Making it (Understanding Your Meta) - Part 2
As I explained in Part 1, I’ve spent a long time playing the wrong game. I tried to use a very specific playbook for a situation (my own situation) that was not built for the world around me. I have seen the same thing happen to a lot of people around me: aspiring filmmakers very often try and find guidance and strategies from people who sell too broad a solution for very specific problems, before realizing there is really no one way to find your way forward.
The problem was not just strategic, it was also about honing my craft. By focusing on my career, I ended up doing things backward: instead of diving fully into my craft to get to the point where it could turn heads, be of great quality, and be of value to others, I was spending a ton of energy trying to find good strategies to “hack the code” of a volatile industry, with poor results.
And indeed, my first break happened with a project that was born out of anything but calculation.
Around 2013, I visited Pinuccio Sciola with my father, in his home and studio. I had not seen Pinuccio in years, but I had known him for my entire life. It so happened that he also was one of the most important Sardinian artists who had ever lived; and one of his inventions, his musical stones, seemed to me a perfect subject for cinematic storytelling.
At that time, I had not even considered making something other than fiction as a creative project, but Pinuccio was such an interesting artist that I realized I could profile him in an original, insightful, and memorable way. I involved three of my favourite collaborators and friends - Cédric, Tomas, and Jindrich - and embarked on a collective creative project, made for passion, with few calculations about what it could do for anyone’s career.
Yet, that one film, Born of Stone, managed to be my biggest success, going around the world in festivals, winning important prizes, and opening new doors. That success drove me to push even harder into my career. But rather than looking into another project to creatively fall in love with, I went back and thought it would have been best to try and "make it" the way I was thinking about it before, only now my ambitions included documentaries and fiction. Together with my friends Luca and Victoria, I started a production company focused on a mix of creative projects and documentary-style professional video profiles. It did not go badly, but not that well either: while I kept busy in the following years, I also felt like I was sprinting through quicksand. I am not sure how long it would have taken for me to understand this was the wrong approach if it was not for an apocalypse.
As COVID entered its most serious phase, I spent a lot of that time watching older movies.
I have been a movie fan for a long time and have a decent knowledge of film history, but I never quite dove deep into the great works of the past. I had watched some of the landmark movies everyone knows about, but I was also in the dark about the work of a lot of great directors. On the one hand, I am very interested in current cinema because I want to see the way it portrays the world I am living in. Also, some works of "art cinema" of the past seemed... suspicious to me. It's dumb, but some of the elitism I noticed in some corners of “classic cinema” fandom and many experiences watching truly terrible art films in movie festivals made me wary to explore the past.
But in summer 2020, with a lot of time to watch movies, and cinemas mostly being closed down, I started to dive deeper into the past. I dove deep into the catalogue of the Criterion Collection, BFI, and Arrow Films and discovered a lot of filmmakers that I mostly just heard about. Godard, Antonioni, Bresson, Deren, Renoir, Ozu, and even more crucially, Varda... it has been quite an education and is still ongoing - it will never end, I hope.
Looking into their careers, I noticed how little they cared about making it. Their focus was purely on their art: and by becoming excellent at it, they ended up making it.
They did not seem to care about “the game”. They cared about play: they were incredibly serious about it.
And they all found their path in very different ways.
Those months of being isolated reminded me that cinema is an incredibly fluid and versatile language that can be used in radically different ways. Some of those filmmakers planned their movies carefully; others started their projects with a loose idea, then developed it in time, discovering their film as they shot it. They reminded me of something I realized when first making my first film school projects: a lot of my favorite movies (Mulholland Drive, Annie Hall, Blade Runner) started with a very different intention from the one that made the final movie. They adapted to reality; and that was something I had not been good at for a while, at that point.
Sure, I might have been a fan of Lynch, Herzog and other new or classic auteurs, but this deep dive really sparked a completely different understanding of what cinema can be. And even if the world of "classic" or "art" cinema can have a very stiff and boring aura to it, a massive amount of movies categorized that way are not stiff, or boring. They are exciting, vital, and energetic. Even more importantly, they are inspiring.
So I decided to forget about figuring out the game. For a European, that kind of knowledge is just not there: there are no guidebooks about the best ways to make it as a creative professional in a continent so varied and diverse. So, trying to use some “Hollywood strategies” to develop your next project is honestly a complete waste of time. And it will most likely lead to the creation of pretty subpar work. I've gone through that path for a while and seen many other people going the same route. My film school taught some strategies that were specifically designed to make this path happen.
But the reality is, that the pathway to success is insane, unpredictable, and hard to replicate. So the best choice might be to do something that sounds cheesy and naive: following your muse; be serious about play, about the craft. Recently, I have just done that: be it for work or for my own projects, I am committing to take the craft, and playing, extremely seriously. The more I look around me, the more I look back at my life, I realise that this is a crucial way to keep healthy; and, not incidentally, this is how Pinuccio Sciola operated: he was always creating and making. No matter his health, or age, he lived what David Lynch calls The Art Life.
Strangely, when I finally completely committed to this idea, my professional career started taking off. Probably a coincidence; yet, it made me even more convinced that diving into art is the right strategic move, not just the most romantic one.
