The New Era Filmmaker's Guide To Today's Realities
50+ Tactics & Recognitions regarding what we do when NOW is when we are trying to make it all work
Times change. Times change constantly.
But they’ve been changing EVEN faster and deeper lately.
It used to be you could enter the field and the assumptions you held in the early years would still hold firm as the decade closed. But that just ain’t the way it is anymore, is is it my friend?
These days when you look at the media landscape and its ecosystem, I think it is hard to cast your gaze and not feel that IF you are going to be part of that world, you are going to need to learn to shapeshift. And not just once. That constant shifting is going to be your steady state. You will need to be fluid. And flexible. And passionate about things in many directions. All at once. Here, now, and forever to be.
I was fortunate in many ways. I transferred into NYU’s undergrad film program just as the American Indie Wave was rising. The wave was spawned in NYC too, so there was a double fortune to it. Right place, right time and all that.
But the real icing on the cake was that NYU was a tad slow to pick up on it, even if all came from their halls to begin with. The filmmakers who truly lit my fuse initially had each attended NYU and in the late 70’s or early 80’s: Joel and Ethan Coen, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, and Susan Seidelman. But when I showed up in the early 80’s, the NYU program was still 100% about Hollywood. I consider this the Good Fortune Icing because it gave me something to rebel against. Which is almost the thing you need most to determine a certain aspect of your identity. If you don’t know what you are for, at least you should know what you are against. I wasn’t against the Hollywood way, but I knew I wanted to do something different than all that.
In planning your strategy for a sustainable career in a creative industry, you need to know how you are both part of something and yet still quite distinct. Granted, as you develop your artistic voice and business knowhow it is relatively inevitable that you are going to be distinct, but that is a process. It takes awhile and should not be rushed. Recognizing where you belong – what the communities you are part of – also requires recognizing where you don’t want to be. What won’t you stand for? What don’t you vibe with?
It is good to not like things. It is good to not like a lot of things. Step away. Don’t waste your time dwelling with what doesn’t suit your taste. There’s no shortage of things to be part of, to learn from, steal from, adapt and morph and shift again and again. But how are you going to shine? That’s a big part of it, but put that in your ponder bag for a different day, ‘kay?
Let’s examine what it looks like to be a filmmaker today, based on what tools and opportunities are already here or likely to arrive soon. Where do we stand? If we determine that, we can start to better understand what it is we need to build. To be blunt, I think most of the scaffolding out their today is for a construction project that is already antiquated and obsolete. It is going to help a great deal to be able to imagine what the building is going to need to be in this new era of continual shitstorms flooding the zone and where the earth is moving under your feet.
This is the process of pragmatic utopian ideation. It may not be what you want but it is the best you can imagine under the current circumstances – and it exemplifies four tactics we all need to embrace:
ideation
practicality
utopian imagining
a willingness to fail (well)
Don’t worry about getting it right; just know you are going to have to keep trying. Things will keep changing but you are going to be ahead of the pack, for better or worse.
I suspect you may wonder why I am not specifying this as “NonDē Filmmaking”. NonDē is a subset of all that is coming before us. These observations I am offering today extend beyond just NonDē. If you go the corporate route, these recognitions still hold true. If you got the state-funded auteur-focused path, yup this is still what you should reckon with. These bullet points are for all cinema makers throughout this earth. These are the cloth that we all shall wear.
I think you know my plea is for us to build this together. I am not going to take the time to get it right this time. I am just getting it out. Getting it right is on all of us. I just want us moving forward. True, I could work on this post for a couple of months and make it truly sing. I could back up each of this points with in-depth descriptions designed to encourage your embrace of the concepts. But damn, we don’t have the time. This caravan most move. Can you fill in the blanks for me? Or rather, for yourself?
New Era Filmmaking: The mindset in 50+ points
We are in this together. We carry many with us and in turn rest on, stand on, and leap from the shoulders of others.
We are all connected and will pull each other in the directions we dance, stumble, and fly.
We are united by philosophy even more than we are by aesthetics, experience, or identity.
We need to recognize where the world was, is, and will be. All three directions require work and maintenance. It’s this exercise that will keep our work in shape.
Money and capital are currently racing to control everything, and they are willing to kill. The stakes are as high as they could be. We all could be erased. It can happen everywhere now.
Art and love are the defense of joy, freedom, equality, opportunity, democracy, beauty, pleasure and all things wonderful.
Art and love are the activators of all positive attributes everywhere.
We know it all changes very rapidly now. And it truly does.
We are committed to winning and preserving all that we hold dear.
We need a new definition of success based on today’s realities, priorities, and goals.
