What can a filmmaker show us about addiction?
In April 2018, I spoke with Christopher Emmons, a writer, director, and composer who grew up in Milwaukee and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I first found his work through Prone, a short film that tells two stories side by side. One of them follows a lonely young man in a support group for people dependent on prescription pills.
This is an archive episode, recorded when the show covered addiction and recovery broadly. Much of the hour is about filmmaking itself. Yet the questions his films ask about loneliness, shame, and what people reach for when they feel empty kept pulling us back to the subject of the show.
What was Prone really about?
At 1:46, Christopher said the film had accidentally become more relevant since he made it, with the Me Too movement and the opioid crisis both in the news. When he wrote it, he was thinking about how people medicate their sense of powerlessness and their inability to connect. The second story looks at a different kind of addiction, the hold that power has on people who are afraid to lose it.
In his telling, the young man becomes infatuated with a woman in the group, and when things go badly he returns to the pills and hits bottom. So, the film is less about the substance than about what it stands in for: no love, no fulfillment, and no other way to feel anything good.
Can a film show what dependence feels like from the inside?
From 5:11, Christopher talked about Surrender, a film written by Mark Renshaw about a man with alcohol dependence. The film follows him through work, binge drinking, and hallucinatory states, and it shows his demons as visions on the screen. Interestingly, the people who try to help him appear as enemies, because he knows they would stop him.
He described the lead as an unreliable narrator. The viewer is never sure whether he is drunk or sober, or whether a scene is real or imagined, and Christopher admitted that it makes for a stressful film to watch. In his view, most films about the subject take a step back and observe. His team wanted to jump inside it.
Why do people hide the truth from their doctor?
At 8:46, I told a story from a meeting of specialists. When the moderator asked what was most difficult about the work, one doctor said she could not stand the lying. My first thought was that the lying is part of the condition, not the person.
At 13:28, I described a patient who told me he had never been in treatment before. The state’s prescription records showed that he had seen a doctor the month before, and when I told him so, he broke down. He did not want me to see him as someone who had failed before.
Christopher saw shame underneath it. At 15:08, he said that many of us are taught to present a happy, polished face, which is the opposite of what a person should do in a doctor’s office. In fact, he did not think this kind of lying carries the same moral weight as an ordinary lie. At 16:48, I added that addiction is a mental health condition, and like anxiety or depression, it is not something a person can simply snap out of.
Which film about drug use did Christopher recommend?
At 17:21, Christopher recommended Candy, an Australian film with Heath Ledger, Geoffrey Rush, and Abbie Cornish. He placed it alongside The Panic in Needle Park among the most powerful films about severe drug use. He singled out a late scene in which two people meet again, barely speak, and let their faces carry both the love and the damage.
I admitted that I had avoided watching drug movies. Still, this one sounded like something I would benefit from watching.
Why linger on a bad decision?
At 21:45, after I told him that Prone almost works as a silent film, Christopher explained his use of slow motion. In one sequence, a young artist climbs a staircase toward the hotel room of a man she does not want to see. Slowing it down gives the viewer time to think about why someone would make that choice, and to watch hope and doubt cross her face.
At 24:22, he credited an actor with one of its most striking images. In the script, the character simply arrives with flowers and finds the woman he loves with someone else. The actor asked one question, what does he do with the flowers, and the answer became the roses spinning in the sink. Of course, the lesson Christopher took from it was to listen to everyone’s ideas, from the actors to the lighting crew.
What do editing and music add to a film?
At 28:05, Christopher called editing his favorite stage by far. In his words, that stage can save a bad film or ruin a good one, because it is almost like writing the story again. Nothing compares, in his view, to receiving a piece of music from the composer that lifts a scene beyond what he had imagined.
From 29:12, we talked about John Williams. Christopher said the music in the Indiana Jones films is basically a character. For him, music is the unspoken language that takes an audience where words and images cannot.
Why leave a film’s ending open?
At 31:19, I asked about the end of Prone, where the young man appears to attempt suicide. Christopher said that at his lowest point the character is hit by something like a rebirth, a primal urge to live. The film shows him surface and then cuts away.
He left it open on purpose. The image was meant to give the viewer some hope that the young man might turn his life around, without promising it. A definite answer closes the conversation, he said, while an open one invites people to talk about what leads someone to that point.
Is happiness the wrong thing to chase?
At 1:06:42, Christopher brought the conversation back to addiction. In his view, people feel pressure to look happy all the time and curate their social media to prove it, and he called happiness the opiate of the masses. If happiness fades and leaves us wanting more, he said, then happiness itself works like an addiction.
At 1:08:56, I said that over the last few years I had come to value freedom even more than happiness. For someone who is struggling with addiction, it means not being a slave to a drug, a jail cell, or a parole officer.
However, Christopher did not want to be heard as saying people should be unhappy. At 1:10:30, he said that knowing yourself, and understanding why you do what you do, can make a person less likely to end up on the worst roads. He compared it to securing your own oxygen mask on a plane before helping your neighbor.
What did it take to film the Roebling family’s story?
From 1:12:24, Christopher talked about Roebling’s Bridge, the little-known story of the family behind the Brooklyn Bridge. It was his first period piece and his first film about real people, and he admitted that the weight of real history intimidated him. Planes flying overhead kept breaking the illusion of the nineteenth century.
At 1:16:42, he described how Emily Roebling ended up passing instructions to the builders on behalf of her husband, the chief engineer, after he became too sick to direct the work himself.
Who is Christopher Emmons?
Christopher Emmons is a filmmaker and composer from Milwaukee who earned his bachelor’s degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he wrote and directed the dark comedy feature Shine Baby Shine. His films include New Skin, Surrender, Prone, The Survivor, and Roebling’s Bridge, and when we spoke he was preparing a thriller called The Eighth House.
What can listeners take away from this conversation?
Christopher’s films treat dependence as something that grows out of loneliness, shame, and an empty life, and they try to place the viewer inside that experience instead of judging it from the outside. Seen from there, the lying and hiding that frustrate so many professionals look less like character flaws and more like part of the condition, which is how I described them on air.
How do I approach this today?
Today my practice focuses on helping people come off benzodiazepines and other medications gradually, and on medication for alcohol and opioid dependence. Physical dependence is not addiction, and the safest way off is usually slow.
Call 911 or go to an emergency department if there is a seizure, confusion or hallucinations, or thoughts of self-harm. For thoughts of suicide or any mental health crisis, you can also call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
This page is educational. It is not medical advice, and listening to the episode or reading this page does not create a doctor-patient relationship. Decisions about starting, continuing, or tapering any medication should be made with your own physician.
Full transcript
A note from Dr. Leeds: my guests speak from their own experience and expertise, and the terminology they use is their own. Whatever the topic, this show holds to one distinction: physical dependence on a prescribed medication is not addiction. This transcript is educational content, not medical advice, and nothing here creates a doctor-patient relationship.
Read the full transcript (80 minutes)
Dr. Mark Leeds [00:09] Welcome to The Rehab on the Mental Health News Radio Network. I am Dr. Mark Leeds and I will be your host. Join me in exploring the world of addiction treatment. How can we improve the ways that we help individuals to overcome addiction? The goal of treatment is to save lives and help people to get back on track to a path towards success and happiness in life. Christopher Carson Emmons grew up in Milwaukee, where he had a great interest in filmmaking. While earning his bachelor’s at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he wrote and directed the dark comedy feature Shine Baby Shine, about a bumbling shampoo salesman. His films since have enjoyed much success on the festival circuit, including New Skin, Surrender, Prone, The Survivor, and the soon-to-be-released Roeblings Bridge, the little-known true story of the family behind the Brooklyn Bridge. Also coming soon is Emmons’s next feature, The Eighth House, a thriller about a veteran who gets pulled into an astrology-based cult. So, Christopher, thank you for joining me, and welcome to the Rehab Podcast. So, yeah, I first became aware of your work by watching the film Prone, and it was great. I loved watching it. A short film with two stories, you know, one of them about addiction, which is sort of the topic of the podcast and what I do at work, treating addiction. Can you tell me more about that? What, you know, what led you to write that story? And, you know, what’s your connection with the topic of addiction?
