…with the most demanding interlocutors… As you make your film, who is it that you talk to? Okay, so there are the conversations with the writer (if they’re not you), plus those in prep, during production, in post — in other words the constant, ongoing, to-and-fro conversations with your team…

How you relate, authentically or not, to your material. There’s a faculty member at the film school in which I used to teach, a rare educator of perennial popularity from whom I learned much. He talks about what material you can relate to authentically. When you carry a connection to…

The Sentence and the Image. Who hasn’t been reduced to pursuing reading solely in the search for material to adapt for a movie? Novels, novellas, short stories — riches to be mined for narratives, for characters, for worlds. Sometimes you dip in, know this isn’t the one, dip out, move…

Not a beat but… On the page, it’s easy to read a simple action in a scene without giving it a second thought. A character sees something, registers it, and reacts. Another hears the doorbell, goes to their front door and opens it to see who’s there. Another hears a…

… Or why are you already making them? To make the world a better place. This has been said to me more times than I could count. If this is your reason, become a front-line health worker, a community activist, or join an NGO and support people in need, just…

The Trap of Easy Answers — for Filmmakers and Anyone Else Of all human activities, ‘rocket science’ surely takes the biscuit for the most casually and regularly dismissed endeavor. There you are, faced with some new activity, challenge, skill to be gleaned, task to be performed, perhaps knitting your brow…

What’s Right for You? You don’t want to go to film school? You can breathe a sigh of relief. You’ve saved yourself as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars. But how do you go about learning your craft? You have many ways — more than ever before… 1. Just…

Which is Right for You? “It’s not wha’ yer know, it’s ‘oo yer know!” my mother told me, when, as a callow youth, I yearned to get into the world of film and TV in my native England. To an extent, given the English class system at the time and…

The Inspiration–Perspiration Spectrum Concept and Experiment in the Creative Process A friend recently introduced me to a book that claims profound insights into how artists set about their work. Old Masters and Young Geniuses by David W. Galenson https://bookshop.org/books/old-masters-and-young-geniuses-the-two-life-cycles-of-artistic-creativity/9780691133805 …