I shot "Marco Polo" over Christmas break during my junior year of college with my dad's Hi-8 video camera and put it together in an analogue editing suite at school during the month of January. I had access thanks to the suite my involvement with the campus TV station. I remember NOT asking if I was allowed to use it for personal projects because I didn't want to be told no. Since the J-term was pretty quiet at school and I knew the guy who work-studied at the front desk, I slipped in under the radar once in a while.
It was an unforgiving editing machine -- once you laid down a clip, it stayed there. Each time you recorded over a section of VHS tape, the quality noticeably degraded, so the every cut was planned out ahead of time by going over logs of the tape in my dorm room. The audio could only be laid down while the video was playing, with all adjustments happening real time, manually with a dial. But all of this was an improvement over the "two VCR" method of editing that I'd used prior to this project. Now you can do non-linear editing of HD video on your phone. But in the year 2000, the opportunity to edit video was worth a great deal to me.
The news packages I was making at the time were each a few minutes long, contained hard cuts (i.e. no dissolve transitions), and were overlaid with one track of music and one track of voice -- all the same elements that comprise "Marco Polo". If you dare, here's one of those news packages. As rough as it is, it remains one of my favorites from the time because we had one day to record it and it was pouring rain outside the whole day. We had to get creative and shot almost the entire thing from inside a car. I lived for challenges like that.
While "Marco Polo" is meant to stand on its own, it ended up acting as a loose sequel (or epilogue?) to a collaboration between me and my brother called "The Winter War" that was worked on both before and after this one. "The Winter War" expands on the school-as-war metaphor by actually diving into the battles described in "Marco Polo." It was more ambitious in every aspect and took me over a year to edit (and this was back when I even had a lot of free time). I can't wait to discuss that one in its own blog post eventually.
The first shot of "Marco Polo" sets the pace -- and it's a slow one. It doesn't hold up so well with the short attention spans found online today (I should talk). The movie I made prior to this, "A Night In January" was something like 20 minutes long. "Marco Polo" was actually a response to that length, something that would be more likely to get into a no-budget film festival. Back then I thought it was streamlined, but who has time to sit down and watch a six-minute amateur movie these days?
There is very little camera movement in the film. Using a tripod was important because the steadiness was the only production value separating this project from a home video. Once the camera was on the tripod, I didn't touch it. Any movement would have been too jerky. If there are jitters present, they are probably the result of tape degradation.
The film is scored by a slow burning Depeche Mode song. That's a band that will show up again, quite memorably if you ask me, in "The Winter War" along with all of my other favorite bands of the time. "Marco Polo" is shorter and the mood is more singular, so it felt right to limit the soundtrack to one song.
The opening and closing credits are not in their original form. Originally, they were typed up in Power Point, displayed on a computer monitor, and then I simply pointed the camera at them. Unfortunately the camera wasn't quite level and I didn't notice the problem until I was in the editing suite, so I used them anyway. A couple of years later when I transferred the film to a computer for the first time, I replaced the credits with the current digital title cards. I know it's only in my head but they still appear not-quite-level to me.
I don't want to dive too deep into the intended meaning behind the film. You can probably tell there are some personal bits in it, although don't get too caught up in that thinking because there's still plenty of artistic license at play. The overall theme comes from the feeling I would get being on Christmas break during 5th or 6th grade. Those were rough years for me. I felt like the world was trying to corrupt me or at least bully me. It probably would have been more poignant (but perhaps more typical) to represent the horrors of war by telling a story about kids in school, but I swapped it around and used war as a metaphor for school because that was more meaningful and relate-able to me. I like small-scale, personal films, not global or political ones.
So there's all these lines like "they taught me so much" and "playing with such a toy..." and references to childhood like the monster under the bed scene and birthday parties and the game Marco Polo itself. There's the shot of Trev wearing a graduation gown in front of a mirror. I loved the idea including bits that couldn't be literally explained but still conjure up some meaning. I was much more interested in moods and atmosphere at the time than I was with plot. Those are still the types of movies I like to watch today.
