photo by janine berben
On the second day at Cannes, this year, an elderly French film producer leapt out of his chair and screamed his petulant little lungs out, for a good two minutes. He has this hissy fit simply because he felt myself and a friend were sitting a little too close to him. I don't think we were too close, I don't think our conversation was too loud. All of us were in a cramped Media pavilion, trying to do business in less than ideal circumstances. The incident was both hilarious and at the same time tedious. It encapsulated the industry for me. The industry is full of petulant little ego-maniacs, who leap out of their chairs at the slightest provocation and who have no social skills what-so-ever. When I got home from Cannes, exhausted, a friend had sent me a link to recent Roseanne Barr article in the New York Times, in which she recounts how hideously she was treated by the TV industry, on the first series of Roseanne. The jist of it was, although she was the star of the show in name, basically, she was patronised by pretty much everyone and the creation of the show was a relentless power struggle between the industry establishment, her belief in her material and her core working class values. As I read it, and as I recognised my own experiences of being marginalised and patronised by people in the industry, it made me wonder why any of us bother to make the effort in the first place. What it is about the industry that attracts the socially inept? What I do know, is that as I get older, I get less tolerant of rude behaviour in the industry. But, this week, I don't want to talk about the rude people, because what the Roseanne article the petulant Frenchman really brought home to me is the value of real friendship. That's what I want to talk about this week. I think people really underestimate the power of friendship to achieve things in this industry. What I do here a lot, is "It's not what you know, but who you know," but mainly used as an excuse, rather than as a celebration of "who people know." The implication of "it's who you know" is that if you just knew some important people, then you'd automatically have a great career. Where most writers and filmmakers go wrong, is that they discount the people they have surrounding them... and instead focus on the people who they perceive to be important. You see a lot of this at Cannes and a lot of this online. It's even got a name. People call it networking. However, from my perspective, networking is pretty much always: the cynical attempt to gain an "Important" person's attention, due to the perceived value they may be to your career. From my point of view, one of the reasons that the movie and TV industries are often such hellish experience, is precisely because it is predominately a networking culture. If you are surrounded by people who constantly attempt to measure your value to them as a career asset, then it's difficult to create genuine friendships. Friendship is different. Friendship is about seeing the inherent value of the person, as a person, regardless of their influence or social position. Friendship is not about weighing up the value of this person to your career... basically, your mates are your mates. The value of friendship is genuinely underestimated in this industry. And yet, the power of friendship to get things done is immense. As an independent film-maker, my ability to produce movies with relatively little money is dependent entirely on the quality and the richness of my friendships. This is one of the reasons that I am not interested in Kickstarter and crowd-funding as concepts. From my perspective, these fund raising schemes miss the point. In my world, no budget independent films are projects that friends do together because they enjoy the process and they believe in the work. Friendship will make a movie happen, in a way that fund raising never really does. However, more than just a way to make no-budget movies, long term friendships eventually open unexpected doors and mind-numbing opportunities. In my experience, a good friend is worth twenty agents. All of the opportunities that are currently in my life, within the industry have been created for me by my friends. Not my contacts, not my network... my mates. People who I like and who like me. People who I believe in and who believe in me. People who most writers and filmmakers would never bother to "network" because when I first met them, they held no power or influence in the industry. However, over time, because my mates are hard working, creative, nice people, they have made friends with hundreds of other, like minded people. And, because not everyone in the industry is an arsehole, a lot of these people have created great careers for themselves. In an industry that appears to be run by cynical networking, it's easy to lose sight of this core fact, that friends are the answer to getting stuff done... it's easy to forget, because the media industry is full of people who set themselves up as gatekeepers, when it fact they are not. Dealing with these kinds of people never feels like dealing with friends. It feels like a life-draining struggle to keep your self afloat in a sea of negativity and cynicism. What I'm learning, almost on a daily basis, is that the imaginary gatekeepers are only as powerful as we make them. It's OK to say, "You know what, you're just too snooty and cynical to bother with... now, where are my mates." At the end of the day, the real revolution in the movie industry isn't a revolution based on new technology, it is really a revolution in the awesome power of friendship over the tedious monotony of media cynicism.Posted via email from Filmutopia's Sunday Morning Movie Blog
