Snuck off from the writing desk to see an exhibition and came across this quote from Picasso. Roughly translated it means 'Should one paint what is on the face, what is in the face, or what is hidden behind the face.'
We realised that this is the question we've wrestled with our entire creative lives, whether making documentaries, writing a fiction film, or, as we're doing now, devising a fiction based on a real life.
For us, Picasso's question not only describes the challenge we have to answer, it plots the stages of the working process. You're attracted to the surface image, but to make a subject come alive you have to go deeper, as Katherine Mansfield wrote ‘…to speak to the secret self we all have.’ It’s the difference between looking and seeing.