February 16, 2010
Titling this film was a struggle. The story follows two brothers as they try to navigate their complex relationship over the course of one afternoon, so naturally my first title was Brothers. It worked fine and stated something very simple about the story, so it stuck. But as I got into production and post-production, I realized I needed a new title.
.
Brothers isn’t very evocative and the word has various connotations, so it doesn’t give a potential audience member much information. Furthermore, anyone who searched for Brothers online would have to dig through dozens of results related to the Jake Gyllenhaal/Toby McGuire movie to find anything about my project, (a bit of IMDb research revealed that my film would be one of many, many films with this title).
.
So I set out to find a more evocative and unique title. My first strategy was just to think about it. I thought that if I concentrated enough, inspiration would strike. A week later I didn’t even have any good ideas, so I decided to take a more structured approach. I made lists of possible titles, asked my cast and crew for ideas, and I re-read the script looking for moments or lines of dialogue that could yield a new name. This gave me some decent options, but nothing that really seemed to fit.
.
Finally, I sat down to discuss title options with Reva Goldberg and Margaret Shafer, who run the Reach Film Fellowship. As we debated various ideas, for the first time I was forced to articulate what I wanted from the title. It couldn’t simply be unique and evocative, I realized, it also needed to reflect the simple, solid feel of this story about boys trying to become men. It couldn’t be too soft, (The Drawn Boy), or too plain (The Bat), nor too stylized or complex, (My Chair at the Table). The Hideaway had the proper solid feel, but Reva correctly pointed out that it has connotations that don’t fit the film, (“It makes me think of pirates,” is how she put it).
.
Ultimately, Reva suggested The Drawing and when she said it, I knew that was the title. It had the simple structure and solid feel that I wanted, and it evoked the boys’ process of growing up. You could say that the lesson here is to get other people to title your film, but that’s not quite it. In order to recognize The Drawing as the right choice, I had to have a clear idea of what I wanted from the title. Without that knowledge, I was stabbing in the dark both in terms of coming up with ideas and judging those suggested by other people. Only when I knew how I wanted the title to look, sound, and feel could I select it.