What do Claire Denis, Terrence Malick, Sofia Coppola, and Christopher Nolan all have in common? They once didn’t know shit about making a movie. They didn’t know how to act. They didn’t know how to light a scene. They didn’t know the first thing about hair and makeup.
They knew at least two things - they were completely sure of their vision and they knew that to bring their vision to life they needed to bring together the most talented group of artists, technicians, and thinkers in their field.
Like everything, I needed to learn this lesson myself.
I remember directing my thesis in film school and feeling completely overwhelmed.
With stress and panic mounting, two nights before the shoot I began to unravel in front of my roommate and cinematographer, Mike.
“What the fuck am I even doing?’ I said as I paced our shoddy apartment. “I don’t know how to direct a movie. No one ever taught us how to do this.”
“What did that acting teacher tell you last year?” Mike asked calmly.
“I don’t know. Memorize your lines and stop sleeping through class?” I fired back.
“Well, yeah. But they also said that at a certain point it's about letting go and trusting the actors to do their thing. You cast them for a reason. You can help guide them in the direction you want, but at the end of the day they’re going to be as good as they’re gonna be. You have to let go and realize their process is something you have no control over.”
I began to calm down—he was right. “I know. I know. I just want it to be good.”
Mike took a bite of his quesadilla (pretty much the only thing we knew how to make).
“Do you trust me? And the grip and electric teams?” I nodded. “Well then trust your actors. They got this.”
Mike’s pep talk helped a lot, and I carried his message with me to set. I needed to let go of that deep emotional connection I had to the film, like how I imagine a parent feels raising a child only to watch them go off to school. I needed to let other people step in and do their part.
This helped me realize something I’ve used when directing personal projects or a commercial, editing documentaries and corporate content; filmmaking is nothing without collaboration and trust in your team. Mike pointed out the obvious, but sometimes even the obvious has to be lived to be fully understood.
In 2019, I directed a docu-style commercial series for the NFL Players Coalition in partnership with the ACLU of Pennsylvania. The series was about parole reform in America. It featured NFL players as well as people in Philadelphia who had been or who were still in the parole system. With minimal crew in a tiny make-shift studio space at the ACLU-PA headquarters, I found myself in a similar predicament.
I felt like I didn’t know the first thing about directing.
Being the important and heavy topic it is, and interviewing the very people dealing with the broken parole system, it was a daunting task. My one saving grace: research.
I didn’t walk into those interviews blind. For weeks leading up to that day I read
countless articles, statistics, and first hand accounts about the parole system. I wanted to have as much knowledge as possible on the subject, to understand the minutiae of their lives. I wanted to live their experiences. Becoming ingrained in their stories led me to feel a deep empathy for their struggles. Without first understanding
them, I never would have been able to accurately tell their stories.
This opened my eyes a little bit more to the kind of director I wanted to be.
I don’t just want to make entertaining flicks, popcorn movies as it were. I want to live a person’s life, step into their skin, wear their shoes, and see the world through their eyes. I want to show the world an experience of someone who might not be like them.
The more I thought about the type of director I wanted to be, the more I understood
why my favorite films spoke to me the way they do. Films like The Tree of Life, Targets, Moonlight, Tangerine and Sound of Metal all take a personal, retrospective approach to their characters' lives, allowing the audience to really live in their world for a couple of hours, to find empathy.
This on-screen honesty doesn’t come through unless the director has a complete and unbridled understanding of the world they are examining.
These tentpole ideas — trust, collaboration, research, and empathy — are what keep me sane during any given project.
By constantly reminding myself that I can’t do everything on my own, letting go a little, researching the topic in-depth, and empathizing with the characters and world, I will be able to make the best film I can make. This is my mindset as we prep for our shoot in January, as I dig deeper into the characters and world of Remnants of Nova. I don’t always know how to do everything, and that’s okay. I rest assured someone on my team does.
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