FYI: This post is all sorts of artsy and weepy, so if you don't want to read that crap, just stop now. I have to get this off my chest, so I'm putting it here, but it may not be at all interesting to anyone. Fair warning.
As I am typing this, it's less than 12 hours until we start shooting the movie. This week everyone has constantly asked me if I'm nervous or excited. I'm really not at all. Right now, I have two main emotions: Anxious and a little bit sad.
I'm anxious because of something I realized on Wednesday when we were doing the camera test:
This movie is no longer mine.
My life started it. I have loved this project and nurtured it and anguished over it and suffered for it and sacrificed for it. And now it's not mine anymore.
Don't get me wrong: It's going exactly as it's supposed to go. I have all the creative control I want. So far the movie is absolutely true to my vision, I have a director I believe in, an A-List crew and actors playing me and my friends that I couldn't be happier with.
But still--the movie isn't mine anymore. I'm not directing it. I'm not acting in it. It may be my life, it may be my creation, it may be my will that brought this into being, it may be my creative vision that drives and defines this...but it's not mine anymore.
Over the past week, I've watched Jesse become Drew. Geoff was Dan the moment he walked into the audition. Matt Czuchry had the hardest time because he had to deal with the real Tucker being not only in the room, but a big voice in the room. And to his credit, he stood up to me and took "Tucker Max" away from me. The character isn't me anymore. Matt is making it something bigger, something better, something that is beyond who I am in real life.
Don't misunderstand: This is what HAS to happen in order for this movie to work. If the "Tucker Max" in this movie is confined to what I am in real life or in the stories, it won't work anywhere near as well than if Matt can take the character into new and fresh places.
I had two choices--be small, petty, and controlling, keep this character as me and refuse to let the other artists on this movie breathe their ideas into mine; or, I could take what I created, pick the best people I could find to help me make it real (starting with Nils all the way through), explain to them everything I could about what it should be, and then get out of their way.
It's the choice between failure and success. I chose to keep my pride and demand granular control my first two times around the block in Hollywood, and I failed because of it.
This time, I swallowed my pride and set my art free.
I know I made the right choice, but still...it hurts, and it makes me anxious. It's moved out of my hands, now it's in the hands of the director and the actors. From this point forward, it's my job to help them do the best job, not to do it for them. Especially for someone who has spent his whole life being in charge, this is not easy to handle.
That loss of control makes me a bit anxious, but I think I can deal with it. I trust everyone to do their job, so it's manageable. The other emotion I am dealing with is, well, sadness.
I don't think for a minute that this movie is going to be anything but a massive, genre-defining hit. I think we are going to knock this out of the park, it's going to be huge, we're all going to get rich and make a bunch of awesome sequels, and everyone associated with it will always look back on this as being a landmark time in their life, both financially and creatively.
And while this is obviously the outcome I desperately wish for, success for me won't be all sunshine and kittens. Because for me, success is going to mean something different than it will for anyone else:
If I get my wish...I'm never going to be Tucker Max again.
I can see exactly how this is going to play out. Matt is going to nail this role to the wall. His amazing performance is going to rocket him to the top of the A-List, and he'll be one of the hottest actor celebs in America (he'll deserve it). And because at least 80% of the people who see this movie won't have any idea it is anything other than a movie, and won't know about the book or the website or me, to them, Matt Czuchry will be Tucker Max. Everything they know and think about Tucker Max will be through the lens of Matt's performance.
But more importantly, once Matt steps in front of the camera as "Tucker Max," then that name no longer really belongs to me. It now belongs to the character that Matt plays in the movie. Yeah, it's based on my life, and yeah, Nils and I wrote every single word in the script, but it's not my life, and it's not really my story anymore. Once we create it, it becomes art that is distinct from me as a person. And even if you create the art, once you put it out to the world, you don't really own it anymore. It belongs, at least in some sense, to everyone.
I've thought a lot about this. This is such a weird position to be in--if I fail, then I keep my identity. It'll be tarnished, but it'll still be me. But if I get my wish, then pretty much all of my public identity gets co-opted by someone and something else. It goes into the creative ether, never to return to me.
I don't really even know how to process this. It's my name. It's my life. It's my book. It's my script. But it's not me. This is so far beyond my realm of experience, I don't even know what to think about it.
I don't even know why I am vaguely sad about this. You know what it is? It's the sort of sadness that comes when you finish a long, compelling, awesome book that you don't want to end. Even though you know it has to finish, even though of part of you wants to get to the end to see what happens, another part of you wishes you could stay in that world forever.
But you can't. Everything eventually ends.
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