Christopher Emmons [01:46] Yeah, so the film Prone that you’re talking about has sort of accidentally become more relevant in the last year or so. We made it a little while ago, a couple of years ago. And now with both the Me Too movement with workplace harassment in the art world and outside the art world, but we show it in the art world in this film. Also, with the opioid crisis, it’s kind of unfortunately become the topics in there become more current and pressing. So, you know, back when I was working on it and writing it, I was just kind of focused on how people medicate both their sense of powerlessness and inability to connect. And then also how there’s another form of addiction in there that’s explored through the more vile, powerful character, which is kind of those who are addicted to their power and don’t want to lose it. So I was kind of looking at that dichotomy and kind of interested in how it could play out through two different stories and how they could connect, how they could overlap, and thematically what would be similar and echo through the two stories. But the character that goes to the prescription pill addict group in the film specifically is, you know, a very lonely person. He is not able to connect with others the way he’d want to. And he kind of feels a big hole in his life. And then there’s this girl, unfortunately, in the support group that he’s sort of infatuated with. So he is unable to really focus on the healing process while he’s there and he should probably switch groups to be honest but he stays there and things don’t go as he would like with this girl so then he resorts back to taking the pills that he had been and kind of goes back to square one, and then we see him just kind of have a meltdown and really hit rock bottom. So really it’s just a sense of, you know, not enjoying your life, not being fulfilled, not having love, not being happy, and then the only way you can get any feeling of bliss is through, you know, taking this substance. And just showing the damage that can do.
Dr. Mark Leeds [04:33] Have you considered the possibility of doing further writing on the topic? I mean, now that, like you said, it is becoming, you know, I mean, there’s a national epidemic of opioid addiction and overdose, and it’s progressed for a lot of people beyond pills. I mean, the heroin use is rampant now, and there’s the poisoning of the heroin supply with things like fentanyl and carfentanil, and it’s become almost, I mean, a whole other thing. I mean, there’s people carrying around Narcan now, which is a rescue drug and saving people in the middle of NA meetings who are overdosing. I mean, it’s just become a whole new thing. Have you considered revisiting that topic?
Christopher Emmons [05:11] Well, I think there’s this fine line between, you know, ripped from the headlines, so to speak, taking an idea that’s, you know, current and then, you know, exploiting or capitalizing off of people’s familiarity with something dreadful. So, you know, I don’t necessarily set out to, you know, for example, do a movie about heroin for that reason. But I have dealt with, you know, a lot of characters that have faced different forms of addiction, obsession and things like that. So I did do a movie a couple of years ago now called Surrender. It was written by a guy named Mark Renshaw out of the UK. He’s really good. And it was this very personal story about alcohol addiction. What that one was sort of it’s from the point of view of this alcoholic. So we follow him around to work and through his binge drinking through sort of hallucinatory states as he’s drinking and sort of self-destructing. And he’s got a good family at home, but he is unable to show them, you know, his best self and give them love he wants to. And he can’t help but make the wrong decision even though he knows it’s wrong. So what we decided to do in there was actually sort of visualize his quote-unquote demons. So you see a lot of things that come off in sort of a horror-like fashion, visions he has of like a dark side of himself or we he also has moments where there’s people that are trying to help him that he sees as enemies in a state even because he knows that they would you know try to stop him from doing what he wants to in that moment so there’s a lot of tricky stuff we did in that one. It’s kind of, you know, Alice in Wonderland-ish a little bit in the way that it’s down the rabbit hole and through a lot of trippy things, but we didn’t do it for the sake of being cool or trippy. We were trying to actually show what it would be like to follow this man through a couple of days of his life. And it was very interesting kind of having a lead character that’s sort of an unreliable narrator, so you don’t know, is he drunk, is he sober, is this real, is this imagined? And I think it makes for a pretty stressful viewing experience because a lot of films that deal with different forms of addiction are taking a step back and just observing it. And we thought it would be interesting to actually jump inside of it. So that was the first time I’d ever done something like that. It was a very intense and interesting exercise for sure.
Dr. Mark Leeds [08:46] That’s great, and it’s true. A lot of people, even in the field of addiction treatment, don’t really take the point of view of the patient or the person who’s addicted. And I’ve actually heard addiction specialists. We sat in a meeting once, and the moderator of the group asked us what was most difficult for us in treating addiction. And one doctor, she was a board-certified addiction specialist. She said, well, I mostly can’t stand the lying. And my first thought was, well, that’s part of the disease. That’s not the person. I mean, that’s what they do. They lie. I mean, you just have to accept that. I mean, how could you know, being a specialist in the field not like that or have a problem with it?
Christopher Emmons [09:25] So can you tell me a little bit about kind of what it is you do, you know, what you do with patients and things like that, just so I can get a better sense of it and maybe some of the people listening?
Dr. Mark Leeds [09:35] Yeah, definitely. I’m a family practice doctor, and I graduated medical school in 1996 and from residency in 99, […] I went to school in Des Moines, Iowa. Yeah, so I went into family medicine, […] and 2005, the end of the year, I decided I’m going to open my own clinic. I’m going to get away from being told when to show up to work and where to be and that sort of thing. And it worked out for a few years, and it didn’t work out because I made the mistake of going back to work for somebody. And a couple of years, and during that time, I had taken a course on addiction treatment and got certified for that for treating opioid addiction, and that was in 2006, I believe. And at that time, I decided I want to do this. I want to dedicate my practice to it. I want to help as many people as possible. And it kind of went on the back burner for a long time. In 2015, I just decided, I mean, I’m not going to worry about working for people. I don’t care about money. I don’t care about, all I care about is I just want to, you know, start over and kind of define my practices that I help people with addiction. And, you know, we did it. I kind of quit two jobs I had. We opened a small clinic. We had some help with the rent and things like that. And then we kept our expenses low. And just in the last like a little over two years you know things have been you know growing and doing better so basically what I do is I treat mostly opioid addiction with what they call medication assisted treatment you know we use medications like suboxone buprenorphine also naltrexone which is an opioid blocker and you know it can also be used for alcohol addiction which has been a new thing a lot more people are coming in for alcohol alcoholism treatment and also people just for addiction in general and, you know, even some addictions where there’s no good medical treatment. But, you know, sometimes a person wants to sit down and talk to a doctor that, you know, that has experience and, you know, isn’t critical or condemning of them, but, you know, understanding of what it’s like. And, you know, and you just hear so many incredible stories. And that’s the most rewarding thing is to see the change in a person from one visit to the next. When a person comes in and they’ve been using heroin up until the day before they come in and they look terrible and they come in for the next visit, they look a little bit better. And by, you know, they’ll come in a few times in that first month and by the one month follow up, a lot of times I don’t even recognize the patients when they come back in. They look like completely different people. They’ve gotten their lives back together. They can talk. They’re functioning. I mean, it almost works too well. It works so well that sometimes people think they’re cured. And, you know, it’s not that easy to cure a chronic illness. But, yeah, it’s definitely rewarding. And so one of the ways that we were able to increase our business and get more attention was I tried traditional advertising. It didn’t work that well. So I started working on SEO of just blogging, which is kind of a scary thing for a doctor to blog, to go online and start because you’re afraid people are going to criticize you and take it apart. But I just did it, and I noticed that people were contacting me not just from the local area but from all over the place. I was getting calls from all over the country, you know, asking, you know, how do I do this? You know, where do I go? And I was able to give people helpful information. And, you know, it kind of gave me the idea, like, how can I reach out and help more and more people, you know, regardless of if they can come into my little clinic where I can only see, you know, a maximum of maybe 100 people total. But maybe I can, you know, write more and reach out more. And, you know, when people ask questions, I can write an article and share with them the article. And now I have something I can share with more people. And then the podcast is an extension of that, just maybe a way to get the message out and helpful information out to even more people.
