June is a special month for me, because that’s when I start production work on my feature films. This is my 4^th year of writing, directing, and editing my own material, and the mental grind of living up to the expectations I set out for myself is a labor of love that demands an occasional respite. I think we’re all in need of parallel social realities with rules and archetypes and characters that comment on our own, that help us form and reinforce our beliefs. For some people, it’s “Twin Peaks”; for some people it’s garden-variety gossip; for me it’s the NBA.

My fascination with professional basketball as an existential metaphor started when I became a Laker fan in 2005. Seattle in those days actually still had a basketball team, but a decade of broken expectations in the 1990s led me away from them. I was 21 or 22 then—an age when negative identity formation begins to run its course, and affirmations of principle starts to seem more lasting than the cultural politics of opposition. I allowed many things back into my life after something of a nihilistic period, and professional basketball was one of them.

In Seattle, we have only two professional championships in any sport to our city’s name (The Storm in 2004; The Sonics in 1979), and that dearth compels us to mistrust ambition and loathe achievement. The Lakers seemed to exemplify those traits more than any other team, and they routinely achieved their ends at our expense. Before 2005, I’d hated the Lakers on every ground imaginable—normative, social, political, symbolic—but something shifted in 2005, and that something was my bias. I was returning to basketball fandom with something of a clearer understanding of what this sport meant to me, personally, after spending time away from it to study History and Philosophy in college.

Basketball fans will remember the start of the 2005 season as a time when a once-juggernaut suddenly became a mediocre team that was saddled with a petulant superstar who shot too much, had a bad attitude, and was accused of rape. What was fascinating to me, as someone who didn’t know of the Lakers as anything but pathological achievers, was how a former champion conducted itself when it was now down and out. It might’ve been the result of my temperament, an accident of the zodiac, or that background in History and Philosophy, but I began to take the symbolism of sport more seriously once the one symbol I could rely on in sport—the Lakers being the evil empire that always won—was suddenly inverted. What followed over the next few years with that team was awkward as hell, riveting to watch, and instructive to recount.

In the late 2000s when my team was galvanizing its championship mettle, I was in my early 20s, and I was piecing my life together. 2010 was a massive turning point in my life that still think about every day, to this day. I had just finished my first film (“Seat of Empire”), was starting on a second (“Waste of Time”), moved into a new place I was excited to stay at for a long time after years of unstable living arrangements, was in closer contact with my family after years of being a distant college student who studied history and was learning how to make documentaries, and made the decision to pursue a divorce after a hard-fought but mutually toxic couple years of matrimony. Somewhere in there, I turned 26. When the water around you is that unsettled, you learn and create things about yourself. In part for the stability it afforded me, and mostly because of the genuine love and joy I have for contributing to this century-old, collective enterprise called cinema, I made a resolution to devote my life to making films that year.

As a filmmaker, my professional life is a constant oscillation between anticipation and realization. You spend the first part of the year preparing for production by writing a script, building a team of crew and cast members you can trust, and fundraising. Then you enter into production, which is physically the most grueling part of the process. Post-production drains you mentally, but you receive a boost from the publicity that begins to circulate about your project, if you’ve been careful enough to do publicity work. Then the film premiers and you prepare to start it all over again.

Not everyone is cut out for this kind of year-to-year engagement. I’ve made many wonderful friends and collaborators over the years who I thought could stand it, but the pressure often proves too much. Nobody is to blame, and there are no hard feelings; not everyone is wired the same way. Personally, I couldn’t live with myself knowing that there were others in my chosen field—whatever that chosen field happened to be—who confronted my same obstacles and succeeded where I couldn’t, but not everyone is obligated to take their profession personally. This is especially the case in film, where disappointment so often follows triumph. A lot of people give up, because it feels like 3 steps forward, 2 steps back, and, really, there aren’t but so many people you can relate to about it. Helpful as other directors are, they’re your competition, and you’re wary of leaning on them too much for advice. Besides, you have to learn for yourself: you know your temperament better than anyone else, and all the moving parts on a production need to be a healthy reflection of the director. Over the years, in the struggle for perspective on what it was I’d decided to do with my life, I relied even more heavily on professional basketball as a kind of “escape” that helped me feel my way through the new terrain of my chosen field.

