Movies About Creative Thinking: When nothing comes

Part five of seven. About the state where you have to work and it will not come, and about what people do with it.

The most specific part of the selection: the films are uneven in pace and require the right mood. In return, they land precisely.

A director has put into production a film he has not thought up yet, and tries to hide from everyone waiting on his decisions.

Topics: paralysis from the impossibility of choosing, escape into fantasy, the expectations of producers and of loved ones, autobiography as working material.

Aftertaste: strangely liberating. A chaotic, at times exhausting film that leaves you feeling that pretending to have it together is optional.

A New York playwright is hired to write a screenplay in Hollywood. He moves into an empty hotel and sits down at the typewriter.

Topics: talking about the work instead of working, an author and his declarations about the common man, creativity inside an industry, isolation.

Aftertaste: stifling, clammy, unsettling. The atmosphere of the hotel stays with you longer than the plot, and the ending is still being argued about.

A screenwriter cannot adapt a book about orchids and writes a screenplay about how he cannot adapt it.

Topics: the obstacle as material, self-criticism and its volume, brothers with opposite attitudes to the craft, the rules of dramaturgy and playing with them.

Aftertaste: funny and nervous at once. A smart film that is a pleasure to unravel and to discuss afterwards.

A theatre director gets a grant and starts building an exact replica of the city inside a warehouse in order to stage an absolutely honest play.

Topics: a conception that devours its author, the drive for a complete description, time and ageing, the impossibility of finishing.

Aftertaste: heavy, oppressive, and for many viewers one of the most depressing experiences in cinema. Watch it in a stable frame of mind and not alone.

A week in the life of a bus driver who writes poems in a notebook every day and shows them to no one.

Topics: a daily practice with no external goal, attention to the ordinary, creativity without ambition, the calm marriage of two very different people.

Aftertaste: quiet, cosy, almost therapeutic. A slow film that many call the best cure for the daily rush.

A tax inspector hears a voice narrating his life and discovers that he is a character in someone else's text.

Topics: the structure of comedy and tragedy, an author's responsibility towards a character, routine and its rupture, help from a reader with a long career.

Aftertaste: kind, warm, slightly melancholy. The gentlest film in this part and a good way to leave it without a residue.

Next part: making it together.

The whole series:

1. Inventors and engineers
2. Limits that help
3. Obsessed with the craft
4. A change of viewpoint
5. When nothing comes
6. Making it together
7. Documentaries