Christopher Emmons [13:18] What do you do that’s different or cutting edge or revolutionary or just not like traditional addiction treatment? What do you do that’s different?
Dr. Mark Leeds [13:28] Well, the typical medical practice where somebody would get, say, come and get medication. You know, like Suboxone is the one that has the best known others, and that’s just a particular brand of medication. A lot of the clinics are these very busy places where the doctors don’t really have time to talk or listen to a patient. And, you know, you’re kind of like a number. You’re rushed in and out. You might not even see a doctor. You might see a nurse practitioner, physician’s assistant. And a lot of the doctors, like I’ve been telling you before, they don’t really understand what it’s like to, you know, the disease of addiction. And I learn a lot. I think, you know, in a lot of cases I can be a good listener and I learn a lot from the stories that I hear. You know, but a lot of doctors are not really understanding. They kind of see it as, you know, maybe a moral failing and they don’t like the lying and the unreliability. So I think one thing I do differently is that I spend time with my patients. I sit down, I listen to them, talk to them, maybe understanding of them and forgiving. You know, when, you know, one guy came in and he right away started lying. He said, I’ve never taken this medication before. I’ve never been in treatment before. And, you know, we talked for a while. Then one thing that we can do is that I’m able to go look up their prescription history. You know, everything is recorded by the state. And I came back in the room and I said, well, actually, you saw a doctor last month and you’ve been getting treatment. And, you know, he kind of broke down and said, you know, I really don’t even know why I lied about that. I don’t know why. I mean, there was no good reason, but I just wanted to, I didn’t want to let you know that. I didn’t want you to see me as someone who’s failed in treatment before. And, you know, I mean, that’s the kind of thing. I mean, maybe another doctor might have kicked him out and said, you know, I’m not going to sit and talk to a patient that just lied to me. But it’s something that we have to be understanding of as part of the condition.
Christopher Emmons [15:08] There’s a high degree of shame associated with somebody showing up and telling you that something’s wrong. It’s this idea of always presenting a happy face or trying to look polished or look like you have everything together and that you’re functioning great, which is the complete opposite of what you should be doing if you’re going into a doctor to seek treatment. But I think it’s ingrained in us, isn’t it? This idea that, you know, we want to look good and not admit all these things that are not societally accepted. And so the lying, I mean, it makes a lot of sense. And I think that it’s amazing if you can find a gentle way to kind of cut through that and move on. And, you know, the classic addict is somebody that tells you they don’t have a problem. And then underneath, you know, inside their slippers, underneath the bed are, you know, whatever small doses of whatever substance they’re addicted to. And they hide stuff all over the place because, you know, they know it’s bad. They don’t want you to know about it. So the lying is part of it. And some people get really good at it. And I don’t think that it has the same moral implications as somebody telling you a white lie or a harmful lie outside the realm of dealing with mental health.
Dr. Mark Leeds [16:48] Yeah, and it is definitely a mental health condition. And there’s a lot of misunderstanding of mental illness in general. I mean, there’s a thinking in the general public that mental illness in a lot of cases is not real and people should be able to just snap out of it. And that’s not the case with anxiety, depression, and a wide variety of mental illnesses, including addiction. It’s not something that a person can just snap out of. And it’s a hard thing for people to understand and a hard thing to explain if they haven’t gone through it themselves.
Christopher Emmons [17:21] Yeah, so I think it’s really great what you’re doing. It sounds like you’re really helping people out there. And I think it’s great to have spoken to somebody that is really trying to help. That’s great. I admire that. Have you seen, there’s this Australian movie called Candy with Heath Ledger, Geoffrey Rush and Abby Cornish.
Dr. Mark Leeds [17:45] No, I haven’t seen that.
Christopher Emmons [17:46] You should watch that, to me, along with Panic in Needle Park, Salvatino, are like the greatest movies about severe substance addiction. I think they’re using heroin in it. I can’t remember exactly. But the journey that the characters take in that one is just devastatingly raw and real to lengths that would surprise you, I think. But I really appreciated where they took it. And I think more people should see that movie. I think a lot of people think Heath Ledger and they think the Joker is the greatest thing he ever did. And that’s probably true. But in terms of like an everyday guy that went through bad circumstances and got himself into some trouble, that was one of my favorite performances of his ever and favorite films on the topic.
Dr. Mark Leeds [18:50] Yeah, I’m actually I’m looking at the description here. I don’t want to read too much about it because I’m going to I’m going to watch this today. Honestly I’ve avoided watching drug movies and heroin movies just you know but this one looks good
Christopher Emmons [19:04] Yeah I highly recommend just where it goes and then where it ends up in the end the ending scene I can’t remember if it’s the exact end scene but there’s two characters that go through a lot together obviously and then they see each other again after not having seen each other at this sort of like table in a cafe or something and most of it is unspoken like they’re looking at each other and they love each other but they’re also realizing that there’s been this history and this toxic thing that happened between them that they’ll probably never be able to repair but they hardly speak and you see all of that in silence in their faces you know they go between sadness smiling, all of this stuff in a manner that’s unspoken. And I just, when I saw that, I just was completely blown away by how honest it felt and how subtle it was and how they didn’t even need to speak.
Dr. Mark Leeds [20:11] Yeah, the real life process of how people get heroin and use heroin, it’s just become kind of like a modern, clean, you know, sterile process. I mean, not to say it’s clean or sterile, but I mean, like, you know, traditionally, you know, people imagine heroin addicts, you know, maybe under a bridge in a dirty house, you know, sharing needles and that sort of thing. And a lot of the people aren’t even using needles. They snort or they sniff the heroin and it’s being delivered by Uber. It’s being delivered by these nice clean cut people that show up at your house when you call them. I mean, it’s just it’s almost scary how easy it is. And it’s a struggle I have with some of the patients and it’s so easy to get that they can’t make it the short amount of time they have to transition to medical treatment. But, yeah, I’m going to watch this movie because it sounds like something that I would benefit from just to get that perspective.
Christopher Emmons [21:06] I think so.
Dr. Mark Leeds [21:10] Anyway, yeah, I just wanted to go back again to Prone. Oh, yeah, and I was asking, so I watched it on Vimeo. Is that something that anybody can go look up and watch? Or was that a private link that I was watching it through?
Christopher Emmons [21:22] Yeah, anybody can watch that. It’s out there and it’s free.
Dr. Mark Leeds [21:27] I really enjoyed it. I watched it a few times. It actually seems like it works almost even as a silent film. The first time I watched it, I had the sound down. Then I watched it a couple more times, of course, with the sound on. And I like to watch things with caption or subtitles also. But you can almost take in the entire story, even watching it with the sound off.
