Slowing down

Do you know those moments where everything seems larger than life? Where the taste of baked beans rivals haute cuisine? Where the hazy sunlight and slow summer pace make you feel so much lighter you could have lost a stone in weight. It's as if the great post production supervisor in the sky has decided to apply a luminosity filter, upped the brightness and contrast, balanced the audio.

Those moments where you stop and look at something - the light from the bottom of a glass of water painting mad Kandinsky shapes on the walls around you, the butter running molten tracks down your baked potato like volcano lava, the bird song drowning out the sound of the traffic for the moment. And if you were in a cinema you might notice the beautiful shot, or remark on the sound editing or visual effects. And in front of a computer screen going through rushes you might mark it down as 'Definitely Use' and on set even you'd quickly dive behind a camera and put a lens between you and the magical accidental unpredictable life that decided to reveal herself at that very moment.

But in every day life, how easy it is to ignore these things. At best to remark 'that would make a nice shot' as if the moment only has value if captured and seen by someone else, like our own eyes and ears and senses are not worth enough to stop this very second and see a movie that no-one else will ever see, and that we can never watch again or rewind. And yet if this moment isn't enough, isn't magic and beauty enough, then what will be? And how much of the planet will we need to have destroyed chasing fleeting neon tinted dreams figuring that out.

I say this as I slowly emerge from an intense, stressful, full speed production process on my fifth book - a global guide to film finance. As I change gears attempting a u-turn mid flight, looking back at the debris left behind as I charged full steam ahead to get the book ready for Cannes, it's such a relief to see the movie - my favorite movie - outside my window, still playing.