Film & Filmmaking
The Work Behind the WorkI fell in love with movies long before I understood how they were made.
Is that not the power of cinema? To evoke a feeling, reveal a deeper truth, or show us a new way of imagining the structures of our society?
Over the years, my sense of wonder transformed into a curiosity about how those experiences were created. I began paying attention not only to the stories themselves, but to the choices behind them: where the camera was placed, how something was lit, the rhythm of the edit, what a production designer put into a room, how music changed the meaning of an image, and how an actor's performance could make words written by someone else feel completely natural. Filmmakers like David Fincher showed me how deliberate every one of those choices is—how seemingly disparate crafts could be organized around a singular vision without calling attention to the machinery making it possible.
But that machinery doesn't belong to one person.
I've never been particularly interested in the mythology of the director as the solitary auteur. I think of a director as something closer to a vision leader: the person responsible for articulating and protecting the central idea while surrounding themselves with talented laborers, craftspeople, technicians, artists, and problem-solvers who know how to turn that idea into something concrete, something real. While the director may be responsible for holding the compass, making a film requires a team of dedicated and motivated people to row their oars in the same direction.
And that's what I love about filmmaking.
As a producer, I primarily see my job as creating the conditions that allow all of those people to do their best work. It requires deeply understanding the story, the director's vision, and how every department operates. For me, it's important that each department has what it needs to operate with a measure of autonomy, independence, and creative freedom within the defined boundaries and constraints of a production. I may be known for my TL;DR emails, but beneath all those words is something fairly simple: I want everyone to understand the vision, how their work intersects with the work of other teams, the expectations, and the parameters well enough that I can trust them to execute free from micromanagement.
And then I listen.
Good ideas can come from everywhere.
A production assistant can solve a problem that has stumped a director. An actor can understand something about a character the writer never considered. A grip can look at a seemingly impossible setup and see the solution. Some of my favorite moments on set (in hindsight) are the ones when the meticulous plan stops working and we come together to identify the problem or challenge, then work hand-in-hand to solve it.
That's where the magic happens. A group of people come together, trust one another, and make something none of us could have made alone.
I've never understood how directors and producers can mistreat their teams and then expect those same people to give everything they have to the work. Film sets are workplaces. The people on them are laborers, craftspeople, technicians, and artists deserving of respect, care, safety, and the opportunity to take pride in what they make. Art made in an environment of resentment, fear, and anger rarely has the freedom to become everything it could have been.
Sure, there are moments of stress and intensity, but that doesn't give anyone a free pass to be a shitty person.
I want the experience of making a movie to be as joyful and fulfilling as I hope the experience of watching it will be.
That extends to who gets to participate in making it. If I am asking a community to trust me with its stories, I believe members of that community should have opportunities to participate in telling them. Representation cannot end at the edge of the frame. It matters to me who is behind the camera, whose perspectives are being heard, and who is empowered to contribute to the work.
That belief has also given me a community of my own. I return to many of the same collaborators from film to film, just as they have invited me into their work. I've had the privilege of supporting other filmmakers in all manner of capacities—sometimes credited, sometimes not—because filmmaking, at its best, is reciprocal. We show up for one another. We teach one another. We carry things. We solve problems. We make each other's movies better.
No one
makes a movie
alone.
Nor do I think the different kinds of films I make exist independently of one another. My narrative, documentary, and experimental work are in constant dialogue.
Documentary filmmaking has taught me how to listen, to observe, to leave room for the unexpected, and to recognize that the truth of a moment may be more interesting than whatever I had planned for it. I carry those instincts into narrative filmmaking. Narrative, in turn, has taught me how performance, design, rhythm, and structure can reveal truths that don't depend upon something having literally happened in front of the camera.
Experimental cinema challenges, interrogates, and teaches both.
I'm fascinated by filmmakers who have questioned the basic grammar of the medium itself. The early Soviet filmmakers—especially Dziga Vertov and Elizaveta Svilova—understood that editing wasn't simply a way of joining one image to the next. The relationship between images could itself create meaning. A cut could produce an idea that existed in neither image alone, but emerged instead in the mind of the person watching.
That possibility still excites me.
More recently, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria affected me profoundly. It reminded me how tactile cinema can be—how sound, duration, silence, space, and an image can produce something we experience before we necessarily understand it.