Christopher Emmons [21:45] Yeah, I think that is a compliment, so thank you. But there’s long sections of it that were done through, you know, there’s just music playing over there, things like that. But I thought that there’s a couple of sequences that I wanted to shoot in the slow motion, not because it looked cool, although I was aware that it would look cool and that’s cool. But, you know, there’s this part where she’s walking up these stairs and we call it the walk of shame because she was basically walking up the staircase to a man’s hotel room that she didn’t want to see. Because he gave her sort of a deal with the devil, basically, that as an artist, he would show her work if she were to sleep with him. And that’s the thing that, you know, in that film sort of accidentally and unfortunately now has more relevance in the light of some of these things that have been coming out. But anyway, we wanted to sort of extend the bad decision and linger on it so that you’re not just like thinking, oh, that’s a bad decision, but you start having the time to think about why someone would do this and, you know, all the implications of that. And just drawing out this horrible thing, you get these sort of micro expressions between somebody having, you know, hope. Should I, in what I, you know, is this wrong? Or does the end justify the mean? All these little expressions that you get through lingering on a moment like that by shooting it sort of in slow motion. And, you know, I think that’s kind of why it does work as a silent film, because you’re still getting all the information, even if you turn the sound off, of what these characters are in for and what they’re thinking and what they’re doing. And, you know, I thought it would be nice to give this sort of poetic quality to people making decisions that they knew were the wrong decision and just seeing really what that was
Dr. Mark Leeds [24:09] I really love the imagery of the roses spinning in the sink I mean that’s a great idea I don’t think I’ve ever seen that anywhere before and never would have thought of that but it looked great
Christopher Emmons [24:22] Thank you, yeah I wish I came up with that was the actor who puts them in the sink. When I sent him the script, he emailed me back, like, this one brilliant sentence. Because I think the script had said, like, you know, he gives her the flower, or he wants to bring in the flowers, and then he finds her in bed with another man. And he’s like, oh, I guess this whole apology thing is in vain and I’m going to leave now. And then he wrote me this email that said, one question, what does he do with the flowers? And then, like, my mind exploded. And then I think we talked about it and he said, what if it goes in the garbage disposal? So we spent, like, a huge portion of the shoot trying to get that to look just right. Like there wasn’t a working garbage disposal at the location where he puts the flowers in and you see him doing it. So then we cut to another sink in another house that actually had a working garbage disposal. And we went through like, you know, doing it a lot of times. And so we got it just right. But, yeah, that’s a classic case of listen to your actors’ ideas, because listen to everyone’s ideas, the lighting person, whoever, because it can add, like, the greatest thing to the film that you would have never thought of.
Dr. Mark Leeds [25:57] It reminds me, I think I heard, I think it was Mark Hamill, he was doing, you know, one of these recent interviews about the original Star Wars, And he said that the secret to the success, or one of them, was just that George Lucas had picked the best possible actors to work together. And by having the best actress for the part, he didn’t really have to do anything other than let them act. I guess it’s a similar thing, is that if you’re working with the right people, things will come together. And you get credit for writing and directing it. But I guess that’s just like with an orchestra, when you see the conductor conducting. The conducting work was already done before then. It was all the hard work of organizing the orchestra together.
Christopher Emmons [26:39] Yeah, it can be as similar as that. Actors or the right musicians, you know, performers make all the difference. They’re the face of the idea that you’re trying to convey. So if they’re not, you know, great, then how are you going to be great at what you’re trying to get out there as a concept or at any given moment or the entire overarching, you know, idea of whatever piece you’re working on. So, yeah, I mean, it’s all about the actors, the crew members, everything that you know, sort of see but don’t understand how it got there and then everything you don’t see. And then you know my job really is just to filter you know like ideas that are I think work with the tone ideas that I don’t think work and just try to keep it on track really and keep everybody working together but yeah it’s sort of an amorphous thing sometimes it’s hard to explain yeah
Dr. Mark Leeds [27:52] And then I’m sure the editing is a huge part of it’s a film could be a completely different film depending on how you do the editing. Someone also might say that the secret to a great film was all in the editing.
Christopher Emmons [28:05] Yeah, you can save a bad film, you can ruin a good one in the editing process. Editing is my favorite stage by far. I like rehearsals. I’m probably my second favorite. Shooting is probably my third favorite. But editing is definitely the most stimulating process because it’s sort of like rewriting almost. It’s like writing it again. You can change things that aren’t working. It’s just really tedious, but incredibly rewarding and stimulating process. And also, I should add that there’s nothing like the feeling of getting when your composer sends you know, a piece of music that’s to go over a scene you’ve been editing. And then, you know, it’s perfect and it elevates the material, you know, and it makes it so much better than you’d even thought it could be. That feeling is, that’s one that’s hard to beat, for sure.
Dr. Mark Leeds [29:12] Yeah, music is another big part of watching a great movie. Sometimes it feels like the music is what makes it great. I mean, of course, one of the great composers is John Williams, and just his score seems to make the movie sometimes. It could almost be a whole different movie, and just to have that music there makes all the difference.
Christopher Emmons [29:37] Yeah, it’s actually kind of ridiculous how much of an impact his music has made on so many different movies. I mean, sometimes I think about it and I’m like, is my favorite part of Superman anything about the visuals or the acting? No, it’s da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. That’s what I love about it and that’s what I think of when I think back on that movie and you know I think that the music in Indiana Jones movies is you know is basically a character and you know maybe it’s my favorite character in those movies music can it’s a form of communicating the things that You were trying to, on set, through words and visuals and color and all these things, but, you know, ultimately it’s the unspoken language that is able to really get you there.
Dr. Mark Leeds [30:43] Yeah, you just reminded me in the buildup in the Superman theme, it always reminded me that maybe he was trying to capture the effect of the newsroom, you know, the typing and the press is going, you know, that was kind of maybe the inspiration for that buildup towards the main theme in the original Superman movie. And just to have that kind of built into it, you don’t even realize it. You’re like, oh, wait a second, this is the, you know, he’s tied in the whole newsroom and Clark Kent and the typewriter is going as part of the actual theme.
Christopher Emmons [31:15] Yeah, he did work at the Daily Planet, so there you go.
Dr. Mark Leeds [31:19] Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to ask you about in Prone, Ryan, the character with the pill addiction. Does he commit suicide in the end? Is that what happens when he jumps in the water? Is that a suicide attempt?
Christopher Emmons [31:33] Yeah, that’s certainly an attempt, but you do see him surface. So if you look at it again closely, he does spend some time in the lake, and then he wakes up with sort of a, you know, kind of expecting to die there. And then he wakes up with this look on his face and then he starts to scream and it’s almost like a rebirth or a primal urge to live that only hits him then, you know, at the lowest point. Kind of this restart mechanism. So you do see him then surface in kind of a wide shot. Like his head kind of drifts up slightly above the water and then we cut away. And the reason for that was, you know, to give you some hope that maybe he would go on to turn his life around and, you know, do something better. But then not answer whether that is what happened or, you know, did he just try again? So we didn’t want to answer that because a finite answer, I guess, closes the conversation. And that’s why we kind of hope that if you don’t answer the state of the character, that it is sort of an opening point to a conversation about what led somebody like that there and what can cause people to do these kinds of things.
Dr. Mark Leeds [33:13] And suicide has also become a big topic recently. So you actually, back in 2013, I think, was it 2010 you started working on Prone, or was it 2013?
Christopher Emmons [33:26] We shot it at the beginning of 2013, and I’d written it in 2012.
Dr. Mark Leeds [33:30] Yeah, so you were covering these topics of suicide and addiction and addiction to power, addiction to drugs, and the Me Too issue, the issue of people, whether consent is really consent. When you have people with, I guess, a power differential, where one person has power over another person’s life or career, there really is no such thing as consent in those situations. And that’s great that people can now, this film can be brought out, and we’ve been talking about this for a long time. But, yeah, I really enjoyed it. I just watched it a few times. I wanted to keep seeing what else I could get out of it. Watching it again, I’m looking for the details. And, you know, it was really good.
