Celia took her time among the fur-lined boots, the slick, pink galoshes, the stub-nosed clogs, the buckles of every shape and size, and as the search dragged on, Dan’s thoughts began to darken again. Perhaps, he thought, he had been fooling himself all along. He had never been in a position to make a feature at all. After five years as a commercial director, he thought he had accrued the necessary skills. He had executed successful campaigns for running shoes, deodorants, and first-person shooter video games. He had established the requisite connections. A feature had seemed like the natural extension of his craft. But maybe he was simply not good enough to make that leap.

It was in college that he had first decided to become a filmmaker. That was when he had first discovered the joyful science of montage, the thrill of placing moving images side by side. It was like magic. From two images a third meaning arose, and within each frame, a world of decisions. Composition, sound, color, performance. He remembered vividly that day in production class, checking out an album of sound effects from the library, carrying the sound of howling wind to the editing bay, laying the sound over his image of bleak, frozen pasture and naked trees, and feeling the chill of storytelling along his spine. The gift of sound and image. That was the whole thing in a nutshell.

To make movies for a living though—that had seemed unimaginable. Who did that? His father was a schoolteacher, his mother a pharmacist. No one in their world had ever made films. No one had ever made art in any way. It was like aspiring to be an astronaut or the president of the United States—utterly unrealistic, possibly even immoral. When the ambition had occurred to him, he had guarded his secret jealously. The idea was too terrifying to speak out loud. But to himself, in his most private moments, he promised to try.

He’d begun without fanfare, showing found-footage collages in music clubs and house parties around town, gradually amassing a repertoire of images—airplanes and flowers, animals and fire—that he screened alongside what ever music his friends were making at the time. He wasn’t sure this was real filmmaking, but people seemed to think it was. The crowds in those days were very forgiving. They were looking for new friends, not great art, and most of the time they went home satisfied. Even as he moved further into music videos and experimental film and eventually advertising, his abiding self-doubts remained.