My favorite scene is in the middle when we see the black and white movie playing on a TV screen. The footage playing was originally it's own project called "Five Years" and it was edited entirely in-camera. By cutting between it and the "Marco Polo" footage I was able to eliminate some of the roughness and gaps "Five Years" had as its own film. It made a nice home for this other video project that wasn't good enough to stand on its own and didn't seem to fit anywhere else. As far as what is happening in this movie within a movie... It has something to do with calling a girl.
My least favorite scene is the one with my cameo as the friend who gets "eaten by the monster under the bed." First of all, it's not very well shot. I had to frame the sequence without seeing me in it, hit record, and then get into position. I had very little to work with while editing and reshooting wasn't an option because by the time I realized it wasn't going to work I was already back at school. Then there's the ridiculousness of the acting. It doesn't look like a monster is pulling me under the bed so much as I'm pulling myself under. And the animated making of the bed was just a bad idea that doesn't fit, even within the internal, skewed logic of the film.
I'm not sure where I got the idea for "Marco Polo" from, but the narration was inspired by the narration in Fight Club. That movie had a huge impact on me, as mentioned here.
At one time I had the entire narration in "Marco Polo" memorized. I had spent a lot of time working on the words, tossing them around in my head over and over again, until they felt right. There's a point in that process where you cross a line between what might actually be poetic and what only sounds good because you've heard it so many times. I couldn't even tell you what side of that line this narration falls on because of my closeness to it. I would literally recite the whole thing aloud to myself while driving or taking a shower or whenever, and I don't even know why.
If you want to take a closer look at the narration, I transcribed it below:
The winter war was over. Upon my homecoming, my loved ones greeted me at the door. They were unaware of the monster I had become. I was now the living, breathing embodiment of everything they hated. I had built a wall surrounding me – blocking me from all love and humanity. I was every woman’s broken heart. My parents had missed me, but they would continue to miss me because their son would never come home.
The war began in September. I forget the year. My friends were still spending their allowance on cigarettes. I had to roll them myself, but I got cigarettes for free. I got a lot of things for free. I’m just glad they let me keep my gun. Playing with such a toy could be dangerous, but I could handle it well. They taught me so much, including some valuable life lessons.
I was home in time for Christmas, but that made no difference. I guess not even love was enough to save me.
I discovered my friend was dead. He was eaten by the monster under his bed. I’m sure we all know by now, human nature leads to bloodshed.
I must have been an emotional kid. I remember crying when I bit into a piece of candy with the plastic wrapper still on it. I cried other times for no reason at all - just to cry. I remember attending a birthday party where I didn’t know any of the boys very well. I started crying, and I told the birthday boy’s mom they were all picking on me. I’m not sure why I did that.
I had nice parents, but I remember them turning on me once. They made fun of my crying once. I used that moment to fill my head when I started killing. I can imagine people doing much worse things if their parents had acted that way more often.
Thucydides, a Greek historian, once said, “War is a stern teacher. In depriving them of the power of easily satisfying their daily wants, it brings most peoples minds down to the level of their actual circumstances. War also brings envy and revenge to the surface and frantic violence becomes the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of defense.”
I never noticed how alien the ears on the sides of my head looked until my return from the winter war.
My emotion has escaped me. I feel none. I wasn’t even upset when they took my eyes.
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I recently reviewed some of the uncut footage for "Marco Polo", and I can see I was demanding on my actor, Trevor. I sound pretty bossy. To be a filmmaker, you need a strong ego. That's another thing I have lost in the years since, humbled by life in the real world and from watching amazing work from all kinds of creative people online. That could be part of the reason for my lack of output lately.
I don't have a lot of "extras" for this project. I wish I had my original notes/script, but they are either somewhere in my parents' garage or lost forever. I did find this blooper reel from when I was trying to get a line from Trevor for "Five Years." It goes on a little long, but it fondly reminds me of the hours Trev and I used to spend working on projects like this.
After all that trouble, the line didn't get used anywhere, probably because it didn't make any sense.
Well, this has been an unorganized stream of thoughts about the film. I'm trying not to spend too much time perfecting my writing. I'd rather just get more of it out there. I'm sure I'll be clarifying/expanding/fixing each of these entries as time goes on, so let's just consider this a rough starting point for now.
