I’ve been constrained by small budgets for my entire filmmaking career. Fortunately I enjoy the intimate, people-focused subjects that lend themselves to such budgets. It’s generally not a problem for me to avoid the occasional concept that would require more money, and to focus on the ones that I know I can make cheaply. The single exception to this rule is Late Autumn, the only idea that I knew was too expensive to self-finance and yet would not throw away.
Late Autumn is a film about dying in which no one dies. The main character is an unthoughtful man who has thoughtfulness thrust upon him by his peculiar experience in the film’s first scenes. Formerly not at all childlike, he acquires the childlike quality of experiencing life anew, of having his senses marked by commonplace things. He loses all the trappings of his former life, and he accepts the losses without protest. He seems to want a new way of living, without knowing what that way would be. Eventually he chooses a path that may require more years than he has left to live, not even because he believes it will satisfy his inchoate yearning for meaning, but because he can think of nothing else that will. Only in the film’s final minutes does he find a cause to commit to, reinserting himself into the cycle of life.
