I woke up feeling a little less crummy than the past few days. I no longer felt as strong a desire to protect and promote people who might be potentially involved in the project. Certainly, there is a level of paranoia and truth to seeing these production people around me as being calculating and trying to see how much skin they can slice off your bones.This has recurred during the process of trying to make “Risalo”. Musicians applied pressure to squeeze out more money, as did puppeteers. Based on the level of income they usually received, people reached out for money. The less well off would try to squeeze out a few more thousand rupees. Production people who work in an industry where they see the potential to make thousands of dollars a day on high profile commercials want to squeeze that out of everyone that walks past. This is despite the fact that fewer can command anywhere near that as far as fees for their work. So some jerk of a producer cuts them down to size and gets them to work for what they are willing to give. Things are not different at other jobs and industries around the world, but it is a bit more extreme here than in some places.I thought about all of this garbage in the morning. I opened up some recordings I had made of the puppeteers practicing in Multan. The work was not particularly polished. It would take a lot to get decent performances from them, but it might be possible. It made me wonder whether I could effectively shoot this film while fighting with production folks and pulling out performances from the puppeteers. That’s not who I am and it is not how I want to work.There was much to learn here. Certainly, I could become a bit more producer like in my dealings, but I kept wondering whether what I was risking all of this for was going to be worth it with this bunch of people. It is a tough decision to switch paths, but you can’t just run down a road because you are on it.I spent the morning pacing around the living room, thinking about what I could and should do. It is time to leave. Yes I can play the game to some extent and get some work done, but I don’t want to work with these people who so blatantly just want to see how big a piece they can gouge out of you. I will do my part and pay the puppeteers a bit more for their time and see if they can take the initiative of puppet making, leveraging the connections I have given them.Beyond that, I have things to pack, some finishing work to do with my friend Umar, and perhaps the first step to a better way of seeing this film through. I don’t want to give up on my optimism or the desire to do some interesting work that helps to support fellow artists, but I think I have run far enough down this particular path.I feel a sense of loss, but I realize that I can’t shoot this film with so much madness. So it was that I had to break the news to the puppeteers. With friends, I am also trying to get their puppet making going again so that they can sell pieces to the public. That is a big way that puppetry has survived in Rajasthan, just across the border in India, and with all the handicrafts events in cities around Pakistan, I think people would really love them. They just need some help getting started, some exposure to different quality and price tiers that they can create and some funding to start. So, I’m trying to help facilitate creation of one puppet as a starting point. Let’s see where we can go from there.It was really painful telling the puppeteers that we won’t be able to shoot the film. Instead of making promises to them about shooting in the future, I will keep working to connect them to opportunities now. I think there is a lot of potential here, but I feel sick in my stomach that this did not go through, after all the reassurances and checking in with our DP/producer. There’s only so much I can do, but I feel like a piece of me died. That’s not the project, but what we hoped to create together right now, does not seem possible. This is just the beginning of where we go next.