Another Shark in a Suit

Everybody loves you. Pisses me off.

Jerry Maguire: I'm finished, I'm fucked. Twenty four hours ago, man, I was hot! Now... I'm a cautionary tale. You see this jacket I'm wearing, you like it? Because I don't really need it. Because I'm cloaked in failure! I lost the number one draft picked the night before the draft! Why? Let's recap: Because a hockey player's kid made me feel like a superficial jerk. I ate two slices of bad pizza, went to bed and grew a conscious!

Okay. I am going to talk about a film which I think it will give me the opportunity to fully describe what I enjoy seeing and what I intend to do. Actually I am very much interested about male characters fighting for their goals, fighting to earn money, earning respect from the others, get a decent powerful career... If possible conquer the world. I am interested about smart characters who want it all.
The film, Jerry Maguire may seem cheesy to many but I think it is a very powerful film in case of written character and its strong visual storytelling. Jerry is a successful sport agent, he is strong, funny, dependable. He is working in a major company called Sport Management International. "Everybody loves him" is one of the tag lines of the film. But at the age of 35, after a nervous breakdown, he starts writing a mission statement in one night "The Things We Think and Do Not Say: The Future of Our Business", proposing "Fewer Clients, Less Money" but a better personal support to the clients. He delivers it to everyone in the company but of course in the next day, he is fired.
Once he is alone, he becomes the boss of himself, Jerry is so frighten that he instinctively tries to get all his clients back with his new company as opposed to his mission statement that he is about to start but like a destiny, he can only convince two of his ex-clients.He is now confronting with his writings, "Less Clients, Less Money" even he doesn't want to because he just wants to get to back to business to get a revenge from his ex-bosses. One of clients is a very young promising football player and the other one is a black, in his mid-thirties who thinks only about money to support his big family.
At the same time, Jerry who was never alone in his life breaks up with his fiancée and another challenge awaits him. Loneliness.
But the main conflict starts when the young promising football player which he was his only savor decides in last moment to make a deal with Sport Management International, Jerry is now with only one client who doesn't promise a potential as a football player, he is difficult to work with, he is aggressive and everybody finds him a pain the ass in the team. But as oppossed to Jerry, he has a very strong respect and caring for family values which Jerry in the end will learn a lot from him.
So Jerry, in his journey, will have to continue with the most difficult football player to get back in the business and will have the chance to really understand and go through all that he wrote before. In a way, now he has the chance to prove whether he was right or wrong to himself and to really understand what really matters in life. Like his mentor would say "Personal relations are the keys to this business."

Jerry Maguire: I will not rest until I have you holding a Coke, wearing your own shoe, playing a Sega game *featuring you*, while singing your own song in a new commercial, *starring you*, broadcast during the Super bowl, in a game that you are winning, and I will not *sleep* until that happens. I'll give you fifteen minutes to call me back.



Now, another thing which I would like to discuss here has got nothing to do with Jerry Maguire, but something that I shot two years ago as an exercise. I love working with maquette, small figures and stuff because it gives me the chance to experiment things that I really can't in real life because it is expensive. Therefore I like to work with actions figures, light them, direct them and creating a living environment for them. I think the most difficult part is creating the environment, for example this saloon doesn't really look to real because there is really no detail, no traces of past, time, doesn't really look like it is living. And to do that, you really have to work really detailed in order to create a living environment. And it is really a craft. It is what production designers do actually.

What I would really like to do as a long term project is actually combine both. A very well written character and a story with a very strong sense of visual storytelling. But isn't that every filmmaker wants to achieve at the end?