Christopher Emmons [34:15] Well, thank you. Yeah, I mean, that was kind of a labor of love when we made it. You know, we didn’t have a big budget at all. And I was lucky enough to get some really amazing crew members that didn’t even really know me to work on it. And some really good actors. And I felt very fortunate to have been able to work with all of them. It was really kind of a special thing. We shot it in like two and a half days. Just kind of going nonstop at this thing. And there were tons of locations, and I wasn’t smart enough to know how taxing that would be. So we were all just kind of loopy at the end of it. But I’m pretty proud of what everybody did on that project for sure.
Dr. Mark Leeds [35:15] Yeah, and […] I had no idea that so much was involved in shooting such a short piece. I mean it took the entire day to shoot this 30 second commercial and so much equipment and people involved and I think when we watch it, I guess any great work of art, you kind of imagine it all just kind of came together and the general public doesn’t realize what goes into something like that.
Christopher Emmons [35:49] Right. And I think that when the general public is wondering that while watching something, it must be pretty bad. And then if they’re thinking about it much later, then it must have been entertaining and effective. I’m still able to watch movies in the theater that are good and not be thinking about oh nice tracking shot or they haven’t even cut for five minutes yet if it’s really good I’m still just kind of an audience member and the second something is not so good then I’m thinking about only technicalities and where it went wrong and hoping I can take something away from where it seems to have gone wrong and learn from that.
Dr. Mark Leeds [36:45] A lot of the new big releases, a lot of them are just, I mean, they’re almost like animated movies. It’s almost, you know, they’re supposed to be live action. We just recently were watching, what was it, Justice League, and some of it, like, it took me out of the movie because I’m like, well, the physics don’t make sense. I mean, you know, this one guy just threw the other guy really far, and it didn’t reflect the weight of what a person weighs. I mean, it’s just, you know, almost like the animation might have been rushed, and, you know, it kind of brings your attention back to the fact that even though this is computer-generated animation, it’s still animation, and, you know, there’s not much of actual real people, you know, and even the people have been altered to look differently than they actually look.
Christopher Emmons [37:28] Yeah, I haven’t seen that yet, but I saw the one that takes place before it, And I know what you mean. There’s a lot of artifice taking over the screen and not a lot of flesh and blood being left behind. It’s very unfortunate. But if you look at film history, you see a lot of like, depending on what was going on in politics, what was going on in the world, you know, during different decades, things like that. You see periods of time where art is purely escapism and doesn’t reflect reality at all, and people’s reality is too unbearable that they just want to go to the movie theater and get away from it. And then you have other periods of time, like look at the 1970s, pre-Star Wars, where you are reflecting reality in its raw form, and you’re looking at really complicated issues and putting that hopefully in an entertaining way in front of audiences. I mean, that’s what I’m mainly interested in, but I love a good escapist film just as much as the rest of them.
Dr. Mark Leeds [38:43] Yeah, one thing I always thought was interesting, and I don’t think you can really realize this until you think about it, that in the original Jurassic Park movie, there’s something like six minutes entirely of computer-generated dinosaurs. I mean, through that, the entire hour and a half or however long the movie is, it’s just six minutes of animation, but you think you’re watching it all the way through.
Christopher Emmons [39:05] Right. Yeah, I’m still blown away by the work that Stan Winston’s shop did on that giant T-Rex fan. Like when it comes close to the Jeep and you’re seeing its eyes blink and dilate, there’s like air coming out of its nostrils, nostrils are flaring, the lip is curling, you know, he’s drooling, all this stuff is just so incredible. And that’s another thing that, you know, we haven’t lost it entirely, but for some reason there’s this push to do these cartoon creatures when we had it figured out in the 90s. And a lot of people will agree that, you know, Jurassic Park and Terminator 2 were sort of the highest point of effects work in terms of it being really convincing and revolutionary. And that we’ve been kind of getting too digital in the, you know, with our effects and things like that sense and getting lazy, really, by just letting the computer fix everything. But that’s also true of everyday life, isn’t it?
Dr. Mark Leeds [40:15] Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly. And that’s another thing that phones, everybody thinks that these phones we have today are the greatest. The quality of a phone call has gone down. In the 90s, we had phones that sounded better than we have now. So it’s true in a lot of areas. Yeah, yeah. And I guess also audio, I guess the turntables, vinyl records sounded better than the music we have now and MP3s and whatever.
Christopher Emmons [40:43] Yeah, like if you listen to what an old recording of a big band jazz group sounded like in the 30s, recorded on tape, and then you listen to what that kind of thing sounds like, recorded on modern recording equipment. Like there’s a charm that’s in the lo-fi tape recording of it when the levels are peaking during a trumpet solo. It’s just there’s something more alive about it.
Dr. Mark Leeds [41:20] Yeah, yeah. I remember when CDs first came out, I remember reading a complaint that the sound of a cymbal isn’t captured properly at the sample rate of, I guess, the 44.1k that they’re sampling at. And you’re supposed to sample at double what a person can hear. And most people, I guess, don’t hear above that 20K level, but still there’s something lost that you’re losing information and that sound with the way that we’re recording. And, of course, now with MP3s, we’ve gone below that.
Christopher Emmons [41:50] Yeah, I was on a train not long ago, and I saw a guy with one hand bracing himself holding the bar, And then with his other hand, he’s holding his little phone watching The Dark Knight. And I was like, oh, man, what’s happening? I saw that in IMAX. It was like the craziest experience ever. It was like three stories of screen and full immersion. And this guy’s watching that experience on this little thing on a train. And I had to remind myself you know maybe he did see it in the theater and he loved it so much that he wanted to take it on the go and just have it with him and he just really likes that movie but I you know
Dr. Mark Leeds [42:43] Yeah I think on the movie Gravity they make fun of that about how this is how it’s meant to be seen you’re going to watch it on this screen or this screen and they keep showing the smaller and smaller screens going through tablet down to phone and yeah
Christopher Emmons [42:57] It was fun that’s hilarious yeah that was another one that was very much designed for the theatrical experience when I found that I sat in 3d and I’m not a big fan of the 3d thing especially post-conversion 3d but I really responded to the 3d and that one with those long takes kind of floating over the planet you start to feel the actual depth of it and feel like you’re there because they’re not cutting every five seconds, and it was just very clearly designed for that specific experience. And, you know, hopefully that’s something we can continue to do and preserve.
Dr. Mark Leeds [43:40] I was going to ask you about that. We saw one of the Star Wars, I think the, not this current Star Wars movie, but the one before it, we went to the theater, and I stupidly picked the 3D theater and the lighting. I mean, this may be something that you’re dealing with when your films are presented, or maybe not, maybe at film festivals, they handle this better. But the bulbs and the projectors, I mean, they keep getting darker and darker to the point where it’s almost better to watch these things on TV in some cases. And I guess the 3D is even worse. I mean, you almost couldn’t tell what was going on. It was so dark.
Christopher Emmons [44:15] Yeah, well, the image is certainly dimmed when you put on 3D glasses and watch something like that’s just kind of unavoidable. But, yeah, I also think that it gives you the sense that you’re watching a movie because it’s kind of, like, gimmicky when you’re watching a quickly cut movie and you’re just constantly recalibrating your eye to a new image every couple seconds. Yeah. How would you possibly not be aware you’re watching a movie? So I think that 3D is better for things like Gravity that have extremely long immersive takes that just keep going and leading you into the image and letting you become a part of it and feel like you’re there. But I don’t think most films that play in 3D are designed to utilize the format for anything other than a gimmick that can drive up sale prices. And we also have to think about well if they weren’t doing that then would people still be going to the theater and that’s a worthy question but is 3D the answer I don’t know
Dr. Mark Leeds [45:31] As far as the brightness I know that was an issue that Roger Ebert complained about while he was still alive that when you go to the theater that maybe the projection people the theater owners are trying to save money by dimming the projector bulb and getting more hours out of the bulb, and that with digital projectors that shouldn’t be an issue, but they may be wrongly think that it is, and they continue to do the same thing. Has that been an issue for you in presenting your films as far as you go to the theater and it doesn’t look on the big screen the way that you meant for it to look because of the brightness issues?
