award for Entertainment Journalism. Rose speaks of addressing with artists not just the art but rather the state of the human condition. That, he says, is ultimately what he searches for in his interviews. That search is his life’s true achievement.

Without much surprise, Ed Burns’ Purple Violets takes home the narrative competition award while Bill Plympton’s Shut-Eye Hotel nabs the animation award. John and Brad Hennegan’s The First Saturday in May shares its documentary feature win with James and Maureen Castle Tusty’s The Singing Revolution. In shorts, Will Frears All Saints Day wins the overall, with John Arlotto’s Deface taking home an editing kudos and Michelle Steffes pulling in a directing award for Driftwood. It’s the students though that manage to speech steal the awards runs. In taking home several awards for Si Tú No Estas, Noe Santillian-Lopez thanks and honors his grandfather in a classy and classic fashion, and to counter this perfectly San Diego State University filmies Destin Cretton and Lowell Frank, in accepting the HBO Films Student Competition award for their short Deacon’s Mondays, play jesters, declaring publicly and joyously just how truly clueless they are.

There’s a time then just before the lights go down, that quiet space of mulling that precedes storytelling, the rest to hold us until after the screen flickers with images so quickly, we no longer understand stillness.

Final Thoughts & The Short List:

While there were some glaring programming stumbles this year, August Rush, New Urban Cowboy: The Labors of Michael E. Arth and Suffering Man’s Charity to name a few, SFF 2007 held true to offering a diversity of content, bringing in stylistically ranging narratives and animations to cater to a whole community. While with The Band’s Visit and Persepolis, there was international and political focus, Honeydripper and Grace Is Gone glimpsed at American struggles. Where the The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was a highly stylized story of personal growth, The Savages was of the same theme in a more accessible build. There was a great deal of thought put into that, and although August Rush foremost wins accolades as one of the most unbearable and clichéd pieces of filmmaking to sit through in my book, it’s also the type of film that has an audience, and SFF noted and respected that.

Most impressive about the festival, however, was the execution of the panels and overall organization of content. It’s truly a festival where a student or filmmaker can learn about the independent process. The atmosphere for discussion and engagement is extremely high, and every one of the festival staffers and volunteers is knowledgeable and helpful. It’s a hard festival to be lost or feel lost at. People are there to help you at any and every turn. All you have to do is ask them questions.

Do I recommend going to this festival? Absolutely.

What’s the atmosphere and dress code like? Professional and semi-professional. Pack nice slacks, dress shirts, skirts and dresses. It’s a classy but relaxed affair.

What undercover aspect of the festival should people know about? The morning coffee talks. They’re set up for students, but if you happen to be up early in the morning, wander into the Marshall House to listen in on the intimate filmmaker to student chats.

What’s the best coffee shop and why? The Sentient Bean for scones. Gallery Espresso for Chai Tea Lattes.

Will I personally attend again? I certainly hope so.

For more information on the festival, to view video interviews with Charlie Rose and David Benioff, or to submit a film visit www.scad.edu/filmfest/.

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