This is not your last project
This is a blog for me, to remind me when I’ve lost my way that creativity and passion are not finite resources. As this is a conversation I have a lot with students and consulting clients, though, hopefully you’ll get something from this as well.
As a creative person, I have a tendency to go All In. If I love something, especially if I’m a key creative on it (the writer, the director, one of the EPs), that project becomes my world. I think about it before I go to sleep, I procrastinate from my day job by building spreadsheets and Slack channels, I daydream on my commute about all the festivals we’ll get to attend once it’s in the world.
The problem with every project becoming my world is, well, I’m not the only citizen of that world, and the success or failure of the world doesn’t fall solely on my shoulders. It can’t. I’m no Atlas, and no filmmaker is an island.
So when conflict arises, or creative disagreements rear their heads, it’s tempting to take it personally. It’s my world, and you’re burning it down! You’re killing the biodiversity with your bad ideas, you’re hurtling us towards the sun with your stubbornness! How dare you!
This results in a few things that can kill a filmmaker’s budding career and passion, so when the stress or disillusionment gets to be too much, I find it helpful to repeat a few simple affirmations to myself to stay on the correct side of sanity.
Sometimes, there’s no saving a collaboration
I’ve written about how to stop fighting on set, how to have a constructive creative partnership, and I spend probably a quarter of my time in consultations mediating conflict between filmmaking teams. While there are of course ways to better manage differences in personalities, taste, and work ethic, sometimes, the only way to move forward is to leave. Leave the collaborative relationship that isn’t bringing out the best in you, in your creative partner, or the project.
When and why to leave a toxic creative relationship is up for debate and highly variable, and I don’t want to litigate that here. But I do want to remind myself (and you, dear reader) that just because a professional entanglement isn’t working doesn’t mean you’ve done something wrong, they’ve done something wrong, and that there’s nothing worth saving here. Some of my worst creative collaborations have been with some of my best friends. Some of my worst fights have been with the people I care about the most.
And sometimes, a person you think you need or that you feel is vital for your creative process is never going to meet you on the level you need. Walk away. If this person was your [creative] soulmate, you wouldn’t leave every production meeting wanting to bury their body in the woods. Stop trying to make a bad or unproductive relationship work for the sake of the sunk cost fallacy and a fear of the unknown.
If you can’t quit as soon as you realize there’s no saving this collaboration, whether it’s because you’re working on a school project, you’ve been hired on to someone else’s project and want to see it through/collect your payment, or anything else, just put your head down, finish your work, and decline future projects with them. You are not unreasonable for not wanting to experience a frustrating collaboration in the future.
Sometimes, there’s no saving a project
Everything I wrote above? The same is true on a project level. Even if everyone starts the process with the best of intentions, the best of faith, sometimes, that’s not enough. Sometimes the money doesn’t pan out, a key person drops out, or the decision-makers veer so far off the original course the end product is unrecognizable.
It’s tempting — oh it’s so tempting — to rage, rage, against the dying of the light. This project is your world, you had a vision, and it’s slipping away. But you are not Atlas, you cannot (and sometimes don’t have the authority to) “fix” this on your own. Is it, then, a productive use of your time and energy to rage? Do you enjoy yelling at a brick wall, demanding it become a swimming pool?
Feel your feelings. Vent to a trusted loved one. Discuss with your therapist. Try to advocate for your position in meetings. But at the end of the day, sometimes, a project’s potential is never realized, and taking that too personally, or taking it as a sign that you aren’t cut out for your craft, is short-sighted, and you deserve better.
This is not your last project
It’s only your last project if you decide it is. Are you frustrated by how something turned out? Are you hurt that a creative relationship didn’t flourish?
I have great news. You’ll make something else. You’ll work with new people. If at first you don’t succeed… you know the rest. If this matters to you, if there was a piece of the process you loved or would have liked to try another strategy with… do it! With your hard-won insights and experience, you have everything you need to make the next thing better. The next partnership more fruitful and healthy.
I say all this as a woman who, in the summer of 2015, screamed “life is pointless!!” at a neighbor walking her dog while I walked the blocks around my apartment with my roommates because of a major production setback on my very first project. A project I was obsessed with for nearly seven years, my first foray into film… my beloved Brains.
Here’s what happened, in bare-bones details to understand how, despite my dramatic existential crisis, everything eventually worked out:
- Wrote a web series season for class
- Cast my friends and classmates from grad school, produced the pilot for class
- Decided to make the rest of the season the summer between my first and second years of grad school
- Major crisis occurs for the romantic lead of the show, who is also my roommate
- Things happen, massive falling out occurs despite my best efforts, the romantic lead/roommate drops out of the production one day before our next shoot is scheduled
- LIFE IS POINTLESS!!!! (I’m so sorry to this neighbor)
- Decide life is actually not pointless with the help of a wonderful support system (my other two roommates/creative partners), buckle down. Shoot once or twice more on scenes that don’t require the romantic lead while we figure out how to cast a part beyond our immediate network (literally every other member of the cast AND crew was someone we personally knew, and we were all new to New York at the time so that was a limited pool to say the least)
- Find the PERFECT actor, reshoot the parts of the pilot the other actor starred in, finish the season
- Become close friends with new actor, lose another actor after the season finishes so the new actor introduces us to another of their friends to replace them
- We film the second season of the web series with these two new actors
- Become close friends with the other new actor
- Write three other projects (two shorts, two new seasons of a different web series) starring one of both of those new actors (in fact, the second new actor co-wrote my last short film with me!)
- Build an online web series creator community, which eventually leads to a woman who made a web series in Utah I connected with meeting the second new actor from Brains, we all made a web series together (she wrote, I directed, he co-starred) and now I’m officiating their wedding in October
- Finishing Brains led to every job I’ve had since we made it: MTV (first job out of grad school was an associate producer for digital development because of my web series production and marketing experience), Stareable (web series community I met while promoting my web series), adjuncting (first teaching the class I developed Brains in originally, then that boss introducing me to another grad program in need of a web series expert), Seed&Spark (learned to crowdfund while making Brains, became friends with one of their educators who eventually recommended me for a job), consulting & freelance teaching (a culmination of all of the above. Also, much of my consulting and education curriculum still references Brains as an example, as GIFs, etc)
My point is that had that a failed collaboration very nearly led me to quitting filmmaking before I’d even finished one project, which has led to a wedding, multiple other projects, innumerable friendships, and my entire career. Had I let my hurt and frustration waylay me, my life (which I love) would look completely different.
Making art is hard. It’s harder still to keep going after setbacks and disappointing results and fights with people you thought were your future.
It’s worth it.
Bri Castellini is an independent filmmaker, an aspiring romance author, and, regrettably, a podcaster. She’s known for the 2017 short film Ace and Anxious (writer/director, 160k+ views on YouTube) and for her podcasts Burn, Noticed and Breaking Out of Breaking In, covering the USA television show Burn Notice and practical filmmaking advice, respectively. She can lick her elbow (not clickbait). Full work history and ways to hire her as a consultant can be found on her website BriCastellini.com
