HANDS DOWN, THE HARDEST PART ABOUT DIRECTING FOR ME is knowing when to compromise. When does someone else’s suggestion actually improve the story, and when does it lead you off the scent?
It’s challenging because doubt is always laced into our cells. But then the real question becomes: how do you know when the doubt is honest? Is it coming from a true place, or from ego?
So when someone offers a suggestion they believe is an improvement, how do you know if it’s worthwhile? Should you consider it? Is it your ego rejecting it, just a bruise on an insecurity that’s actually true because you didn’t think something all the way through? A blind spot? A lapse in discipline?
Or maybe you’re only insecure because the moment they’ve pointed to comes from deep within your soul, your core reason for making the film. And because it’s so pivotal to who you are, to your sense of living, to your enthusiasm for why you even wake up in the morning, you fall apart when they suggest it should be changed. You can’t handle them questioning that part of you. The earth shatters around you, and you start entertaining their suggestion because it feels too embarrassing to speak up and say, “This is why I want to make the movie. There will be no compromise.”
But saying that out loud means admitting something so deep, so close to your essence, that you hesitate. So you consider the suggestion anyway.
And of course there’s the other person. Why are they making the suggestion? I don’t have control over that, so I won’t spiral there, but it’s always possible you’re being confronted with a change request that’s rooted in their insecurity.
This whole string of thoughts, this tangle of possibilities that can play out in tiny, almost imperceptible degrees, is why this is the most challenging part of directing.
And let’s not even mention that this kind of suggestion often lands when you have five minutes of light left at the end of a 12-hour day, and if you don’t decide within seconds you’re heading into overtime.
I keep thinking there has to be a somatic way to help myself in those moments, but I haven’t found the trick yet. Breathing seems to escape me right at the eleventh hour of decision-making.
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