What I Talk About When I Talk About Directing

I’ve been making films since I was a kid. And I’ve been a runner just as long. Both are things I love and feel deeply passionate about. For me, directing feature films and running long-distance go hand in hand. I value longevity and naturally gravitate toward lengthy, immersive endeavors. When I commit to something, I want to see it through to the finish – I’m in it for the long run, so to speak.

Running is in my genes – my dad coached cross-country in the late ’70s, and every April, my family made the trek to watch my uncle run the Boston Marathon. I started running road races around age eight, and in high school, I was captain of my cross-country running and ski teams (where I made annual team movies to recap the seasons). During my twenties, I signed up for several half-marathons a year. But I soon learned that running so many long races back-to-back made me more prone to injury. I didn’t like needing so many recovery days after a race either, when all I wanted to do was keep running. I never really stopped, but somewhere along the way, I cut back on races, and my overall mileage tapered off a bit too.

There’s an old marathon mantra that I often see printed on those bright, neon-colored signs held by spectators during races. Murakami famously references it in one of my favorite books, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It goes: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” Lately, I’ve been thinking about how this applies not only to running long races, but also to directing features – and to all the curveballs life throws you as well.

In March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, my 15-year relationship suddenly ended in a divorce. For someone who always believed they were in it for the long run, facing this reality was painful – and it triggered a suffering that didn’t feel optional. The world was in lockdown, the film industry was on hiatus, and my personal life was uprooted – it was a surreal and trying chapter, to say the absolute least. I experienced situational depression for the first time. The only thing that I knew could give me some semblance of grounding was running. So I ran. And what I mean is, I ran a lot.

Distance running is known to be meditative and therapeutic, and I find it especially cathartic when I’m going through something difficult. Running activates those amazing hormones called endorphins – the body’s natural painkillers that essentially mimic the effects of opioids. To help me process the grief and heartbreak I was experiencing from my long-term relationship ending, long runs quickly became my natural drug of choice. My complete mental health cocktail, though, also includes actual meditation and actual therapy, too (both of which I picked up during the pandemic, and also suit me well). But running has always been the base ingredient. It fuels my creativity – my best ideas come to me when I run (or at least it feels that way, thanks to those feel-good chemicals being produced in my brain). And whenever I have a project to focus on, my mileage inevitably increases.

Another thing that happened during the pandemic was that I was sent a script to direct called Turn Me On. It was pitched to me as a dystopian sci-fi romance set in a society isolated from the rest of civilization, where people take a drug to escape having to feel difficult emotions. It was easy to draw parallels to what I was going through, and also the world at large. And I figured having a big project to focus on would provide me a bit of my own escapism (irony not lost on me) at a time I really needed it. I had all this extra creative energy banked up from the running, after all, so decided this could be a healthy place to deposit it.

Features take a long time to make, and in a way, long-distance running helps me build the mental stamina required to see them through. Despite years of running road races, for one reason or another, I had still never run a full marathon – and I wanted to change that. I like the structure and discipline of training for a long race, which essentially means running many “mini-marathons” before the big day, gradually increasing endurance with 10- to 20-mile runs multiple times a week. I see training kind of akin to the way I do camera tests, rehearsals and blocking before shooting a film. To get ahead of some of the common injuries that I had suffered in the past, I trained smarter this time, incorporating things like new stretching techniques and implementing an overall strength-building regimen.

There were the usual starts and stops in getting the new film off the ground, but it was finally slated to go into production before the end of 2022. So that spring, as prep ramped up in earnest, I ran my first marathon. It admittedly didn’t go so well. The night before, I became very ill with a stomach bug. But around 4 a.m., crouched down on my bathroom floor with a slight fever, I decided that after all the training, I’d rather pass out somewhere along the 26.2-mile course than stay home and regret not running. (Remember how I said that when I commit to something, I see it through to the finish?) I arrived at the starting line completely dehydrated and struggled through half the race – but I finished nonetheless. In marathon running, there’s a philosophy that once the training is behind you, race day is 90 percent mental – the rest is just putting one foot in front of the other. I think my mind clung to that idea and sorta tuned out how malnourished my body actually was. The silver lining was that thanks to all the better training, I recovered quickly and ran again the following week with minimal soreness.

Looking back, I realize that marathon marked the beginning of an ambitious two-year period where I obsessively ran many more marathons and road races – while simultaneously making the feature. I liked having specific big races scheduled on my calendar to help balance the inherent stresses of directing. I knew from experience that finishing the film would be a long road, so perhaps, subconsciously, I wanted to have a few literal finish lines to cross in the meantime. By then, I had taken the space I needed to process my breakup and make peace with the past, and felt more like myself again. It seemed like I could run through anything. After a period of feeling so unmoored, running and the film were the two pursuits I knew I could commit to now – and see through to the end. The many challenges that arise while making a feature became the new hurdles I worked through with every run I did.

