10 Vital Life-Skills Filmmaking Will Teach You (Part 1/4)

Doing the stuff you don’t feel like doing

Fear. Laziness. Discomfort. Weariness.

Filmmakers often face these obstacles.

I’m no exception. Especially when it’s not just a day or two, but a long form project that seems to stretch on forever, never-ending…

Ultimately, these are human weaknesses, though creatives often face unusual challenges due to the function of our minds. Creative, but scattered. Enjoy starting something new, but lack follow-through. Being introverted, yet being in a position that demands interaction.

These things can pile up and overwhelm you. But if you want your film to be the best it can be, you have to fight it. You will learn to, and I’ll share how I was faced with these issues, encouraged to overcome them, and learned (by necessity or by choice) to grow from them.

I hope that you can do the same – maybe before you get on set again!

This week’s specific topics:

1. Don’t ask? Don’t expect anything to happen.

2. Throw your hands up – if you want to fail.

3. Sloths don’t shoot feature films.

Each time you fail to ask someone for help out of fear of rejection, are tired and make a dozen excuses to not push forward… your film will reflect these things. Poor lighting. An ineffective scene. A nonsensical line of dialogue. You can often trace them back to one of three things: inexperience, lack of resources, or ‘letting it go’.

These sit, more or less, within the ‘letting it go’ category.

As filmmakers, we know when that’s the case. And it’s more often than we’d like to admit.

This is one of the beautiful challenges that filmmaking forces us to face – facing those inadequacies and strengthening them, or continuing to create poor quality work.

Don’t ask? Don’t expect anything to happen

My producing partner and I sit outside a mom-and-pop restaurant. The concrete is starting to get hot. It’s 10:30am in Phoenix, in the Summer, and the location owner is nowhere to be found.

We text. We call and leave voicemails. But there’s not a peep.

We’d done everything by the book. We had locked the location weeks earlier, followed up with him a week, several days, and the day before our shoot to make sure everything was good to go. He promised it was.

Our actors were showing up at noon.

It’s nearing 11am. My initial reaction is one of defeat. We might as well call it quits today. Try again another day.

“Well, this sucks. What the heck is that guy’s deal? He promises to be here and just doesn’t show up?” I bet he’s sleeping, I think. It’s hard enough to lock down a restaurant for 2 whole days of shooting, much less for free.

My partner, Joseph, replies.

“Yeah.”

Joe is a man who never uses many words when fewer will suffice.

He thinks for a moment, while I stew unproductively, expecting us to go home and tell our actors we will reschedule.

Nope. Joe insists that we need to make it happen. We can’t just put it off. He’s right, of course, and I grudgingly agree. I’m being lazy (we’ll get to that later). I don’t feel like it’s realistic that we will somehow be able to find a location so last-minute.

So, in the most impromptu manner possible, we decided to drive around a bit and hopefully find a similar location nearby. We turned left onto the road in our mini-convoy, traveling about a half-mile before we hit a sparsely populated strip mall. There weren’t very many vehicles in the parking lot on a Sunday morning.

‘Cafe’, said a poorly designed, but newly placed banner above the building.

Joe and I shrug our shoulders. Might as well give it a shot, I suppose. It was open.

I fully expect to get a ‘no’. After all, we are asking to shoot basically right now for four hours or so, and arrange another shoot day of about 6-8 hours – an action scene, no less – for no compensation at all and no insurance.

Ironically enough, Joe has me do the talking. He spurs me to action, despite my protests. He tells me I’d do a better job talking to the staff. I nervously agreed to try. I wasn’t terribly confident in this arena.

The small cafe-style restaurant is minimally staffed, and I walk up to a middle-aged woman who looks busy and in-charge. I awkwardly approach and tell her that we are shooting an indie film and our location dropped out on us last minute. Their restaurant is ‘perfect’ for our scene and we wonder if we could shoot there. I give her all the details on what we needed.

“Sounds good to me. My boss is right over there, I’ll talk to him about it.”

Whoa, that’s a convenient twist.

She walks over to her boss, chatted for a minute.

“Yeah, he said it’s fine. And you can come on another day too, when we aren’t too busy.”

Incredible.

