NonDē Dance Step #25: Have fun and prioritize your joy
The next step in building the NonDē Cinema Ecosystem
Longtime readers may recall that the year before last (i.e. 2024) I shared with you what I felt the initial required 24 steps in building the non-dependent cinema ecosystem are. I was recently looking at that list again and realized I had made a grave mistake; I left out something crucial. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had to go and write a damn headline for this post article and spoil all the suspense of this paragraph, didn’t I? Now you know there is a 25th step and even know what it is.
Damn straight, I’m talking about the necessity of bringing those twin siblings of delight and merriment, Sister Fun and Brother Joy, to the party.
Seriously though, fun and joy are crucial ingredients for a new ecosystem, and particularly since they were so horribly absent in the old one. They weren’t always lacking, but somewhere along the way they got up and left the building. And without them, the work won’t ever truly be satisfying, be it for the makers or the watchers — and perhaps it won’t even be good.
Once again, we misplaced our priorities.
For those, like myself, on the experiment and not the proof side of the filmmaker or aesthetic scales, fun and joy are even more crucial. In their embrace, we open ourselves up to serendipity, to the magic that swoops in during the glorious sometime, the breeze that carries us and all up to that higher level. You know the mating call for serendipity, right? If you want to summon it, you best test that alchemy out, as serendipity comes round most when fun and joy abound.
Look, I know first hand how hard it is to deliver excellence, and I am all too well trained to try to maintain the highest bar. I can marvel at the multitudes igniting simultaneously, the thousands of cylinders all firing in unison, the spark that takes flight and lights up the night, but it doesn’t mean I always get there. It is damn hard to do things right and even harder do them well.
I get many a filmmaker’s desire for pushing to the zone of the deepest concentration. I have worked alongside the strictest task masters who demand the deep focus of the most committed ninjas. Keep your voices down. No phones. No joking around. Just focused direction. And as much as get that, I find it leaves the most important cards out of the mix.
The problem of course starts long before we show up on set though. It likely has kicked in before we’ve even set our sights on the idea of making things. We’ve generally lost our way before we even start down the road. For folks who are often masters of the drive and the fury needed to make things happen, I think we do it in a bit of a fog. We try to get things done. We try to accomplish things. That became the goal for all too many — myself included.
Stop that right now friend, and let some of the good mischief in.
Let us now examine why we hitched a ride on such a joyless mission. And how to build a far more playful rocket for the next expedition.
