Rotterdam!!!

Well Blasted!!! premiered in Rotterdam to packed audiences and had three successful screenings there, showing double feature with Laura Kraning’s film, American Parade. It’s a wonderful festival and to be there is to truly to feel like you are an artist among artists as well as all of the people that support and enjoy cinema. I have never been to a place where the work comes so much before anything else. There are no red carpets, no photographers, just the pure joy of cinema. They meet in the coffee shops and in the bars and discuss the films of the day. It’s a massive festival that includes a market and you know that no matter where you are, you are missing ten other wonderful things, but that is how life should be. They serve beer just about everywhere but in the bathrooms and smoking is allowed in every public space in the city. And Good God you don’t know food until you leave the states: the cheese, the fruit, the bread, are all like it used when you were a kid. I had a good time. I want to go back soon. It was an honor to be there and I hope this 36 year old festival never changes and that the people there never change either.

Judas Goat

Here is the quote that was my mantra while making Blasted!!!

It's from page 134 of The Rum Diary...

"I sat there a long time, and thought about a lot of things. Foremost among them was the suspicion that my strange and ungovernable instincts might do me in before I had a chance to get rich. No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction--toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat.*"

*A Judas goat is a trained goat used at a slaughterhouse and in general animal herding. The Judas goat is trained to associate with sheep or cattle, leading them to a specific destination. In stockyards, a Judas goat will lead sheep to slaughter, while its own life is spared. Judas goats are also used to lead other animals to specific pens and on to trucks. The term is a reference to the biblical traitor Judas Iscariot.