Christopher Emmons [46:09] I’ve encountered that a little bit, but some of that is honestly done from like, oh, maybe you could have dimmed the house lights just a little more. You know, that kind of thing. The worst thing that ever happened in terms of presentation of a film at a film festival is that, actually, I think it happened to me twice, the film, like, stops in the middle, and, like, the projector goes to, like, they forgot to not, you know, have, like, a sleep mode, where, like, say, after 45 minutes it goes to sleep if you don’t push a button. And, you know, just like stuff like that. And then, you know, they say, stand by for, we’re going to remedy this technical difficulty. And then they, you know, it comes back on and they force people to, you know, rewind about three minutes. And then you feel like you’re burdening the audience by having to watch a section of it again. And then you start to experience guilt, you know. For like, oh, my movie is making you know, have to like lose three minutes plus the fixing time of your life instead of just playing through the way it was meant to and entertaining you. Now it’s become a burden or some horrible thing. And, you know, and then you feel bad for the performers and for everybody that worked on it to try to create this atmosphere and this mood. And then it just all, like, just within seconds just kind of dissipates. And, you know, are people still following the story structure and the pacing and all that you work so hard on when they, you know, get it to play again? So that was more of a nightmare than anything I’ve had with lighting. I think that’s something that, you know, other people viewing haven’t necessarily picked up on, even if I have, like, oh, I would like it to be more dark in this room because the projector would look better. You know, people are still seeing it and, you know, maybe not thinking that critically about it. But, yeah, certainly I’d like conditions to be exactly as I’d want them to be. But I’m not Christopher Nolan who can show up at the Chinese theater right before the screening and inspect the image before it’s showed to an audience. I went to the Chinese theater when Interstellar was premiered, and he was literally just there checking the sound. He was checking the sound and the image and everything before it played for people, and that was a pretty surreal experience.
Dr. Mark Leeds [49:00] Oh, wow. Yeah, I guess the Chinese theater was featured on the Oscars where they ran across the street and interrupted their movie.
Christopher Emmons [49:08] Oh, yeah, I did see that.
Dr. Mark Leeds [49:11] I wanted to ask you about music. I see that you’re also a composer. Do you play a particular instrument or several instruments?
Christopher Emmons [49:20] I do, yeah. That’s a funny thing to ask. I grew up in a sort of family of musicians. So, you know, I started on piano. I learned upright bass, electric bass, learned guitar. I had a teacher that let me play drums in the band room during my study hall until I got decent at them. I was horrible. And it was right next to a choir room, and they hated hearing me practice. It must have been awful for them and kind of offsetting as they were trying to sing. But I was happy to learn drums. In that time. But yeah, I play stuff and I grew up sort of playing in, you know, different bands and stuff and eventually got into writing music for my own movies. I’ve done music for a couple other films a couple of years back. You know, it’s something I’d like to do again, but I’ve I’ve been working with this wonderful composer out of Australia named Zalen Talis, who’s much better than me. And, you know, it makes me want to get good again and have time to, you know, write more, both for film and I guess for myself as well. When I was younger, like in high school, I used to just be in the basement recording all the time, you know. But it was really great because it was a creative space and it kept my mind going. And, you know, my friends and I would record music, be shooting, you know, movies that we thought were cool, which, you know, hindsight is 20-20. But it was good stuff to be doing. So, yeah, it’s good to be in a healthy creative space.
Dr. Mark Leeds [51:24] Yeah, definitely. When you were young, what was the common medium that people were using? Was it digital video or was it film at the time? I know when I was a child, we were using a film camera. And we actually, some friends and I, we made this, you know, we recorded or we did, you know, a film with our little Star Wars figures. And, you know, we thought it was going to be great. You know, we went on and on making, it seemed like hours of film. I’m sure it wasn’t hours. But in the end, when we got the film developed, it was completely washed out. You know, I guess we didn’t know what we were doing. But, you know.
Christopher Emmons [51:58] Yeah. Yeah, I used to, I never really shot anything like that on film or Super 8 or anything like that. I had those big, bulky, you know, kind of VHS insert camcorders.
Dr. Mark Leeds [52:18] Oh, yeah, I had one of those too. Those are great. I actually used one for my VCR for a long time.
Christopher Emmons [52:23] Oh, nice. Yeah, that’s a good idea. But, yeah, I would do things like that too. Like shooting Star Wars action figures and sometimes, you know, doing stop motion to have them look like they’re moving around. Like you turn it on and off real quick and then you move them slightly more, turn it on and off. And then, you know, it looks animated when you play it back. But I think I wore out the machines doing that. And I would do sort of hand-drawn animations like that as well when I was young. And I thought I was going to be an animator because I used to have patience. But, you know, that kind of thing now is, you know, both kind of tedious beyond what I have intolerance for anymore or time for. And it’s also kind of sadly one of those things that’s not in vogue. I think that there’s nothing more powerful than the hand-drawn line because it’s the most deliberate. Way you can get your idea onto screen. But, you know, now it’s all done in the computer. Nothing against that. I love Toy Story and things like that. But I just think we’ve lost something. And, you know, every time you see a commercial that’s semi-hand drawn or something, you get a little bit drawn in and nostalgic. And I certainly miss that and wish I could somehow be involved with something like that in the future.
Dr. Mark Leeds [53:55] I mean, do you actually have to draw a different picture 20 or 30 times for every second of film and make them all almost identical?
Christopher Emmons [54:03] They used to. But now it’s a lot of like, if it is semi-hand drawn, they keep the face modeled but then draw different mouths. You know, stuff like that. Or create a layer in Photoshop for the eye to blink and then you just turn it on every once in a while. There’s a thing called the Puppet Tool in the Adobe Suite that you can just drag around a character’s arm and tell it what to do over what period of time, which is beautiful. It expedites the process, but like a lot of things, can’t help but think something’s being lost as well.
Dr. Mark Leeds [54:48] I wanted to ask you, and this is maybe off the general topic of the podcast, but I love science fiction, and I think I saw as part of a trailer a director’s cut I was watching, but you have made science fiction films before?
Christopher Emmons [55:01] Yeah, I dabbled. I’d like to do more. Yeah, I did one that’s called The Survival. It’s kind of a post-apocalyptic thing. It’s about this boy that had a sick mom who can’t go out and get water and supplies for the house anymore. So he had to kind of go out and be the one to do it. And then you see what the world’s kind of become while he’s on his journey. It’s very dangerous. And this is this idea that water is a diminishing resource, let alone having clean water. And we see that the air is toxic. He’s having to wear an oxygen mask. So it’s sapping into some current anxiety, certainly. I mean, Cape Town right now is actually rationing water. It’s being talked about a lot but not enough. It’s a pretty scary thing that we’re living in a time where that’s already taking place.
Dr. Mark Leeds [56:05] Yeah, yeah. Just yesterday, actually, I was talking to someone who lives in coastal Maine, and he was telling me how they’re lucky to have some of the best, cleanest water in the world in Maine. And we were talking about just the idea of migration, how people migrate over time to where the resources are, and just that theoretical possibility that the majority of the population could possibly migrate to where the good water is. Of all things, we were actually talking about that, the water cleanliness. And I was kind of imagining, like, these little micro condos stacked up in buildings of people, like, all trying to get into Maine where the good water is.
