I have never trusted dogmatic people. Anything absolute, anything that stops allowing questions, frightens me, religion very much included. And yet one of my favourite bodies of work in all of cinema is built on nothing but dogma: Dogme 95. Ten self-imposed, deliberately crippling rules. No added light. No props. Camera on the shoulder. It produced some of my favourite films ever made.
Even better: The Five Obstructions. Von Trier dares Jørgen Leth to remake his own short film five times, each version sabotaged by a more absurd condition designed to break him. Leth simply refuses to break, and gets more inventive with every round. Watch it. It quietly dismantles every excuse you've ever had for not being creative. Big budgets are fun. The small, impossible jobs are the ones where you actually find out what you can do.
So dogma is a cage or it's freedom, depending entirely on who wrote the rules. Handed to you, no questions allowed: cage. Chosen by you, on purpose: freedom. Somewhere along the way I stopped saying "well, they only pulled that off because of the budget." Complete nonsense, and a very comfortable excuse.
Next. Doubt.
Which, admittedly, is a strange thing to put next to dogma. They should be opposites. I doubt almost everything I do. Not in a way that stops me, in a way that keeps me honest. I'm never quite sure I made the right call, chose the right frame, lit it the way it deserved. Bertrand Russell said it better than I can: "the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." I found his interviews late and they rearranged something in me. Certainty is easy. It's the people who never doubt themselves who worry me, on set and everywhere else.
Which leaves discipline, the one that has to marry the other two. Choose your own rules, then let doubt kick them around the room, and you make a surprising amount of energy. Discipline is what stops it going off in forty directions at once. Without it, I'm just enthusiastic and lost.
On a shoot I'm most dogmatic about one thing: the environment. I build a room where everyone can do what they're best at without me hovering over them. The model is part of the team, not discussed in the third person while sitting three feet away. The assistant might have a great idea. The make-up artist might tell me the light's wrong for what they had in mind, and they're usually right. I'll take a hair stylist's hand in the edge of the shot over a polite, do-not-disturb set where everyone watches the mistake happen and says nothing. My dream team looks at the picture, not just at their own job.
All of it for one thing: a candid moment I can actually catch. The honest laugh. The quiet second nobody performed for the camera. You can't fake it and you can't force it. You can only build the room where it can happen.
Dogme26 could be the thing everyone talks about next. We could use more authenticity, more real people, an antithesis to everything artificial. Fine. Then let's bring back skills, hard work, and a lot of doubt. Look at Jan de Villeneuve again, the picture at the top of this article. You can't fake her life. She's unique, and that's the only thing I've ever wanted to show in my Skin Project.