Finding Bourdain.

Director's Notes: The Madwoman's Game. Part I

Maine, late fall, 2021. Outside the window, a trace of snow blew across deep green pines. Inside, black unconnected circles and scribbled notes stretched across a whiteboard.

Interesting project, but how to do it?

Carla Berkowitz, who produced the film Critical Thinking, had introduced me to Bianca. A 15-year-old from New Mexico who wanted to make a documentary about women in chess to inspire young girls to play. Keanu Reeves, himself a serious chess player, had signed on as her mentor. They asked me to direct.

First instincts on the whiteboard: Engaging if never played chess? Multigenerational appeal, how? Emotion. Travel. Needs a journey.

How to materialize this? How to make it real?

Years of getting things right and wrong with Bourdain gave me a few things that helped me find my way through The Madwoman’s Game.

Intent. Attention. Vision.

Intent.

For me, good filmmaking means doing right by people. Subjects, crew, and audience. Tony felt this for the people we filmed with, as did I. The right intentions opened the door to heartfelt, candid, funny moments.

At the extremes: conflict zones, neighborhoods under armed guard, places that go sideways in a flash. Showing respect was a matter of life or death. Raising an open hand, covering the lens, placing a hand over the heart, each declaring my intent to protect the dignity of strangers.

People feel intentions. Aligned intentions open doors to the intimate and cultural. Intent becomes action despite fear, and the willingness to embrace an awkward moment.

The right intentions can get you through shattering a one-of-a-kind main dish in a busy restaurant. Or forgetting to hit the record button. Or the hardest of times.

At the whiteboard, intent was circled, an arrow pointing to a question: How to make chess meaningful for the audience?

Attention.

Attention requires practice: staying sharp, situationally aware, present. Not only looking through the camera, but listening through it. What else is going on in the room?

Better pictures come from listening. Following the conversation. What must this image say to the audience? Tony was a good listener because he wanted to hear people’s answers. In the early days, if I wasn’t listening, a quick browbeating ensued: Yo numbnuts, it’s not about that… it’s about this.

So I started by listening.

Bianca, teenage hero of the story. What does she want that she doesn’t have? What matters to her most? What is her perspective? What is her voice?

Bianca is curious, driven, and passionate about art and chess. But there were questions she needed answers to. What to do, where to live, how to earn a living?

More arrows and circles on the whiteboard.

An insight.

Not knowing but wanting to know, that is the first step on a hero’s journey. This was a coming-of-age story. Bianca was on a personal search with real wants and needs driving her questions. But how to combine her search with chess?

If life is like a game of chess, how do we play it?

Vision.

The deeper levels. Anthropology versus fiction. Shaping reality versus finding it. Tony and I came back to these questions many times, over beers, over breakfast.

He came at television as a nonfiction writer who also wrote fiction and was obsessed with cinema. I wanted to be making cinema but got drawn into nonfiction. Neither of us took the easy route. Those years were extreme. The work took everything, utterly taxing but delirious. Living like that felt like a hundred lives:

The side doors of a beaten up minivan were ratchet-strapped open, the AC gone, hot air jetting through the vehicle. Steep Cambodian hillsides rushed below on a winding road. We were onto our second beers, yelling through the wind. Tony had us doubled over in laughter, recounting a bout with food poisoning. If I could get him to laugh, that was a big win.

That strange blend of art and reality produced what Tim O’Brien calls the story truth in The Things They Carried. A story greater than the sum of its parts.

When I started seeing the ways that chess, like food for Tony, could be a window into deeper things, the whiteboard began overflowing. We’d need some mystery and magic. A story needs a beginning, middle, and end. I needed a format, like a game, with rules but infinite variations. We were going on a journey.

And that was something I knew about.