I typically like to run every day – and sometimes even twice in the same day, especially in the summer. I love running in the heat. July, New York’s hottest month, is usually when I’m running the most. It’s always easy to swing into a bodega to get an orange Gatorade or hop on a Citi Bike if a bad cramp hits. Some of my favorite runs have been in very warm climates like Malawi, Costa Rica, Mexico and Hawaii. There are really no weather conditions I won’t run in. I grew up on the Canadian border in Vermont, so when I visit my folks for the holidays, I’m often running in single-digit temperatures. And while not ideal, I’ve also run several half-marathons in relentless downpours. Running alongside water is my preferred route, though. Where I live in Brooklyn, it’s easy to get to the waterfront, where I run the piers of Brooklyn Bridge Park nearly every morning. It’s always fun taking the Manhattan Bridge into the city and making my way around the perimeter of the island. Occasionally, I follow the long path along the Belt Parkway, all the way to Coney Island and back – which always feels like a satisfying accomplishment when I review the map afterward.

Production on Turn Me On was staged in Rochester, New York, so I lived on location full-time from pre-production in October until wrap in December 2022. And believe me, I packed my running shoes – which proved pretty productive for the actual film as well. It was a crisp and beautiful fall when I arrived. I got to know the region by running along Lake Ontario, scouting potential locations for our second-unit photography. I discovered a stunning waterfall and several natural vistas that feature predominantly in the final cut. On the outskirts of downtown, I made loops around the sprawling old Kodak factory – where we shot many of the film’s interior scenes – and found great architecture that would serve as establishing shots.

It was a challenging production with its share of indie filmmaking stressors, but I’m grateful for having a dedicated cast and hard-working crew who helped bring it all together. Strict COVID protocols were still in effect on movie sets at that time, so after long days confined indoors with a large group of people, going out for a run only felt that much more liberating. And running continued to keep my mental health in check throughout the long (and at times arduous) post-production process as well.

After production wrapped, I was invigorated from the shoot and had so much energy that sitting in our small, dark editing room in Manhattan was tough. To help counterbalance it all, I signed up for a half-marathon every month we remained in the edit. The routine was simple (albeit exhausting, in retrospect): I’d wake up early, go for a run in Brooklyn, commute into Midtown Manhattan to work with my longtime editor, Matthew C. Hart, for eight hours, and then do a half-marathon (or long training run) on the weekends. As the weather warmed, most evenings I opted to walk all the way home, too. And when we finally picture-locked that fall, I celebrated by running the New York City Marathon.

From the start of prep in 2022 to the film’s premiere in 2024, I completed precisely three marathons, nine half-marathons and more than half a dozen road races of various distances – logging nearly 4,000 miles while training. At the end of September 2024, Turn Me On had its world premiere in Spain at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. It was well received by audiences and my experience at the festival couldn’t have been better. Afterward, my friend Griffin Newman (who gives one of my favorite performances in the film) and I decided to do something frivolous, so we took a train straight to Euro Disney for a day and rode all the rides. And because it was peak marathon-training season again, the next morning I capped it all off with a glorious 15-mile run around Paris. Then I flew back home and ran the New York City Marathon once more. It felt like the perfect bookend for the past two years.

I’d love to say I got a PR in the marathon and was able to run again the next week, but the truth is, I hit a wall – hard. Around the back half of the course, I developed severe shin splints, accompanied by an unwelcome cameo from an old IT band issue that flared up around my right knee. A wiser runner might have stopped, but because I’m a completist, I staggered through the last few miles until I finished. I’ve paid the price this winter, and have had to cut back on my mileage while recovering. I think all the back-to-back races caught up with me again. I’m learning to manage my running addiction more healthily now though—to get the therapy and the high that I love, but not to the point of breaking.

The past few years have brought their challenges, but I’m honestly content with where I am now – and thankful for everything I’ve learned while running through it all. It’s funny how, during hard times, you hear all these sayings and platitudes – the kind my younger self would’ve probably rolled his eyes at – and later, they start to make more sense. That Murakami one, of course, resonates with me now more than ever, but another one sticks with me, too. During my divorce, I remember going for a walk with a friend, and he offered me something along the lines of, “The depths of sadness only raise the ceiling of happiness.” At the time, I didn’t really understand it. But now, I’m happy to say I feel it in my bones (and my knees, too).

Featured image shows Michael Tyburski and Bel Powley on the set of Turn Me On; all images courtesy Michael Tyburski.