director’s note for Saving Face (2005)

I am fascinated by human ineptitude. I rarely see the world in terms of good and evil, right or wrong. I think most people strive to do the right thing. That the “right thing” is so often wrong is uncanny, sometimes tragic, and often very, very funny. My favorite stories arise from good-but-flawed characters trying desperately to do what each believes is best for a given situation — and the situation keeps getting worse. The characters don’t find any of this funny; we as the audience laugh out of recognition — in their boat, we might do (and perhaps have done) worse. What interests me is our capacity to see this, yet make those same mistakes regardless. It is funny that a species so capable — our biology outpaces our circumstances such that the vast majority of us are physically and intellectually far more agile than our daily work requires — is so lost when it comes to emotions, to relationships with one another. On the chain of evolution, from fish to ape to us, we are the geek with glasses who can’t ask out the girl. Prior species were wiped out by famine and disease; we may be the first to be felled by poor self-esteem. <a href="https://medium.com/@inscrutable/directors-note-for-saving-face-2005-3623dd7f7a5c">Click Here</a>