You Need Bad Ideas

Bad ideas are the first step to great ideas. An idea needs to exit your head (be verbalized), exit the theory (be tested) and then the fun creative fun can begin, especially if you are co-creating something.

What that means is that you can’t simply reject something. You need to taste it, test it, and then trash it or bounce back thanks to it. Bad ideas lead to great ideas because they open new roads with new options.

An excellent example of that is how filmmaker Denis Villeneuve and editor Joe Walker collaborated to create a whole new scene that wasn’t in the screenplay and was thus never shot but that Villeneuve felt was necessary to help understand the story.

Walker had some resistance first, but through testing realized there were new possibilities. Here is the story told by the author of Art of the Cut, Steve Hulffish:

How Denis Villeneuve Came Up With a Bad Idea that Turned Into a Great Idea

Denis Villeneuve came to Joe Walker and said: “Hey Joe, I know we didn’t shoot the scene but I feel that we need a scene where Amy Adams is dreaming in the Alien Language.” If you speak multiple languages you might know that one of the ways that you really start to get into that language is because you start dreaming in it and they wanted to show that Amy Adams was becoming immersed maybe dangerously, in the alien language but it wasn’t in the script, and it wasn’t shot. And so Denis said: “What if we took this scene from here, and this shot from here, we drop this one thing and we put that in here.” And Joe was thinking “There is no way this is going to work, this is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.” And yet, he trusted Denis and even though it didn’t work at the beginning it made Joe think, “You know, maybe if we got some ADR and we got them to do a special visual effect shot to show an alien creature then we could get it to work.” And so what seemed like a bad idea became a great idea.

Watch below the full video with 10 tips from editors to editors: