From Adversity to Triumph: The Journey of "His" and its Filmmaker, Maia Buljeta
From Adversity to Triumph: The Journey of "His" and its Filmmaker, Maia Buljeta
We've all had to develop thick skin in order to keep making art in these crazy times. If you're having trouble doing that though, maybe this story can help.
That moment when you’re 15 and life starts repeating itself too much and you don’t like the movie Zodiac but all your friends do, so it makes you feel like an outcast. You think something’s wrong with you, so you keep trying to put on nail polish, having sleepovers, eating ice cream, trying to fit yourself into what seems to make other people around you happy. But you keep looking in the mirror and not recognizing your own reflection.
Your prized possessions are the films you make, but your closest friends are bored of it and want to keep watching the videos that make you look like a clown.
You feel like there is so much trapped inside of you and that nobody knows the real you, so it translates into anxiety that makes you tap your fingers a lot or shake your leg. You keep posting on Instagram, hoping somebody notices what you’re really going through. You can’t stop thinking about your Grandparent’s house and the meaning of family, but you’re only 15. You get bullied by adults for knowing a lot about your favorite software. Another adult tries to trick you into working on a documentary then steals your credits, so you run into the bathroom crying, wondering why all of this is happening to someone so young.
Now you’re 18, and your whole future was ahead of you, until your life gets turned upside down due to an unforgettable betrayal from a member of the family. You find yourself in a different place, and everything starts falling to pieces. You try saying affirmations to yourself as you’re in the middle of the mall while you feel your hope slipping away. You take a photo of your stuff in Starbucks and call it “Minimalism” on instagram even though that’s pretty much all you have left, and you can’t tell anyone that no matter how much you want to.
Now you’re 19 and you get into your dream school, the Rhode Island School of Design, and pay $47,000 just to get told by a professor that you’ll never make it as a filmmaker.
Now you’re 20. That moment when your uncle just passed from COVID-19 and you sit at home, staring at an empty room that is staring back at you when you desperately want to show your movies in theaters again. You look out your window and all you see are trees instead of your beloved aunts, uncles and cousins that you haven’t seen in years. You want to make something but you haven’t seen anyone in a hundred days.
Now you’re 24. As you're on your way to the post office for the hundredth time, you feel surrounded by silence.
You know these feelings?
I do, too.
When I was 15, I decided to write a movie called His. A mystery film. One of my classmates comments, “a mystery film without murder? Must be terrible.” I kept writing. I needed a place to put all those unsaid thoughts. So in His, a puzzle solving genius who always runs away from the things he is afraid of learns that a snow globe goes missing from the local bookstore and vows to track down the thief who took it. While searching, he comes across a series of people who are unsatisfied with their lives and wants something that someone else has, and the genius realizes he is not such a genius at life. However, upon learning the thief steals items without monetary value so he can steal a feeling instead, the genius ultimately comes to realize that life is just another puzzle. At the time, I was reading James Joyce's The Dubliners and was profoundly impacted by it, so I put that story into His. I also decided to make His as close to Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train as possible.
I realized I loved the movie. It represented me, it finally said the things that I couldn’t find the words to say.
Then I decided I was going to make the movie.
I turned 16, and did further pre-production in a crew class at the Jacob Burns Film Center. I created the mood board. Color scheme, wardrobe. In the parking lot of Stop and Shop, I would write my shot lists in my spare moments.
It was September and I just turned 17. During one of my first phone calls to an actor, my heart was beating through my chest. He said yes. Soon after, I walked into Ye Olde Warwick Book Shoppe for the first time, and I realized the shop owner looked just like the shop owner in my screenplay. I asked if I can shoot my movie there. He said yes. I asked if he can act in it. He said yes. I went into the post office. I asked my mailman if I can film my movie in his deli. He said yes. I ask the coffee shop if I can film there. They said yes.
On my first shoot, it was my first time having such a big shoot.
I started apologizing, and one of the crew members, Nick Aquilino, told me to stop apologizing, and that I was the director and it was up to me to run the ship. Once I heard that, I never forgot. I started being a lot more confident on set. Our shoots would last on average 6 hours. For each shoot, I made a detailed hourly schedule, breakdown sheet, and shot list, and carried my clipboard with me. We kept in touch through Facebook Messenger. I found that I could utilize a Meisner Technique approach that I got from acting class and teach it to my actors as we went along, working with them on objectives, scene partner connections, and connecting outside themselves to their environment. For blocking, I would tell them to stand near the leaf or a water bottle.
There was lots of problem solving, improvisation. If a crew member couldn’t make it, I operated both cameras, but then I photobombed it and then learned After Effects so I can remove myself from the scene. The movie was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It's about how to make all the pieces work together to communicate this story, harnessing the innate abilities of what each actor and crew member had to contribute in their own inimitable way.
When I would come home from my shoots, I started to realize that the feelings of forcing myself to fit in were slowly waning. We started doing more and more cool stuff - shooting scenes running for miles in the woods and fields in hard-driving rain. We took more and more risks. We filmed each shot over and over again, if necessary, until we had what would be the perfect take for what the story required. We spent more and more time on the movie. The crew started adding notes and details to the film. I have been on sets where narcissism was the prevalent factor, so I decided it was important to create an environment on this set where everyone can have space to experiment and try things out.
I started meeting new nice people. Having new conversations. The project became bigger and bigger. I started feeling less and less alone. This community that I was making from scratch made the wonderful history I spent at my grandparent’s house less and less lost.
At one point while we were shooting outside of the bookstore, a woman walked up to us and said, “hey I’m a producer, here’s my card. Tell me about the screening, and I’ll bring all my friends to it.” Then she left. Me and the rest of the crew stared at each other for a few seconds, then burst out laughing.
I think on that set we all found a place where we can be ourselves.
Then, that moment when you’re working on your film, young, 18 years old, your house is organized. You’re doing great in community college. You overcame many fears. But then a great betrayal happens that changes everything, and you’re forced to grow up really fast. Suddenly, your priorities have to change and you have to pause working on your film. And every day you’re cooking in the kitchen and grieving for your old life. That’s what happened.
2019, you tell yourself that you can’t let that happen. So you hold another shoot, and it goes really well. But you’re given bad grades in college by a professor who doesn’t like you because you choose to make artwork from the heart instead of by regiment.
In 2020, His was nearly completed, when all of a sudden the pandemic came and tragedy befell my family. I could no longer shoot scenes with people in-person. It was just me. So I stopped working on it. Letting it collect dust. Then one day, on the day of my uncle’s passing, I got this jolt of electricity. I nearly ran to my computer. I typed a 20-page document. I typed another 30 pages and sent assignments to the team remotely. Everyone said yes. So in June 2020 we all started working on His from our houses - 70 shots from Jonathan, 50 shots from Nick.
Then I realized His had no original music. So once again, I had to succumb to the pandemic. Again, I started thinking that maybe everything was impossible. But then one day, I got this flash of hope and wondered, “what if I can make my own music?” I started learning Ableton Live. And I made a soundtrack. His helped me stay away from reviewing the old photo albums.
I started capturing more sound effects by recording them in my closet, because I learned it absorbs echo and you can get crisper audio. Sometimes I paused and lost heart. And then quotes from the movie would start to pop up in my mind. “Life is just another puzzle”. I’d get up and try again.
Then I realized there were a few other missing pieces. Since there were still several shot and music gaps in the film, I first watched the whole movie over, made a fifty-page list of everything that was missing, then put in temporary substitutes of stock footage to get a clearer visualization of how the sequences would play out. That made it so easy to get a feel of the flow of the movie. I wondered again if it was impossible, because I haven’t seen a lot of people do stuff like this, and I would sit in my dark basement and wonder if I was crazy. Then I would shrug and get back to work.
Then I joined a Raindance London career surgery zoom call and I met Nina Ostrogovich, our post production coordinator. We put an ad on Mandy.com. And- eight new crew members, ready to work on His. Twenty applications. Jaylynn. Rosalind. Marcelus.
During the pandemic, I realized that His turned into more than just a movie. His became like a friend to me. A means to connect with others.
I directed it, was the cinematographer, edited and produced it. I did it. As time keeps passing, I keep learning to correct people when someone says something is impossible. I grew up homeschooled and world-schooled around many different people and teachers, and raised and taught by my mother–my primary teacher and an internationally-showing artist–who has been there for me through all of these years, all through the pandemic, who I am fortunate enough to have spent many joyful hours with. My ability to overcome obstacles is also derived from the support of my lovely sister, an incredibly impressive Carnegie hall-performing classically-trained violinist named Olivia who always believed in me.
I realized that I can't stop making films. Even if I wanted to, I can’t. I get this jolt of electricity through my veins, and my brain starts thinking right, and then I have to put everything I’ve got into making it happen. That’s the type of creature I am. I believe film is life and life is film. Talk to someone new, you learn something new. That’s kinda the magic of life.
