You Cannot Make a Movie
This is not tough love, or reverse psychology—I am not trying to goad you into doing something by telling you that you can’t do it. You really cannot make a movie—not just you, but anyone. This is because movies make themselves—and your job is to simply let it be able to do so.
Moviemaking is a bit more like baking than it is like cooking, as it is often said about baking that once you put it in the oven, what you’re baking ‘makes itself’. It’s much the same with moviemaking—you assemble the elements your movie seemingly requires, at each stage of the way, and at each stage of the way you just kind of bake it and see what happens. I think there’s a thing like this in computer programming as well, where you code something, and then you see if it will ‘compile’. That’s how you should think about moviemaking, whether you’re working on the writing of a scene, or the whole script, or you’re shooting something, or you’re editing it, etcetera—you’re just trying to make something that bakes right. You taste it by reading it or watching it. Then you kinda go back in time a bit and alter the recipe, change a word, change a cut. Anyone who’s ever made a good movie knows what he hell I’m talking about. If you’ve only ever made shitty movies, a lack of this approach is probably why.
A movie will let you know, so many goddamn times, what it wants to be. You have to listen, because more than even you want the movie to exist, the movie itself wants to exist—and exist well. No movie wants to suck, whereas human beings might want to make a sucky film, or not care if they make a sucky film. But no movie, itself, would ever want that for itself. If it’s frustrating, the process and everything, maybe it’s because you’re not listening. Maybe you don’t know how to listen. Maybe you have this thing all backward, expecting the movie to bend to your will. It does not, and should not—you are supposed to bend to it.
By the end of making a movie, you should not just be a better filmmaker—you should be a better person. If you’re not, then something has gone terribly wrong. I truly believe that art, and the process of making art, exists to make people more empathetic, whether it be through serving as a challenge to their notions and preconceptions, or by just slicing straight through to their soul. You make the viewers a bit more well-rounded and less edgy, and also do that for yourself. If you’re a prick when you started out making films, you should be significantly less of a prick each time you crank one out. That’s the art, and the art making, working as intended.
It’s actually a lot easier to make movies the moment you realize that you can’t make them. The problem is though that too many people think they can’t make them in some sort of arbitrary, misguided sense, where they think they don’t have the talent or the resources or whatever. That’s fucking stupid—and though I want them, and anyone, to make movies, they probably would suck at it, so obsessed with their status in life that it would distract them from any actual work needing to be done. Because yes, even though you can’t make a movie, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a lot of work—bakers work just as hard as guys who only use the top of the oven. They just work differently. Work differently too, and your films will be much better—or even exist at all.
Thank you for reading, and if you enjoyed this piece, and enjoy my films, consider donating $2 per month to my film studio, Kill The Lion Films.