Memoria is a film I didn't simply watch; I felt it, deeply. I want more audiences to encounter cinema that way.
One of my ambitions for my own personal feature films is to create a corresponding experimental short for each one and exhibit it immediately before the feature begins. Not a trailer. Not an explanation of the movie to follow. Something more sensory and abstract—a piece that creates a feeling, an impression, a texture; something that prepares the senses before the opening credits roll.
I like the idea that an audience coming to see a narrative film might encounter another cinematic language without necessarily having chosen to see an “experimental film.” Maybe the two works illuminate one another. Maybe they complicate one another. Maybe the short simply leaves an impression that changes, however slightly, how the feature is experienced and understood.
For me, these forms feed one another. Documentary reminds narrative to observe. Narrative gives documentary a deeper understanding of story structure. Experimental cinema reminds both that the rules are only rules because someone decided to follow them.
And then there is what happens on the other side of the screen.
I once said during a film festival panel that going to the movies is one of the last communal gatherings of shared experience we have left in this country. I still believe that. For a couple of hours, strangers walk into a darkened room and agree to experience something together. We bring different lives, beliefs, histories, politics, joys, griefs, and expectations into that room. Then the lights go down and, for a little while, we laugh together. We gasp together. We become uncomfortable together. Sometimes we cry together.
A group of people came together to make something, and then another group of people comes together to receive it.
There is something profoundly beautiful to me about that exchange.
I remember sitting through a screening of Here For Now in 2022. It was cold and raining, I felt unmotivated, and I was in my head about something. Sitting through my own films is often difficult for me. I'm usually quite critical of the work—and often a little nauseous—so I tend to stand off to the side rather than sit with the audience.
Then we reached the moment when the trick of the film is revealed. I heard the audience realize what had happened.
They gasped. And shortly thereafter, there was thunderous applause.
It was a salve for my heart.
Over the years, I've gotten better at watching my own work with an audience, but those moments remind me why the audience matters so much to me. They reassure me that I am doing what I love. That I'm on the right path and moving in the right direction, even if I haven't yet achieved everything I'm working toward.
My decision to devote myself to filmmaking came later in life.
In 2019, I was sitting in rehab watching the Academy Awards when Lady Gaga won the Oscar for Best Original Song for “Shallow” from A Star Is Born. She spoke about how hard she had worked throughout her life and, more importantly, about refusing to give up—about being rejected, falling down, standing back up, being brave, and continuing anyway.
It was a clarion call I both heeded and needed.
I had spent much of my career making images, writing, designing, producing, and telling stories in one form or another. But sitting there, beginning the difficult work of rebuilding my own life, something shifted.
I made a decision to pursue the thing I had loved for so long. I wanted to make movies.
My life has never been the same since. I hope one day I have the opportunity to tell Lady Gaga how much her speech meant to me—how it felt like she was speaking directly to me. It forever changed the trajectory of my life, and for that I am grateful. I refer back to that speech often. It's framed above my desk.
Making Art can be Hard
(Sometimes really, really hard.)
Trust your struggle
Art is hard. Being a working artist is harder.
For over three decades, I've navigated the pressure to compromise and conform just to keep the lights on. But I know in my heart I would be compromising a sacred vow to my inner artist were I to abandon that side of myself simply because I wanted to be more comfortable. Struggle often gives art something to say. And so, I've learned to trust my struggle.
Making films can be exhausting, uncertain, expensive, occasionally absurd, and full of problems you have no idea how you're going to solve until the people around you start solving them. And somehow, I get to do it.
I'm living the dream.
When the struggle feels like more than I can bear, I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and repeat these four sentences:
I love what I do.
I asked for this.
I'm grateful for the work.
Thank you.
They center me.
They ground me in gratitude.
I think about the kid I was and all the hopes and dreams he carried. I think about all those movies. All those hours spent watching awards shows and imagining what it might feel like to be standing on one of those stages someday. I remember how movies and television were an escape from the fear, anxiety, and depression I've struggled with my entire life. I have never forgotten the dreams of my youth, or the hope that tomorrow will be better. No matter how dark things can feel, I know that my inner child is proud of what I have created, what I have achieved, and what I'm working toward.
There is still so much I want to make. So much I want to learn. So much I hope to accomplish. But every once in a while, I have to remind myself to look around.
I'm not waiting for the dream to begin. I'm already living it.