Christopher Emmons [56:48] Right. But then what you’re not mentioning is what happens to the people that can’t migrate that are left behind and what happens to that region, you know, the dried up region.
Dr. Mark Leeds [57:02] Yeah, that’s true. I mean, obviously, yeah, the better solution is to find a way to get clean water to everyone. And, you know, there’s that. I think Bill Gates was going around sharing poop water with people. I don’t know if you saw that on various talk shows where they’re cleaning up the water to the point where it’s completely safe to drink and taste great. And it comes from sewage. Right.
Christopher Emmons [57:25] Yeah, no, it’s fascinating stuff. But certainly as gross as it seems, you know, things like that need to be thought of at this point. You know, we have the situation in Michigan as well, where there’s still basically poison water that people are drinking. So, yeah, I mean, there’s parts of this country that are like third world countries. And we don’t like to talk about that or linger on it, but it’s true.
Dr. Mark Leeds [58:01] Yeah, I mean, that’s a scary thing, just to think that generations could have been growing up, you know, with their mental abilities affected by the drinking water. And it’s something that they just have no control over.
Christopher Emmons [58:11] Yeah, it’s really horrifying. There’s, you know, there’s a lot of, like, existential threats. Threats. There’s a whole plethora of them going around right now in the air, in the water, in the soil, in the ocean. And, you know, we’re very distracted by very stupid, thinly veiled distractions all the time. And it’s hard for people to thrive on really big issues. As they, you know, kind of look at these niche things that might be important, but they’re not, like, going to ensure that we’re here tomorrow.
Dr. Mark Leeds [59:02] Yeah, that’s true. I mean, you know, it seems like people are distracted and just assume that everything’s going to kind of take care of itself, and it very well might not.
Christopher Emmons [59:14] Yeah, and it’s kind of a weird sort of acceptance that’s happening here. There’s a film that you should watch called Hypernormalization by Adam Curtis. But it’s this idea that these things are sort of happening that we know are wrong, but it’s happening so commonly that we get used to it. And we don’t necessarily know how to take action against it or think we would be capable. So we just sit back and do nothing and assume that, you know, maybe it’ll work itself out or not and we’ll respond when it doesn’t. And I feel like there’s this, like, that’s a really horrible sensation that we’re stuck in. But at the same time, you know, am I going to run out the door and have come out with a great idea on how to, you know, fix one of these existential threats in an hour, you know, in a day, in a year? Probably not. I can make a film about it and show you how terrible it’s going to be if we keep going down this path. But you know it’s very tricky to know how you can help I heard not long ago that it’s still good to recycle but we’re past the point of recycling even really mattering which is spooky
Dr. Mark Leeds [1:00:54] Yeah and still and still we just keep pumping out more and more plastic bottles and plastic bags. Yeah. That was a strange thing. Last summer we took a trip to California and it was unusual. When you go to any supermarket, you have to pay extra for your bags. I’d never seen that before. Coming back here to Florida, they put every individual item in a bag sometimes. It’s just more and more bags and they don’t care if you take a few extra. In just your regular supermarket, you pay 10 cents per bag and then in the organic type places, they don’t even want to give you a bag. They’d say bring your own bag.
Christopher Emmons [1:01:37] Yeah, I was in L.A. When that started. I remember everybody, that was the talk of the town, man. Everybody was going on about that. And then that was around the time that the drought got really bad at first and they were telling you if you had a long sprinkler that you could only leave it on for so long and it was very interesting when all that stuff started. But I guess it’s best not to get angry and it’s best to bring your own bag. It is a helpful thing. I guess it’s just hard for people to get used to any kind of change.
Dr. Mark Leeds [1:02:24] Yeah yeah it’s one I guess one funny thing came up you know when they you can buy your own bags but these bags they sell I had read somewhere that you have to be careful some of them have lead in them but I guess you can you know if you’re going to commit to using your own bags you can can order hemp bags or something and you know make sure that you’ve got good reusable bags but I mean anyway I want I wanted to ask you about when you write do you go to a certain place to write? I’ve actually talked to some filmmakers that they like to sit in a Starbucks or a certain restaurant. How do you get into the writing and how does that happen?
Christopher Emmons [1:03:00] Coffee. Lots of coffee and sometimes music. Not generally music while I’m writing. Sometimes though, but usually just kind of, you know, it can be anywhere between five minutes and 30 minutes of trying to find the right sort of frequency. And once you’re kind of dialed in and tuned into it’s a matter of how much stamina, how much time, and how many distractions are available to take you away from it. So in not wanting to be distracted, I don’t go to like a coffee shop or anything like that. There’s way too much stimulus happening there. So it’s you know wherever I’m living at the moment while working on something and not to be super cliche this response already maybe is but you know you always want the cabin in the woods scenario so that all you hear is nature and sirens and fighting couples and, you know, you really want to be, if you’re dealing with a serious topic especially, of course, you know, you want to be dialed into it and not distracted. And you want to be in the right mindset and find a good way to get yourself in and out of it.
Dr. Mark Leeds [1:04:30] Do you ever wake up like three, four or five in the morning and you wake up with an idea and you run to the table and you have to get it down because you’re afraid you’re going to forget it when you wake up later?
Christopher Emmons [1:04:41] Yeah yeah absolutely like that happens and I keep notebooks where I where I write down these things and sometimes they’re you know you wait a couple hours later you look at it and you’re like wow I really wish I didn’t go through the effort of getting up out of bed and writing that down this makes no sense and sometimes it’s good but I suspect that even outside the realm of filmmaking, people involved in anything, get up in the middle of the night, what’s a good idea and write it down.
Dr. Mark Leeds [1:05:16] Yeah. Yeah. I think I learned recently, you know, not that long ago, actually, that it’s a bad idea to ignore that urge to get up and write it down because you really do forget some things that might have been great.
Christopher Emmons [1:05:27] Yeah. I think I was hearing something recently. I don’t know how useful this is, but something about how ancient humans used to wake up in the middle of the night. And that was just an accepted thing. And that’s what they did. And there’s some kind of like name for that stage of, you know, kind of pureness of thought and creativity before they took a break. So it wasn’t just eight hours straight. Let me get my REM cycle. So I can power up and, you know, work 9 to 7 the next day. You know, there is more of a flow to it, which is very interesting to me.
Dr. Mark Leeds [1:06:15] Yeah, that makes sense. Actually, I have this machine I haven’t used here recently, and I’m not even sure it really works. Have you heard of these mind machines with the flashing lights and pulsing sounds, you know, where they put you in a certain state of, you know, it entrains your brain waves. Yeah. And I guess the idea is that it could possibly put you into that state of near sleep, you know, where you might be in a more creative state. Yeah.
Christopher Emmons [1:06:42] And as this relates to addiction, we’re getting into some interesting territory about altered states and different mindsets. Something I wanted to address also is that But you could say that a lot of addiction comes from, you know, unhappy people trying to get happy. And you could say that some of it’s systemic. But what is interesting to me is that I think that there’s this sort of false pursuit of trying to be happy all the time for yourself and maintain a happy look for other people. And here people are curating their social media feed to look happy and great. And as the social media thing becomes more and more of, we’re viewed as that avatar rather than the actual flesh and blood being we are, I think this idea of trying to maintain this happy, unnatural facade is becoming a really frightening thing. And so, you know, if you were to ask me, I would say happiness is the opiate of the masses. I think that happiness is great, you know, but I think it’s natural to have it in moderation. And it’s not the clearest headspace necessarily or the one that should be maintained. I think that, you know, people who are great meditators are not constantly pursuing some Zen state of what it feels like to have just, you know, won a million dollars and prolong that feeling. Because all the material things that you can get, it’s in our nature to feel happy for a brief period, but then you want more, right? So if that’s the nature of happiness, then happiness is addiction.
