FilmCourage interviewed me and asked “How do you know when your movie is ready to shoot?”. In the conversation, I simplify things into three steps:
- Discovery: the process of defining what matters;
- Prioritization: organizing complexity and weighting the options and opportunities;
- Engineering serendipity: you build the bottle that can hold the magic elixir. How can we reach higher? How can we accomplish more than we planned for and manufacture magnificence?
The film business as of late has been cutting budgets to the bare bones and filmmakers are rising to the occasion. We prep our movies in less and less time. It’s mission impossible but we deliver it. But what get’s lost in the process?
It’s the third step. And that is a tragedy. In this age of cultural abundance we have to reach even higher than before. Good enough just isn’t anymore. To make a film resonate, we have to get it into the realm of good luck. The secret ingredient is time. When we give up time, our movies are not really ready to make; we just do it anyway because we think we have no choice.
