I’m not a hard-sell guy. Ask anyone who’s worked with me. I’m pretty good at just laying out what we do and letting people decide.
Dammit, Chloe! We’re Running Out of Time!
Dammit, Chloe! We’re Running Out of Time!
Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em: The right time to film someone is before you wish you had. We hear from people who waited.
The right time to film someone is before you wish you had. We hear from people who waited. We almost never hear from people who didn’t.
I’m not a hard-sell guy. Ask anyone who’s worked with me. I’m pretty good at just laying out what we do and letting people decide.
Usually.
Your parents are not going to be here forever.
Neither are your grandparents. And the stories they carry, the ones they’ve never quite told you, the ones they figure nobody wants to hear, the ones they’ve been planning to sit down and talk about someday, those are on a clock.
The clock doesn’t send a warning.
People come to us for a lot of different reasons.
Some come because a parent got a diagnosis. Some come after a milestone birthday when the number on the cake finally made something real. Some come because a grandparent said something offhand, something about the war or the old country or the year everything fell apart, and someone in the room was paying attention and thought: I need to know the rest of that.
Some people come because they waited too long with someone else.
That last group doesn’t need me to explain the urgency.
I’ve filmed people over a hundred years old. I’ve filmed people in their sixties who didn’t make it to the delivery of the finished film. I’ve filmed people who said “I’ve been meaning to do this for twenty years” and laughed about it, and I laughed too, and we didn’t say the other part out loud.
Here’s what I’ve never had someone tell me: “We should have waited longer.”
Almost nobody thinks their own story is worth capturing. That is the most common trait I see. I think it is part of the nature of the people that want a film of them.
They all say, “Nobody’s gonna watch this silliness.”
Oh, how wrong you are old-timer. How very wrong you are.
If you’ve been thinking about this, if the thought has crossed your mind about someone in your family who’s carrying a story you don’t fully know, do the thing. Don’t let the thought stay a thought.
It’s not urgent in a dramatic way. It’s urgent in the ordinary way that everything finite is urgent, which is to say: it’s running. It always was.
Tell ’em what ya told ’em: Nobody has ever told me they should have waited longer. I’ve filmed people over a hundred and people in their sixties who didn’t make it to the delivery. The clock doesn’t send a warning. If someone in your family is carrying a story you don’t fully know, do the thing.