I said that 2010 was the year I made the resolution to devote my life to making films during a tumultuous period of my life; it was also, coincidentally, the last year the Lakers won a championship. The popular narrative surrounding the team when they beat the Celtics in the Finals that year was pretty superficial, as if it was forgotten that the team just years prior was a mediocre squad until a few critical roster changes, front office decisions, and re-focused efforts from key players brought them back to winning multiple championships after a long, hard climb. Even and especially from a historically accomplished team, that kind of effort is taken for granted. Most people just assumed that they’d win because they were the Lakers, and that’s what they were supposed to do.

That right there, in and of itself, is a lesson I started to internalize, a transformative insight that rewarded the hundreds of hours I’d spent over the years watching games, or reading about them, or talking about them with friends and family: Achievement is the ideal, but expectation seems the genius of achievement.  Even when the Sonics were a good team in the 90s, there was an unspoken sense after a few years that we were “just Seattle”, so that when we started to fade it was an easier accepted reality than it would’ve been in a town with greater expectations of its teams. It happened that way with the Mariners in the early 2000s, and has been the case with the Seahawks for most of that franchise’s history as well. We celebrate trips to the Super Bowl or to The Finals, but don’t seem to truly expect that we’ll be back there again. Something clicked for me after seeing the Lakers achieve a goal that they’d been years removed from. In the hunt to live the dreams I set out for myself as a filmmaker, I started to visualize depressed expectations as a kind of contagion, and started dealing with it as such; something to treat immediately if it affected you or anyone you cared about, and something to stay as far away from as possible when you saw it in others you didn’t know or couldn’t help.

You could lose or win the award; you could fail or succeed in getting to the film festival; you could make, break, destroy, or repair your reputation one year, then do the exact opposite the next; there are many things with respect to definitive goals that are simply out of our control as filmmakers who exist beside a knowledgeable but often fickle critical community of newspapers and selection panels and festival officials. The one thing you can control, however, is your annual output, your dedication to learning from your competition, and your will to create. Those are tangibles that I think lead to high expectations, and I’ve observed that they seem to be prerequisites for any winner, for anyone we look up to in film, in politics, in sports, in anything.

It’s interesting because, in film, those things that are ultimately out of our control are also measures of success, ways by which you grow your audience and have people who don’t know you relate to you. Many in our field don’t say it for fear of alienating others, particularly in a film community as small and thriving as Seattle’s, but I can express it in full confidence: we’re a competitive breed, and no one wants to win certain accolades as badly as I do. Win, lose, or draw, though, you have to have a certain stillness of mind that focuses on the process first, and the results second: it’s hard to do this if you can’t “act like you’ve been there” because, in fact, you haven’t been “there” and don’t expect to be. It’s strange being a fan of a team in Los Angeles, particularly when so much of the discourse in independent film in Seattle is negative towards things that come out of LA; the bottom line is that we want many of the same things that film communities in LA or New York or wherever want—to be known internationally for making great art, and for having an infrastructure that supports people who make great art. The only way that can happen is if individuals perform with the pressure of knowing that the future of the medium in our city in a sense depends on us giving it all we have.

We in Seattle let our professional basketball team in Seattle go, and that team eventually became the Thunder, who knocked the Lakers out of the playoffs this year. New champions are crowned every year; the teams that impress me are the ones that might finish in 2^nd or 3^rd place regularly, but aren’t happy with it like people who don’t have a vision of where they want to finish might be. When the Sonics left in 2008, the liberal discourse in our city begged earnest questions about how professional basketball reciprocated the millions of dollars and millions of hours the city poured into it, and those questions are back at the forefront now that it’s possible there maybe a new NBA team here in the near future. I don’t know how to feel: on the one hand, a team without a tradition of winning is truly a drain, even on its own fan base. On the other hand, nothing has given me so much instruction in how to approach the activity of filmmaking, the job of a director, as team sports. I think that energy has truly been missed in this city since our team’s departure, and I’ve been really excited with the prospect that we might get a new team with a chance to write a new history.

Not that the old one wasn’t proud enough. Fans of basketball might remember a time in the 1990s when the Sonics regularly finished ahead of the Lakers in the standings. We even made it to the Finals in 1996, but lost to Chicago. The next couple years, we were still a dominant team, but the Lakers re-tooled by adding Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant to the roster. In a game in February of 1998 that I remember watching and reading about the next day, those Lakers blew the Bulls out by 20 points, and a ballboy taunted some of the Chicago players as they walked out of the arena. Towel draped over his shoulders after a compelling but futile battle in an altogether meaningless regular season game, Bulls guard Michael Jordan responded with a kind of characteristic confidence I’ve always associated with people who took a big picture perspective to their crafts: “We know we’re still going to be there again at the end. Can you say the same about your team?”