As we wrap the year up I thought I would step back from the day to day business of show and take a look at what habits or traits help people do their best work, at least in my observation.
There are thousands of writers, directors, producers, agents, executives, and so on running around Los Angeles, New York, and all around the world. They are all trying. They are doing the things. But most never quite get in the winner’s circle in any real sense. Of course, some are more talented than others. Many are called but few are chosen and all that. But as I’ve seen it, three traits can make a big difference, too: focused ambition, knowing thyself and curation.
I saw Poor Things Friday in Century City. It won The Golden Lion in Venice and opened last weekend with $72K per screen, which is fantastic. Poor Things won’t be for everyone. You have to accept a big premise. But I do love its imagination, and for me, few films more clearly bring to mind my own admonition: always do the daring thing. If you pitched that story to a friend, they would have to be very creative and avant garde not to wonder if you hadn’t gone mad — which is usually an excellent sign.
Money and attention and praise and goodness come only to a few projects. There are the top films and shows. There is everything else. That is how it is. But one doesn’t know ahead of time which will be which. Is your project one of the chosen? Is your slate full of gems? Will we get the ten minute ovation after a walk down le tapis rouge or will we watch the Oscars on TV?
Fitzcarraldo Editions in London has seven employees and has published 4 of the last 9 winners of the Nobel Prize in literature. Jacques Testard is the publisher with what must be an incredibly refined sensibility. I imagine him contemplating exquisite literature while making perfectly measured matcha tea with a Genroku period Japanese whisk, perhaps with a Basho haiku …
In Kyoto
Hearing the cuckoo
I long for Kyoto
carefully filigreed on its handle by some nameless artisan.
That’s what I imagine anyway. How can we be in the zone, too?
Focused Ambition
By ambition I don't mean you want to be rich. I mean you want your work to be great.
Step one. What you’re doing is important. Wherever you are. Is the center of Hollywood. An important thing is happening that we are taking seriously. That is the energy we are sending to ourselves and into the world. Even if you are an unpublished author with a manuscript, yourself and the integrity of that work must be taken seriously by you or it will not be taken seriously by anyone. So start with that.
Everyone will try to get you to make the same very average movie and you have to put that out of mind. Every show, and every film, should aspire to be someone’s favorite film. It doesn’t have to be everyone’s favorite film. But it should be someone’s. If it doesn’t even aspire to that, and many don’t, why bother?
Ambition doesn’t mean it has to have spaceships and orcs. I recently saw Aki Kaurismaki’s Fallen Leaves, part of his Proletariat Trilogy. It’s a very contained film. But it is ambitious because it is very true to its world and reality and because it aspires to be distinctive.
Distractions from the goal of quality are everywhere. For a movie to be successful, the film has to be the very thing of the moment and a few moments after that. People talk about the reasons why a film is being made. “We need a programmer that skews F18-34.” “Regal wants mid-budget comedy programmers for August.” “Jerry is my neighbor in the Hamptons.”
Those are bad reasons.
The reason should be — “because it’s amazing. People are going to care and it will stand the test of time.”
Only that will yield the very thing of the moment.
When people are distracted by politics or demographic targets or similar, they are distracted from the goal of quality. The work loses a sense of its ambition and always gets worse.
Think about writing Infinite Jest. It’s 577,608 words. It has footnotes that have footnotes. It is ambitious.
Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell famously wrote and recorded their first album “When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” at home in their bedroom studio. It was totally ambitious and ideally focused. Perfect.
Amy Winehouse left London to record 'Back to Black' and 'Rehab' in what was, for her, the relative isolation of Miami.
We only said goodbye in words
I died a hundred times
Be like Ezra Pound giving T.S. Eliot notes on The Wasteland. You know that it should not be
Unreal City I have sometimes seen and see
Under the brown fog of your winter dawn
It should be
Unreal City
I have sometimes seen and see
Under the brown fog of your winter dawn
OR better yet
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of your winter dawn [final version]
When you’re intensely focused, ambitious and paying attention you know where the lines must break.
As a very minimum threshold by the way, you have to actually put in the time. You have to actually go to Miami and record the album. 100% of unwritten scripts do not sell.
Know Thyself
The Oracle of Delphi said “Know thyself.” I find that most people who do excellent work understand what they’re good at. They develop a distinctive style and tend to work within that style. They explore their art enough and have explored choices enough to develop a signature style and they stay roughly – roughly, I say! – on brand. There are exceptions: filmmakers or producers who do a variety of studio films at a very high level. But I do think that is the exception amongst people working at the highest level. You’re probably not the best at everything. You’re probably the best at your distinctive style and the more “you” a work is, the more likely it is to be distinctive and good. Sylvester Stallone told me this one night at The Palm and he’s right.
Curate: You, Art, Things, People, Everything
Finally, there is something about what you allow into your world – the movies, the music, the tweets, and the people. Keep yourself – what actors call the instrument – finely tuned. You can’t be at your best if you have bad inputs. As Sartre said, “L’enfer c’est les autres” (hell is other people).
You have to be intentional and selective about who is influencing you, what you’re watching and listening to, and how you’re engaging with it. All of these things can take you to the middle or push you forward to new and interesting ideas and places. You can be actively engaged – as Godard said, “The way to criticize a film is to make another film” – or you can just take things in without reflection. No middle of the road, bad influences are allowed.
One reason to be engaged culturally and to care about how you engage is that we can be trapped and we need to continue to evolve. As Brian Grazer said in his book A Curious Mind, “We are all trapped in our own way of thinking, trapped in our own way of relating to people. We get so used to seeing the world our way that we come to think that the world is the way we see it.”
Culture always evolves. Two years ago is passe. You must evolve. You will evolve whether you like it or not. You must experience the interesting parts of the culture actively to grow the best version of yourself and to help build tomorrow’s culture.
So as you finish reading the new manhwa on your phone, as the final lyric of that song drifts away, as Carol Ann Duffy’s “the stars are filming us for no one” slides unsummoned across your memory, you joke with your brilliant friend, and look out from your aerie at the city, at what might be, “with a wild surmise,” hopefully you start to see the next new thing, and in that moment, you are skating on the edge. You can see what is on the edge and what is over it. Others can’t see it, and they fear it. But you have prepared yourself; you do not fear it. You know the difference between good and great and you’re going for great. Indeed, in that moment, this is where it’s fucking at.
Roy Price was an executive at Amazon.com for 13 years, where he founded Amazon Video and Studios. He developed 16 patented technologies. His shows have won 14 Best Series Emmys and Globes. He was formerly at McKinsey & Co. and The Walt Disney Co. He graduated from Harvard College in 1989.
You are 100% right. Your advice is on the mark. Everyone told me to avoid making my best work. They didn't know from snippets what it was about. A dear friend, connected to T. Malik said told me avoid it. But it works, it was me and it's authentically my style.
A film made for $30k was written about in the Library of America. https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/2158-the-other-american-gothic-director-cody-knotts-on-adapting-charles-brockden-browns-macabre-masterpiece-for-film/?
I worked harder, cared more, because it was me. I found my niche, 19th century American Literature brought to film. We are already working in pre-production on Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance.
Thank you for caring and advising someone because you wanted, not because it would benefit you
The world needs more people like that
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This is a great great piece! Thank you