Dr. Mark Leeds [1:08:56] Yeah, that makes sense. And it’s definitely tied into brain chemistry and probably the neurotransmitters like serotonin. I once heard a doctor giving a lecture, and he talked about how when a person keeps taking more and more drugs, they can only get high up to a certain point because the way he put it, there’s only so much serotonin you can squeeze out of a neuron. And probably correlates to that, what you’re saying about happiness. You can only get to such a certain level of happiness and elation. I think I’ve realized in the last few years that what I would seek out and value even more than happiness really is freedom, freedom from getting as few gatekeepers in my life and people telling me what I have to do and where I have to be and being able to slow down and kind of enjoy, look out the window, enjoy the sky and watch airplanes flying by and not be in a rush to do anything. For me, freedom is something much more valuable than chasing after happiness. And hopefully that’s something people who are struggling with addiction can get clean and take a step back and realize that being free, You know, not being a slave to the drugs or locked up in jail or having to report to a parole officer or to, you know, whoever, or even a family member who’s checking up on you and doesn’t trust you anymore. You know, just being free is probably the most valuable thing in the world.
Christopher Emmons [1:10:30] Yeah, it certainly is. Don’t get me wrong when I say that happiness is not a natural state of full-on being, because I’m not suggesting that everybody should be running around moping or being super unhappy, but more what I’m getting at with that is the idea of being comfortable, stripping everything down and stop being a consumer, Stop being, you know, a performer for everybody else and just look at yourself, you know, not just physically, but I mean, like inside yourself, figure out why you’re doing these things, what you really want, what you’re doing because you think people want you to. All these things and being comfortable and respecting and I think that you know this idea of like knowing yourself there’s a lot of people who you know wouldn’t want you to because it’s not it’s not necessarily profitable but I think knowing yourself can make you less susceptible to a lot of the awful roads you can end up on. And it’s not a vain pursuit. I don’t think it means that you’re full of yourself if you’re analyzing how you feel at any given moment. I think it’s very useful because it’s similar to like when a plane’s going down. They say, secure your oxygen mask before you secure your neighbors. I think it’s a lot like that.
Dr. Mark Leeds [1:12:09] Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I wanted to ask also I was watching the movie Roeblings Bridge is that something that people can watch online or TV how can someone watch that?
Christopher Emmons [1:12:24] That will be online in the next month or so we’re playing the Manhattan Film Festival at the end of April and then I think somewhere shortly after that it should be going online for everybody It’ll be on YouTube, on Vimeo. But yeah, I’m very excited about that one. That was the first period piece I ever did. And it was the first thing I’d ever directed and been writing on that dealt with real people. And I started to realize that part of that was I was just like terribly intimidated by, you know, the legacy of actual human beings and all these facts. And it’s a completely different world. It was 1867 through 69 that we were putting on film there. So customs were different. Everything was, you know, and I can’t tell you how many times we were, I just wanted to be like, all right, we’re all set. Everybody action. And then you realize, oh, there’s a light knob in the back of the shot. We’ve got to cover that up. And then, you know, we were filming outside, and we couldn’t escape, but there was a flight pattern, right, as we were shooting people talking outside. And it’s like airplanes didn’t exist at that time. We can’t have that. And, you know, there’s just all these things that we don’t necessarily even think of that you have to think about when you’re doing something that’s not present day, increasingly so the further back in history you go. But it was ultimately after being very difficult, very rewarding. And, you know, I learned a lot. I wasn’t familiar with the family history, you know, behind all these crazy things that happened during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. And this film touches on just the beginning of that. But, yeah, it was a really, really great experience to be able to work on something like that.
Dr. Mark Leeds [1:14:37] And so that happened. That was, like, shortly after the Civil War ended. And, you know, Lincoln was assassinated in the 1860s.
Christopher Emmons [1:14:46] Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, that was still fresh in everybody’s mind. And then we were thinking about, you know, literally and metaphorically bridging gaps, right? So how do we connect Brooklyn to New York and how do you know when it’s icy for example people would get you know either you couldn’t take the ferry across to go to your job or you’d be on the water and you’d plow the boat and drown or you’d get stuck in the ice you know these are the conditions for people that lived on the opposite side going to work and trying to come back. So that’s, you know, it’s an interesting idea, both literally in that sense and also metaphorically of uniting two different pieces of land and the people on them. And I’m sure that there are plenty of people. I mean, it’s largely thought to be a good idea for quite a while, but I’m sure that there was people that were also like, oh, we don’t want that Brooklyn riffraff coming in here, you know. But it’s such an interesting thing that had modern relevance to us when we were making it, even though it was way back then.
Dr. Mark Leeds [1:16:12] So I guess it’s the opposite of building a wall would be building a bridge.
Christopher Emmons [1:16:15] Right. So yeah we you know we put a lot of time into it and it’ll be coming out soon really proud of it
Dr. Mark Leeds [1:16:26] And it was really interesting to see the people you know dressed up in the period costumes and I had never thought about that you know the building of the brooklyn bridge and the idea that it was the father designed it and then I guess the son took over the project.
Christopher Emmons [1:16:42] Yeah, and then years later, actually, the son’s wife, Emily Roebling, kind of finished it because Washington, who was the chief engineer on it, became so sick with the bends that he had to kind of tell her what to tell these other people, and she had this sort of ended up, you know, telling them all what to do on his behalf, which was really kind of amazing for a woman at the time. There’s a lot in there that people don’t know. And at the time when it opened, they called it the Eighth Wonder, and P.T. Barnum had elephants walk across it. And I guess everybody felt that if elephants could walk across it, which must have been so incredible, to see that it probably was secure.
Dr. Mark Leeds [1:17:41] Oh, wow. Yeah, definitely. I’m sure there’s not a great photography from that time because, of course, there was cameras back then, plenty of Civil War photography. But did you see any video footage of people speaking about it who actually were alive at that time? I mean, I don’t know if that would coincide of the time of… I mean, you know how like with the Titanic, You have survivors of the Titanic that were interviewed years ago on television.
Christopher Emmons [1:18:11] But no, there’s no, we weren’t able to find any like recordings of what any of these people sounded like. There’s only research on, you know, what the accents sort of sounded like on these people and things like that. And we spent time thinking about should we do accents? Should we not? We were just trying to tell our version of it, our impression basically of what these people would have been like without getting caught up in what they exactly sounded like or things like that. Because we just didn’t want it to be cartoony or have the actors thinking about sounding right rather than emoting.
Dr. Mark Leeds [1:18:56] Yeah, it would probably take away from the story or maybe be distracting.
Christopher Emmons [1:19:01] Yeah, and maybe we could have really nailed it and it would have been an interesting exercise, but we did play with it and it didn’t end up being the way we wanted to go.
Dr. Mark Leeds [1:19:15] I really find your work intriguing. I’m especially looking forward to Roebling’s Bridge coming out. I can’t wait to see the full film, and I really appreciate you talking to me.
Christopher Emmons [1:19:24] Thank you.
Dr. Mark Leeds [1:19:27] Thank you for joining us today on The Rehab on the Mental Health News Radio Network. I hope that you have found this show to be interesting and useful. If so, please subscribe to The Rehab Podcast and share on social media. I appreciate your taking the time to listen to The Rehab. Thank you.
