Bad advice
What to take, what to ignore, and how it all gets into your head anyway.
I was talking to another filmmaker recently about how to give yourself time to find the right idea (a future post for sure). Marking out a long enough period of time without producing material, so that fresh ideas and thoughts can grow and settle. The great slow-motion mental KerPlunk that creativity needs. The conversation inevitably veered into projects we were being offered, or advised to do. Which sent us into the tangled territory of advice; what to take, what to ignore, and how easily it can derail you.
I told him that my manager is always advising me that I should write a horror film. ‘Something dark and fucked up’. The Tomas Leach version of Hereditary. I love watching horror, but write one? I mean, I love watching gymnastics at the Olympics, but I don’t think I should try it.
On the list of 30 films that I gave my manager, that I love, am inspired by and are work I think I would be good at making, not one is a horror. (And yes, I understand, horror is popular. Horror films are getting made.)
This other filmmaker suggested what I had was the wrong manager. That the manager was giving me bad advice and therefore not doing a good job.
It’s hard to argue with. And that thought process sent me spiralling into an excavation of all the bad advice I’ve been given.
Because the film industry is FULL of bad advice.
As soon as you start making any kind of films, or try to start any kind of career in filmmaking, then you start getting bombarded with advice. From peers, agents, execs, your parents, some podcast, a screenwriting book, your idols, the one person you know in the industry, or even some substack like this.
It’s easy to get drowned in it.
How can you tell what advice is good? What advice works for you? It’s hard. We all want to make a living doing this and we all start as insecure, impressionable people. We might all stay insecure, impressionable people. It’s easy to be swayed and misguided and let the powerful delusion that we all need take over.
I constantly struggle with it. Advice that I instinctively question can rattle around inside my brain for days and days and make me start doubting what I am doing. Or start me pursuing something that just isn’t right for me.
When I was starting out as a documentary filmmaker in the UK, I got given a lot of awful advice from very smart people. The head of one BBC channel told me I should direct some episodes of a show like Secret Millionaire, which even then I could spot as the literal opposite of what I should try and do. One veteran filmmaker and EP, who ran a company I loved, stopped my first mid-length film after 2 minutes saying ‘I know where this goes’ and told me I should cut my films faster. He also bragged about being on holiday with his family recently and getting up at 5am to write and that I should do things like that. The only thing I took from this advice was not to be a prick to younger filmmakers.
But it’s not always easy to spot bad advice. A producer recently told me I shouldn’t make a micro-budget feature with any of my own money. I have gone round in circles on whether that was right or not. I love investing in myself. I love films made on tiny budgets. But does that mean I should make one?
I still don’t know. I change my mind regularly. And there isn’t the ‘right’ answer. There’s only what your instincts tell you.
Picking through the advice at the moment is especially hard, because nobody knows anything. Not about where the film industry is going, what’s coming next, what’s going to work. And yet, if nobody knows anything at the moment, why are they so keen to give you advice?
The pressure filmmakers are under to conform, to become another asset in a sales portfolio is immense. The industry sees us a factory that could be upping its output.
And the way to do that is make things that are very clearly definable, overtly genre, politically meaningless, celebrity focused slush that won’t have any impact on a human being anyway, and is set up to fail.
So if that’s the state of things, who the fuck is giving out advice right now?
If I were to write a horror film, wouldn’t it just be another script to add to a read-later pile? Maybe I would get some AI coverage notes. Or someone in an agency would read it, and I’d get some advice of how to make it more commercial.
How do you shield yourself from this kind of advice?
I still don’t know how to separate it all out. I can get swayed. I get excited. I like to think that maybe I can crack it and write the perfect piece of genre that is impeccably crafted, full of action and obvious stakes and an amazing climax.
But it’s not me. And I need to remember that.
I once got told that the things I make and write are thoughtful. (It wasn’t really meant as a compliment - it was a commercial context and it was ‘thoughtful’ as opposed to ‘cool’.) And thoughtful is the work I love. The work on that list I shared with my manager. The work I dream of making.
I try and remember that for myself. And not only for myself, but when I give other people advice. Am I giving advice for what they want to do? It’s a responsibility, I think, to give advice that fits the person.
After I saw Janet Planet last year, I fell in love with Annie Baker. That film gently pulled me apart and created a yearning and unravelling inside me that is still going. I got obsessed, to the point where I thought I saw her on the street in Los Angeles and I basically forgot how to function. She was on the American Masters podcast after the release of Janet Planet, and was incredibly illuminating on what she uses as a way of feeling her way through the work.
She said that she is ‘striving for something I like. I’m striving to like the thing that’s in front of me.’
Which I think is my new barometer for life.
I’m going to keep seeking out opinions, feedback, guidance, but I’m going to try to just do what I think might possibly be good, will entertain me and that I care about.
It’s impossible to be wrong if you live by that. Or rather, everyone is wrong, so who cares.
And that’s all the advice I’ve got.
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