¡Colores!; 203; Ed Haddaway, Matthew McDuffie, Aaron Noble

You You You You

You You You

You You You

You You You

You Clearly, in a dream state, a very rich life is going on. And I look at people all the time, and I think there's a whole world in their heads.

I mean, I know from my own experience, I walk around with all these different thoughts and feelings and ideas, and it's comfortable. So I assume everybody else is in the same boat. A wonderful rationale for what I do is from Carl Young, and his idea of the collective unconscious. It's always made simple to me that I can read a book that was written in the 1600s, and I can understand what that book is about. And to do that, there has to be a basic connection between people. I'm always aware that my audience, or any audience, is doing half the work. It's not just the author, it's the person that's receiving it, and what are they doing with it?

It's a universal connection between all of us. I'm pretty deaf, deafness causes you to separate from other people, it creates a social barrier, and I went to a stage in my life where I was really a loner. So art was absolutely necessary for me to connect with other people. I would pretty obsessed with dark things for a long time, and it was sort of a conscious decision to move from the darkness toward a lighter view of life. I don't know how anybody can get through this life without a sense of humor. I mean, life in itself is a very difficult, challenging thing.

I remember reading about the Eskimos, supposedly they go off by themselves and they have a kind of spiritual time, and they come to the conclusion that the universe is their friend. And I like that idea, if it's not our friend, I don't know that I want to live in this universe. So if it's out to get me, which it seems like a lot of time, we're in real trouble. So I choose to look at it like the universe is my friend. I'm trying to understand exactly what humor is, and it's a very elusive. If you kind of remove yourself just a little bit, it's all this kind of wild dance. Life is just chaos and cohesion, it's really our attitude to shape whether it's funny or

not. I feel like I'm trying to be a juggler from short, and I'm throwing objects up in the air, I want them to stay up in the air. And the real world doesn't allow that, but I get as close as I can by making the sculpture. The lightness of being is that we're also temporal. Everything is elusive and temporal, and it'll all be gone from there. And that makes it both profound, and it also makes it ridiculous.

It's a ridiculous thing. It's a responsibility to be a storyteller. One writer, Matthew McDeffey, shares the importance of stories. Why is story important? Because it's everything, because everyone has one. As my son says, stories, they're everywhere, and it's interesting, because my mother had this gift where she could see a couple on the street, and she would make up a story about them. She would go something like, oh, it's so tragic. You're going, what's that, Mom? She's in love with him, and she was so she would go on, and it sort of made me realize that everybody, everywhere, has an infinite story to tell. It's what makes us human, and it's what makes us love each other. So that's why it's so important.

When you are creating characters, is that part of the process? I just steal. Just steal. It actually, everything that I write starts with some sort of autobiographical kernel. Story is really kind of like emotional mathematics in that you're creating an algorithm that creates the response that you're looking for. I know that sounds cold-hearted, but it really is puzzle-making. Well, particularly film writing. Not all writing can be about observation, and certainly film is, but you want to have an emotional response from the audience, and that means setting things up in a particular way. So when a reveal is placed in front of the audience, or in front of the characters, they can't help but react in the way that you hope. When you're putting together a screenplay, what is the dramatic structure that you're looking for, and how do you create it, and why is it important?

It's important because that's how you get the reaction that you're looking for. The first thing to establish is a problem for the character. A reason for the story to exist, something that means a lot to that character, and then you sort of establish, what are they going to do about it? Because that's really where conflict and story comes from is somebody wanting something and not being able to get it. So that sort of drives the story. That's what creates the scenes for you is this need and obstacle that prevents the need, and then being a good dramatist is sort of like being a bit of a saddest in that you want to take them as far from whatever they want as possible. You want to torture them, and it doesn't matter if it's a comedy or a tragedy, you try to take them as far away from what they want as possible to create that emotional thing, and that's sort of like that's the crisis of the whole piece, and then it's like, okay, that acts as like a mouse trap in terms of the final confrontation of whatever the forces

that you've developed in the beginning of the story, that they're going to have to face at the end, and there's this pergation, I guess. And that's our connection to it as an audience or as viewers, because it's such a natural part of the human condition. And I think everything has that structure, if you really think about that. It's the structure, and poetry probably has it as well, and it's like the structure of a wave on a beach, and there are lots of different types of waves, big crashing waves or gentle waves that sort of lap upon the shore, but they all sort of rise to a place of absolute tension before they come tumbling down onto the sand or the rocks or whatever it is. So can you give us an example from your latest work of this moment, which was discussed? In the face of love, the film that came out with Annette Benning and Ed Harris, there is a moment where the Annette Benning's character is holding a secret, and she's holding it from her daughter, and I'm not ruining anything if I tell you this, her husband has died

five years ago, and she finds a man who looks just like him. So it's like a hitchcock kind of romance, so she falls in love with his double and pursues him rather recklessly and is keeping it a secret from her friends or neighbors or her daughter. And so there must, and I knew as soon as this sort of story came from, it actually came from the director of something as motherhood experience, I knew that that daughter had to come into the story, that that would be the crisis of this entire piece, that that would be the moment where there was the most tension in it, and that the mother would have to choose the lover over the daughter, and it was the emotional high point of the entire piece. Why do you write?

I write because it is every art form that I adore. I write screenplays, I write films because it's every art form. It is poetry, and when you're composing it's poetry. So tell us about the life of a screenwriter. I don't mean this in a pejorative sense, but it is a solitary existence, it's something that you have to live in your head, and you have worlds in your head that you're devising, that you sort of have to, universes, that are constantly sort of spinning and you're sort of pulling them down out of the firmament onto an electronic page. So there is that, that you sort of feel I want to say separate from the rest of the world because you sort of feel like you're an observer, and because you are, well, you're constantly shopping for little bits of humanity to put in your cart every moment of the day. So your existence, your very existence is, is your material.

