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The short film I am directing now is a story made of scenes I had imagined in my head many times. I thought through the humor, drama, and vulnerability of an intimate look of a 1950s pregnancy vs. a pregnancy in the present day a million different ways. But when it came time to actually shoot it, it was clear I had thought through it like a writer, not a filmmaker. There were technical hurdles to overcome to bring the picture in my head to the screen.
As we shot a modern baby shower scene, we were trying to think of the physical progression from the food table to the activities and how to make sure the camera’s cuts and movements from one to the other ran smoothly and had continuity. As I thought through things, I said absentmindedly, “well, you know how at a baby shower, you always—” then I looked up. My male director of photography, male sound recordist, and male lighting guy stared back at me blankly. None of them had ever been to a baby shower in their lives. They had no context for how an event like this usually goes.
I made a mental note to have a little more female representation on my crew for part two of the project (which you can support us with HERE) and moved on with the day. We shot sequences of warm greetings between party guests, women giving each other baby advice, oversharing about their birth stories and laughing together.
During a break, our quirky British sound guy suddenly observed, “you know, men don’t have anything like this. We don’t gather around each other for support in a time of transition or swap stories. It’s so beautiful that you have this.”
Such a simple observation, but it was a tender reminder not to take for granted a type of event I’ve been attending all my life. We sometimes hold back from telling our own simple life stories because we think they’re too common to be worth telling. But somewhere out there are a few people that have never seen a single moment of an event you’ve attended a dozen times.
It made it feel like Two Heartbeats really is a story worth telling.
He’s right, men don’t have as many built-in venues for deep emotional connection over shared experience as women do. In fact, as we continued to talk, someone mentioned the claim that most men receive the first flowers of their lives at their funeral. One of the men there grumbled, “I wouldn’t want flowers anyway”, eager to get back to work. But our sound guy said quietly, “I think it would be lovely to receive flowers”.
And so, I hope that when our production is funded and we get back on set, I can present him with perhaps his first bouquet of flowers.
