I feel like I need to get over my mental block against documentaries sometime.

When I think of documentaries, I typically don’t think of something I’d like to watch. I mentally picture a bunch of boring old white people talking about, like, war airplanes or something. The whole idea of it just makes me want to take a nap.

But there are many good documentaries out there about just about any topic you can think of. Animals, wrestling, comic books, mental health. And war airplanes, of course. If it exists as a topic that can be discussed, there are documentaries on it. And hence, I need to get over my inherent prejudice against this genre of filmmaking.

I occasionally find documentaries that fly in the face of my supposed disdain for them. I loved You Can Not Kill David Arquette, for instance. Selena Gomez’ My Mind And Me was the second movie I ever watched when I got Apple Plus through their free trial. Last year, I watched Still, about the life of Michael J. Fox.

Apparently I weirdly like documentaries about celebrities and their struggles.

But not always just that!

I recently had the opportunity to screen Create Or Die, a documentary film on writer/director David Axe and his work on creating his most recent movie, Acorn.

David is a self-described bad filmmaker. He loves making movies, but he recognizes that he is not particularly adept at it. But that’s all right because he has a dream. You see, he intends to make one movie per year until he improves enough to be able to call himself a “good” filmmaker.

Acorn is his most ambitious project yet: a movie-within-a-movie story where his central protagonist is a cancer-stricken and dying director hellbent on making one last picture before she dies. Her movie is a horror-western called Die Standing Up.

Axe decides the only way to completely tell this story is to film two separate movies: Acorn and also Die Standing Up. Then he figures he will work out in post how to put them together into one full feature length film that isn’t so long that it will be refused entry at film festivals.

Along with David, we meet his cast and crew as they explain what it’s like to work for him, as well as to work with each other. As difficulties emerge–most notably being the crew losing a filming location they had booked–we get everyone’s thoughts on exactly how they intend to move on.

But move on they do, and David is able to meet his deadlines and targets. He is able to finish and screen Acorn.

Ultimately, Create Or Die is about a man and those around him as they seek to find a creative outlet for their passion and make something the world will remember them for. David’s self-deprecation as a person who makes “bad movies” or “cheap movies” is all of us as we struggle with our own self-doubt over whether what we do is good enough. But that makes his drive and his dream to keep making bad movies until he has grown enough to make a good one even more admirable.

If you’ve ever created anything–not just a movie, but a book, an album, maybe even another life–there’s a lot to like in David’s attitude. He’s a true never-say-die kind of guy who strives for incremental improvement any way he can get it. He doesn’t let failure or the fear of it stop him from doing what he loves… maybe even doing what he feels he has to do. He knows that someday, he’ll be of the quality he wants to be.

It’s the kind of attitude everyone should have.

David notes that the vast majority of cheap indie films end up unfinished and never completed, and he holds himself to such a standard that he won’t allow that for himself. When he starts something, he finishes it, even if he knows the result won’t be good. He knows that’s the only way to improve. And starting something only to abandon it is the fast track to giving up on his dream entirely.

OVERALL

This wasn’t the kind of outing that merits the typical Ups and Downs, as it’s a more personal experience of and look at a man and his team trying to find their way to their dream. What Downs do I give that? Am I looking at the lighting of a documentary to critique that? It’s a documentary! It’s a bunch of talking heads and shots from the effort to complete Acorn. I felt it was more important to just talk about the man himself and what he presents as he works on the latest version of his own magnum opus.

And for what it is, Create Or Die is inspiring. I genuinely think that, talent aside, we should all be a bit more like David Axe and his irrepressible urge to create and evolve and learn and grow. And like I said, if you’ve ever created anything yourself, hopefully you see a little of David inside of you.