About
*This is the production blog for The Age of Reason, an independent film shooting in San Antonio, TX, August 2011.
About The Movie
The Age of Reason, while based partly on our own experiences as suburban youth, is informed by several specific film genres. These include the iconic teen coming-of-age movies of the mid-century, such as Rebel Without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass, and All Fall Down whose visual styles convey the angst, confusion, and wonder of teenage life; the dejected playfulness and magic realism of French New Wave Cinema; the unapologetic, yet endearingly flawed characters found in John Hughes’ “brat pack” series and Judd Apatow’s “Freaks and Geeks.”
Though The Age of Reason draws influence from these works of the past, our most important task is to communicate to a contemporary audience. Therefore, a balance must be achieved between artfulness and entertainment, and we must incorporate the highly empathetic language of cinema to which modern moviegoers have become accustomed. This will be a contemporary film for a contemporary audience.
To feel contemporary, The Age of Reason must address the psyche of today’s youth. The main character, Oz, struggles with a sense of entitlement that plagues our current generation facing an oversaturated job market. Since the Great Depression, parents have successively expected their children to be granted more opportunity and wealth than they themselves were able to achieve. This has created a culture where children’s self esteem is propped up by the inescapable mantras: “You can be anything you want to be” and “You’re special just for being you”, causing insecurity and resentment when they realize their goals are out of reach. Oz dreams of becoming a major league baseball pitcher, but he is afraid he’s not good enough to make the cut. Tragically, he is right. The other characters share similarly modern struggles enforced by the culture of divorce, overworked parents, and suspended adolescence.
The stories and films that inspire us most are the ones that push the boundaries of genre, style and character, creating not necessarily “real” worlds, but worlds based around the characters’ realities. Many of the movies considered to be some of the greatest of all-time – movies like The Graduate or East of Eden or Taxi Driver – are not movies based entirely in our reality. They are stories with a kind of forced perspective that make us sympathetic and understanding towards the characters on their own terms. The “reality” of The Age of Reason — while hauntingly familiar to suburbanites — is heightened by the sharp-edged melodrama and the underlying shades of absurdist humor, cinematic supernatural, and a compressed timeframe. The story envelops a spectrum of the teenage experience: mindless destruction, self-importance, carelessness, embarrassment, fear, rebellion, and attachment, provoking the distinct feeling of nostalgia while creating a new, enduring kinship between the audience and the characters.