I mean, the chances of everything working out like that seem fairly slim, right? Sure.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that there are opportunities, possibilities, and alternate options out there, waiting for you. When things go wrong, when you can’t find what you need or the rug gets pulled out from beneath you, if you don’t pursue new solutions, nothing will happen.

You must go out and courageously pursue solutions. If you ask, you will receive. Or you might–and I don’t know about you, but I think those odds are way better than no chance at all.

If you ask, as they say, ‘the worst that can happen is they tell you no’.

More importantly, if you don’t ask, they never get the chance to say yes.

The lesson:

One thing that is important to note is that in this circumstance, my natural inclination on a long-term project (without any real external pressures to stick to timelines and such) was not ‘the show must go on!’. Instead, I would have simply called things off.

When I started out as a filmmaker, sometimes I’d rather avoid confrontation and feared being denied, turned down, and rejected.

It was also laziness and lack of follow-through.

The biggest problem for me in this situation is that I would’ve rather stayed comfortable, in my little bubble, interacting with the few people I needed to, just enough to get by. I wouldn’t have gone out and talked to random people if Joe hadn’t encouraged me to do so, even though it would’ve meant delaying the film’s completion, inconveniencing crew and cast, and getting a worse location down the road.

I still have these issues, but they aren’t as pronounced as they used to be.

This story highlights a couple of things. Firstly, it’s important to intentionally force yourself to leave your bubble of comfort. Face some discomfort. You’ll adapt and grow, and your film will be better as a result. It will become less difficult. It will allow you to do things like approach people you never would otherwise. You’ll be pleasantly surprised who might be willing to help you out and give you a chance.

Secondly, the fact that my partner, Joe, kept me accountable to getting results for our film is what made our film possible. This is why I advocate for first-time feature filmmakers to find someone you can trust and make a film together. Having that angel on your shoulder (and you being the shoulder on theirs) is invaluable.

On the other hand, that means that if you are going it alone, you will have to be your own ‘rock’. You need to hold yourself to a standard. Set concrete goals and make yourself stick to them. Build in accountability for yourself by setting expectations for people around you (like cast and crew) that depend on you getting results.

If you have something you feel you have to live up to, you’ll be more willing to go out and ask the difficult questions.

Throw your hands up – if you want to fail

1 month of preparation. Not enough time to cast. Last minute pickup and assembly of equipment. Unexpected rental car fees. A 3 hour drive to a location night-shoot. In summary: multiple near heart-attacks (at least for me) leading up to the shoot.

I meet with the crew at a predetermined point in Phoenix, ensuring we have all our ducks in a row to convoy to the shoot.

We trek to the location, and the crew arrives as I survey the location, reminding myself of all its details, deciding for good where I’ll shoot this or that bit of the film. I mentally prepare for a long night of shooting.

I’m excited. Focused. Anxious.

We get settled in, staging the equipment and having a safety meeting. Now it’s time to get to work…

Setting up the DIY, PVC rain rig. By the way, the entire shoot hinges on this rig working.

All the scenes take place in the rain.

That’s one heck of a piece of equipment to put so much faith in, but since I had tested it prior to the shoot, I didn’t have a lot of concerns.

This is the video where we tested the rain rig.

I ask my key grip and PAs to go set up the rig on this little beam on the side of the building so it can cover our scene. It’s still daylight and we have plenty of time. So far, so good, right?

They get it set up, more or less, and turn it on, but it’s another half hour before it works properly. I think we are making good time.

Murphy’s law strikes: the glue on a fitting fails and the pressure of the rain rig drops to nothing as water floods out of the breached connection.

We fix it with gaff tape (of course). It’s a temporary solution at best.

Rinse and repeat – we wrap the same connection several times before it functions. When we start shooting, things go smoothly, except for every couple of hours when we have to repair the gaff connection since the hot tap water is melting the adhesive.

Hurdle 1 completed.

I could go on ad nauseum, so suffice it to say that these and other normal on-set surprises occurred throughout the night. Our actress was freezing from the rain, our rain rig kept falling into further disrepair, and our location building started leaking and taking on water from the rig.

Toward the end of the night and after a few re-rigging sessions, the rain rig is totally busted. It sputters water every which way, the spray isn’t consistent, and it didn’t look good (in my opinion). I’m not happy. My crew is exhausted and impatient, understandably. The rain rig needs repair every 15 minutes, then 10, then 5…

We rush to get our last shots, as our actress freezes from the wind and water and cold, and we desperately attempt to fix our failing rain rig, while sticking to the schedule.

