As hard as I try not to, I usually walk into a wedding with some idea of who I think these people are.
Most of the time, my experience with a couple before the wedding is a few emails and maybe a quick phone conversation. A lot of my clients come from referrals too, so without meaning to, I probably carry a little of what I remember from the other couple into the new wedding.
Then the day starts, I get around their people, and pretty quickly I realize I may have had them completely wrong.
The Version We Show People
People project different things publicly. I do it too. Sometimes what we show is close to the whole picture. Sometimes it is one small piece of it.
I may go into a wedding thinking a couple is wild and free-spirited, and then I start listening to the people around them and find out they are deeply religious. Or I may discover there is a very firm foundation underneath a personality I initially read as mostly fun and free-spirited. Or I expect somebody to be quiet and reserved and their friends immediately show me a completely different side.
That does not mean the version I saw before was fake. It just means I did not know enough yet.
The Preparation Room Changes Things
The preparation rooms are usually where my assumptions start falling apart.
People are getting dressed, looking for things, teasing each other, trying to keep somebody calm, talking about people who are not there and remembering things that happened years ago. I get to see the relationships working before everyone is standing where they are supposed to stand.
That tells me much more than an email ever could.
I also get little glimpses behind the curtain. Somebody who seemed one way during a consultation may make much more sense once I see the people they grew up around. A joke may explain a personality. A parent may say something that tells me where a certain part of them came from.
I can go into a wedding thinking I understand who these people are and be completely wrong by lunchtime.
Then I Start Talking to Their People
The interviews open it up even more.
Friends and family know versions of a person I do not. They know what happened before I arrived. They know the old stories, the habits, the things they are proud of, the things that changed them and the things everybody in the family has laughed about for twenty years.
Sometimes what I hear catches me completely off guard. I have learned to like that.
I do not really want to arrive already knowing the story. I want to keep watching long enough for the people around the couple to show me what the story actually is. I am not looking for dirt or judging any of it. I am trying to understand people well enough to know what belongs in their film, and sometimes just as importantly, what does not.
Being Wrong Is Useful
Years of weddings have made me a little less confident in first impressions.
I still have them. I am human. But I trust them less than I used to.
That matters when I am making a film because I do not want to force a couple into whatever version I imagined before the wedding. The better film usually starts when I stop trying to confirm what I thought I knew and pay attention to what is actually in front of me.
There is almost always more there.
