Producing is a precarious business. You should not do it if you don’t believe that by producing your projects you can make the world a better place or advance the art form. You are not just the one that feels they know what must be done. You have to know that the unknowable becoming known through your labors is a real possibility. Producers can’t be the people who settle for the way things are. They shouldn’t be the sort that takes the easy route or are willing to sacrifice nuance or beauty in service of just getting it done.
The goal of every film should be making the greatest film possible. As much as we need to know our limits, we can not stifle our desire to exceed them. The challenge of art is often when you think you can see the end, it won’t truly become art until you can see past that suspected endpoint. If you have the capacity to keep reaching higher, you also will inevitably regularly suffer from watching your goal grow farther and farther away. Ambition is discouraging because it pushes that goal consistently further and further down the road. Most people can’t walk through it on their own.
The producer is the balance that allows the director to go out on the ledge and risk it all. I have had collaborators – fellow producers – who don’t want to dream or want their directors to dream. They want to have a plan and to execute it. They are generals. They want to march the team across the land of the known. That’s not me. I love the experiment and not the proof, the hazy fog that is obscuring us from what is right in front of us but still foreign. I want to learn from every step and have my team learn from our communal action. I want us to unearth what we previously had not yet imagined.
That seesaw is on the edge of the highest cliff. We watch the eagle soar above us, holding that thing, that shiny ring. Our directors will only get close enough to snatch that ring if we stand on one end of the see saw so they can climb up the high end. As they are reaching we can’t get off or the whole thing tumbles into the ravine. It may be hard to watch. It may look like they don’t know what they are doing. It may really be all of that, but our role is to support it, and even to encourage that reckless behavior.
We have to go somewhere different than we ever have before. Occasionally even the director doesn’t just snatch the brass ring. Occasionally when the director grabs it, neither she nor the eagle let go, and they both rise up higher and higher to a mountain top we never dared dream of before. Wow. And we helped make that happen.