But finally, we wrapped.

The lesson:

We persevered. We got it done. The footage looked great. In this scenario, it was clear to me that we didn’t have the option of rescheduling or finishing the second half of the shoot another day.

There was no way the budget could accommodate that, and so the decision was simple.

However, my first instinct was still that we should resume another day. So, when circumstances make it incredibly difficult for you to throw your hands up and decide to figure it out another day, that’s convenient.

But what about when the stakes are lower? When you have flexibility? When it doesn’t seem like ‘that big a deal’ to reschedule?

For example, I did a short film where the night before, we learned it would probably rain. In my mind, that meant the shoot would be ruined. I actually used this particular film shoot to explain why visual planning is incredibly important for directors and will make or break your film.

I argue that you should decide beforehand to push through whatever challenges you face leading up to the shoot. Dedicate yourself to an attitude of perseverance and problem-solving.

While you may think things can’t possibly work out, you’d be surprised what you can accomplish with some ingenuity and a stick-to-it attitude.

The bottom line is this:

Murphy’s law is very real. What can go wrong, will, and if you want your film to succeed, you must learn to persevere and push through those circumstances. You must commit to getting things done, despite your circumstances.

The moment you give up is the moment you truly fail.

After all, you can’t tell the future, and if you decide ahead of time that you won’t succeed, you’re right.

Sloths don’t shoot feature films

The day had finally come.

The last day of shooting for me and Joe’s first feature film. One last sprint to the finish.

One last painful reach for our wallets to pay for our film, and one last long day of shooting.

Our last scene was set on the roof of a warehouse, which was probably the most inhospitable place we could have selected for a night shoot in December.

It was a bitterly cold and windy night and we were on set from about 5pm to sunup the next day. Frankly, it wasn’t a terribly exciting scene to film either, in my opinion, despite its importance to the film. One crew member, who is also a good friend of mine, came to me privately and complained. ‘Why do we have to do this scene up here?’

Could we have picked an easier time, place, or method to do the finale shoot?

Yes.

At the time, we thought that using this location would have the best dramatic effect and make the most sense. Aside from whether it was ultimately effective or not, we thought it was important to give it our best shot.

While my friend’s complaints were understandable, they were also very demoralizing for me. His comments affected me because my natural response was the same as his. His comments drew attention to something I was already aware of but was trying to ignore. Of course I would have preferred ease to difficulty. But sometimes, you just have to slug through the shoot.

Sometimes, there’s no substitute for hard work. Even something we enjoy doing can become quite un-fun.

The lesson:

Learn to combat the lazy instinct we all have. Laziness is the root of many excuses to not do things we need to do. It gives us reasons to evade anything.

Don’t be tricked by this instinct. We all have it, and there’s no shame in admitting as much, but you should learn to counter it.

Identify whether there are any other legitimate reasons for not doing something, but don’t allow your lazy instinct to dictate how you plan or what you shoot.

Learn to do the things you don’t want to

All of this lesson stuff is easier said than done. You’re going to fail, repeatedly. That’s okay.

What’s important is that you continue to struggle. If you find yourself complacent, never questioning yourself, and never kicking yourself for falling short, there’s a good chance you’ve fallen into the comfortable track of the person who does hard things only when they want to. The selectively hard worker. An evader of discomfort.

I’ve born these titles before (and still do from time-to-time) and I’m not alone.

Keep pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. Your films will improve, and you will be a better person. Remember:

1. Don’t ask? Don’t expect anything to happen. When your way forward to success involves asking people for help or talking to random people, get out and give it a try. In the end, you will only have yourself to blame for not stepping up to the challenge and breaking out of your bubble.

It helps to have a friend or partner who challenges you and provides encouragement.

2. Throw your hands up – if you want to fail. Take a wall in your way as a challenge to overcome. Commit prior to your shoot that you will be a problem-solver and find a way forward.

You may find ways to tackle those problems in the future that you would have otherwise not discovered.

You will be more committed if others are relying on you to come through.

3. Sloths don’t shoot feature films. Identify whether there are real reasons for not doing something, but don’t allow your laziness to dictate your plans.

As always, I wish you the best. Get out there, challenge yourself, and make some great films.