A wee essay on being a “great” filmmaker.
In my younger filmmaking days, I was a tyrant.
I would have never guessed it in the moment. Tyrants rarely do. Maybe only when they’re looking out at a field of dead or a dark city. Maybe not even then does a tyrant ask themselves, in a teeny tiny Steve Urkel voice…”did I do that?”
But younger filmmaker Larissa was a tyrant all the same. Though my demeanor with teammates was warm and encouraging, I made it known that I was the final say on all projects the team worked on.
Auteur School as Rule of Law is what justified my behavior: films fall under one person’s vision. Filmmaking may be a team sport, but the final cut is down to one heart, one mind, one keen set of visionary eyes.
MINE.
I made some great work this way. Remarkably, I made some great friends. But often my co-writers and crews were one-and-done affairs when I was in this mode. It always puzzled me when great teammates were suddenly too busy to shoot another project together.
Hadn’t my fellow writers and makers had a blast spitballing ideas with me? Didn’t we love shooting together, me showing up at the last minute with a revised shot-list and new script pages? For a project only I could cut, on a timeline I decided, made of fine-tuned ideas that were basically all mine? After all, this was OUR work!
And I always got everyone pizza!
It took years of therapy, self-reflection, and making new kinds of work with other kinds of teams to learn that my tyranny masqueraded as teamwork because I was afraid of sharing control.
For years, I thought having greater control was tantamount to having a greater finished product. In my effort to make a project “great” I would neg ideas, nitpick pitches, and completely revise the work of others. For some people, this relentless commitment to The Vision is still the hallmark of a “great” director.
But I have learned that “great” is truly the enemy of good.
The Auteur School pays more dividends for male filmmakers than it does women or othered filmmakers. But it still pays peanuts.
If I was a film tyrant in my younger days, I am a scrappy film collectivist in my less-young ones.
There is more beauty in the team game than I realized. The control I lose by giving up my choke-hold on the creative process may cost me some of my own Great Vision. But the value gained by sharing hold of the ineffable with a true team of encouraged, encouraging collaborators?
That’s the real good stuff.