And if you think about that, there's, there's never going, or should never be a moment when you don't have something to write about. It's what you're choosing to write about, that's, that's the difficult part. Is that the burden of the writer to, to make those decisions and, and then always have a decision after the decision you just made? Burden slash luxury, because there are, there are such heavier burdens in the world than trying to decide what to compose. But the, the agony is, is quite real because, and I think it's in relation to the desire that one has to, to put it out there. That's that compulsion to create, I think, is so, so profound that when you're not in that process, that it's, it is torturous, because you feel like you are letting, not

just yourself down, but you're, you're letting your potential down, you're letting the species down, you're letting the universe down, that's, I guess that's the burden, because you feel like I have something to say, and I'm not getting it out there, I'm not letting people know what it's like. And I think that's really, because it's, it's a responsibility to be a storyteller, isn't it? I mean, it's sort of like, are you alone, are we alone? Are we, what's, what's our connective tissue here? So I think that's really where the, the, the masochistic aspect of it is you just don't feel like you're, you're living up to your potential. With a tremendous new quantum bridge mural, young artists make the impossible, possible. I came out for a, for a week before we did the project and looked at the wall and tried to figure out what wanted to be living on that wall.

If it's a portal into some universe, what universe is this a portal into? The quantum bridge, the quantum bridge, quantum, quantum bridge, the bridge, space time continuum bridge. Uh, it's because it's blending the idea of bridge between time, the quantum bridge, so perfect. The quantum bridge, quantum bridge, bigger, the quantum bridge, hello, this is the quantum bridge mural. What the idea of the quantum bridge is you're connecting universes and you're connecting three different life spans, life spans, you're connecting the past, present, and future. And a lot of young folk only really see what's right ahead of them, but it's a little if we connect the past, present, and future, you're looking at where you came from to represent what you're doing now and then what you could potentially do in the future. If it's perfectly what we're trying to do, you know.

The mural makes you reflect on what the possibility can be and how you're going to break from the stereotype of just graduating and then going to McDonald's, you know. Well, to me, art is the language of hope. To me, it represents a lot of what we're trying to do here at 508 to encourage all that energy and all the creative prowess that we have as young artists and bring something different to our city and something new for people to be inspired by. The reason I'm attracted to murals is a lot of things, but the scale is really important. When I was a kid when I was 19, I went to Mexico City and I saw the great Diego Rivera murals. There was something in the energy and the scale of the power of those.

That reminded me of the other artworks that I love, which was Jack Kirby Comics, Superhero Comics. Huge bodies and a super force, so I just always wanted to kind of try to get at that somehow. Another thing about murals is that they're public and I just find that more inspiring. I am not too good with heights. Heights has never been my thing and I had to overcome that fear. It's 140 feet long, it's 24 feet high at the highest point. I think the square footage of this is about 1700 square feet. There's sometimes I'd go up to the third or fourth story of scaffolding and I would be shaking, but I had to suck it up and just deal with it. It was our jungle gym.

My favorite part is the actual handwork. We use paint brushes. This is all brush work. Oh man, this mural almost destroyed me. It was so hot when we started that the paint was steaming as we applied it to the wall and it was so cold when we finished that we had to heat the wall with a big space heater so that the paint could dry properly and not freeze. We were painting in the snow. We were painting in the middle of the night in sub-zero temperatures. It was an incredible battle to get this mural up on this wall. It was very intimidating coming up to a wall like this and having to do grid it out and transfer the images onto the wall and having every line land in just the right spot. And that was paint-staking and it was difficult. And I worked them really hard.

I know it was tough for them but they never showed it. They kept their spirits were great, they were optimistic, they were energetic. I think they probably learned a lot about what it takes to do a wall of this scale and probably stretch their own capacity. He's like a ninja. He's like a samurai. A very practice, smooth calm, taking strokes with confidence too. The way of the muralists. Even seeing him do it was a little unreal. Especially the kind of wall that's kind of stuck to it. It was a little real. Yeah, it was a very textured wall. Wall is so big. So if you don't get up every morning and get out there and keep going even way past the point of exhaustion, it just won't get finished. Yeah, it's the discipline of the wall. But in the end, it's all worth it.

In a way felt like a responsibility or a greater duty. It was painting our home and I felt honored. That means the world to me. I want people to know anything as possible as long as you have a belief in your ability of whatever you want to do and the impossible can become possible. And I really would like for adults to really see that it was done by youth of the city and showing how their dedication to the city and how this is now one of the biggest walls in Albuquerque is a statement. Don't hesitate. Don't be afraid to get yourself out there. The accomplishment is like nothing you could ever imagine.

One thing is a sudden step up in an exponential jump, a leap upwards to a higher level dramatically. I think that periodically throughout a person's life, you can have these moments, these quantum moments where suddenly your horizon opens up and you have new strength and new possibilities for yourself. As an old superhero fan, that's what I'm about, I'm about that metaphor of superpower. And I think superpowers are really real. So the quantum bridge is definitely sort of a youth oriented mural, maybe even more than all my stuff is youth oriented. And I wanted to get that idea that you can make huge leaps in your life. And where a card you have discipline, you train, you train, and then one day boom, you're

at the next level. And so this mural presents a past level, a present level, and a future level, and then it shoots off into things. Until next time, thank you for watching.

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