I kept getting caught up in that high school idea of the theme as a general idea or topic. What’s the theme of the movie? But I know from the Joan’s Filmmaking Lab sessions that the nugget – that key element of the storytelling process – is so much more! I decided that the word “theme” just wouldn’t work and that we shouldn’t use it at all. But over the weekend, I remembered that moment in King Lear that Joan reminds us of in the Lab when Lear, who has had Gloucester blinded, stands with his friend on a heath and Gloucester, who cannot see, describes the world in incredible detail. Lear says, “No eyes in your head, yet you see how this world goes,” and Gloucester says, “I see it feelingly.” That idea – to see feelingly – completely captures the nugget! I had one of those ah-ha moments: the nugget, or the theme, is the fusion of feeling and doing. It’s not mechanical (list the feeling, list the doing) and it’s not additive (feeling + doing); it’s the transformative merging, a kind of feelingdoing. And a completely different notion of theme.

Joan took this opportunity to share some of the photographs she has taken of people in the Labs over the years. They are riveting portraits of people feeling. You cannot look at the images without feeling: they immediately spark incredible empathy. And that’s the nugget, the expression of feeling in and through doing.

Joan and I talked about the nugget struggle today. She’s not interested in giving up on theme; she wants to reclaim it and she had some advice: “When you come to a fork like that, when you start to think that feeling and doing are separate, you have to stop and say to yourself, ‘What don’t I want to feel right now?’ If you’re thinking about the nugget and you can’t find the action, or you start getting cerebral, it always means that there’s something you don’t want to feel. Sometimes it will be a big thing; sometimes it will be a small thing. But if you figure it out, then you’ll have the energy to move forward.” She went on: “As filmmakers, our ability to see comes from our capacity to feel. That’s what film is. That’s what I’m teaching people, as well as myself. We’re working on the expression of the inner life that craves to be known, seen and shared, and we’re honoring the desire to derive meaning through that sharing of experience. That is what it means to be human.”