After directing my first feature film, REVELATION, I was faced with a question I’ve always detested. You’ve all probably been asked the same question at one time or another. I’ve been asked it during job interviews, by guidance counselors, and on this particular occasion: during an interview about the film. The dreaded question: “Where do you see yourself in five years?”


My blunt and unimaginative response: “I have no clue. I take things as they come.” I can feel self-help gurus cringing. I can feel our achievement-driven culture shaking its head. I can see the disappointed look in my interviewer’s face. Where’s the sound-bite of me mapping out my plans for an Oscar?
I’ve always felt somewhat guilty about not setting out such long-term plans. I don’t like disappointing others. But generally I’ve found something that I like to do and that excites me; I work on it to the best of my ability and then I find something else and something else and so on. The plan never excites me as much as what I’m currently tackling so why make it?


Imagine my joy in finding some vindication for this lack of goal-setting in C.S. Lewis’ classic Screwtape Letters. In it a senior devil, Screwtape, writes letters to an apprentice devil giving him directions on how to snare and capture the soul’s of mankind. He writes in one letter: “We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.” Screwtape acknowledges the encouragement he and his demonic colleagues “have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men’s affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence, nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”


Wow. If only I had been able to quote that to my guidance counselor! Who knew that instead of being lazy I was in fact fighting off Satan’s temptations?
In producing and directing films I’ve always loved working with people who LOVE what they’re currently doing. They’re not in that position as a stepping-stone to something else. It’s not just something that will look good on their resume. It’s something that they love to do.


In The Practice Of The Presence Of God, Brother Lawrence notes: “We ought not to grow tired of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.”


My New Year’s resolution for 2010: do things which makes God smile. Anyone have a plan for that?


- Post by Andre van Heerden, Writer/Director at Cloud Ten Pictures