7 Pieces of Filmmaking Advice I Stole From Directors that Are Smarter Than Me

7 years ago I opened this blog, inspired by what Ryan Koo was doing with No Film School, writing 8 articles per week and building a solid and fast growing community. 7 years later, Ryan Koo doesn’t write on No Film School anymore, he has a staff, offices in Brooklyn, and millions of monthly page views while this blog is still… my blog.

If mentorless has never turned into a business for me, it has become my tailored film school notebook. Having the blog has forced me to stay informed, curious, and active as a filmmaker even when I wasn’t living in a city that had a thriving film community, even when I did not have the means and tools to direct the stories I wanted to tell, even when I spent years experimenting with storytelling on other mediums and developing a feature screenplay.

This blog has allowed me to learn, store, and internalize precious knowledge from working filmmakers that came handy last week when I was back on a traditional live-action set after 5 years.

10 days ago I shot a live-action short film in Turkey. As I was prepping to shoot a film that was bigger in scale than anything that I had done before, I couldn’t help noticing that I had significantly grown as a director over the last five years without directing live-action.

Weird.

And then I realized that this growth was partially due to this blog.

From the 1,000 + blog posts and 300 + newsletters I have shared since June 2011, there are 7 pieces of filmmaking advice that stuck out and I hung onto while creating, prepping and shooting Chloe. Here they are:

From Ava DuVernay: Stop asking. Start doing.

To this day, DuVernay’s keynote at Film Independent is one of my favorites. I heard it first when it came out back in 2013 and her advice has stayed with me ever since. And yet, it is so easy to forget. I’ve spent the last three years developing a feature film. The first year alone, writing the first draft in a notebook and the last two years with my producer. And we’ve been asking. For grants. For advice. For money. In January, I said enough. Enough asking for a while. Let’s do. And that’s what we did.

From David Lowery: No one knows how to make the movie better than you do.

Each person on set sees the film from their expertise and perspective. As a director, your job is to see it as a whole and to keep heading that way. Which also means every mistake in judgment is yours to own. In times of crisis and doubts, when a shot doesn’t work, when tension is getting high, when time is ticking and the crew is getting tired, it is tempting to delegate and run with someone’s opinion even though it doesn’t feel quite right. But ultimately, nobody knows the movie like you do.

From Alfonso Cuaron: You’re only as good as your collaborators

That’s something Cuaron said at a Comic-Con panel when promoting Gravity and if you’ve seen the film, you understand that to push that many boundaries, one needs to build an amazing team of collaborators where everyone is at the best of their game but also looks forward to being challenged. This is something I have never forgotten and I know in my bones to be true. The truth is, if you are going for a storytelling that goes beyond your well-framed coverage and three acts structure narrative, you need to find collaborators who are attracted toward risk and are willing to put the extra work necessary to transform a risky story into a success story. And as you age you realize that this is particularly hard to find. When we’re young everything is a risk so it’s easy to find collaborators open to risk. But we lack the expertise. As we age, people get tired. Whether they work on a shitty or a great film, they’re likely going to work long hours. Unless they work on commercials, their salary won’t be anything fantastic compared to the time they’re putting in. Finding people who love their craft above the personal cost it takes to be great at what you do is extremely hard. That’s why the same DoPs work over and over on high profile films and with the same filmmakers.

From Werner Herzog: Stand

A couple of months ago I purchased the Masterclass year-long membership, which is one of the best purchase I’ve done film education wise. (A month later they offered a 7 days free trial and reduced the price so now is a good time to invest). I’m going through all the filmmaking/storytelling classes and one of them is with Werner Herzog. In a section of his masterclass, Herzog explains his do’s and don’ts. One of them is to never have a video village and to never sit. For Chloe, I asked to have a small and mobile monitor and no chair. The first hours of the first day the crew kept trying to make me sit in a low chair in front of a big monitor but I knew that if I sat in that chair I would never stand up again. So instead I placed the small monitor as close to the actors as possible and either stand up, sat on a sandbox or on my knees. By the second day they had completely dropped trying to make me sit and brought me a pillow for my knees instead (too cute). The point of Herzog’s advice, which I lived during those two days, is that you want to keep people’s energy as high as possible on set. If someone needs to rest, they can take a step back from the set and do so. But where the camera and the actors are, the director stands.

From Greta Gerwig: Have everyone wear their names on stickers

I actually failed at implementing that tip and it became a lesson for the next shooting. Gerwig stole this from Mike Mills for Lady Bird and I thought “Great, let me do the same because I’ll be surrounded with people with foreign names and I don’t want to call them ‘hey-you!'” When I mentioned it to the production team, they came back with beautiful-memory-for-life-badges, which felt like a great idea for about 1 minute. But the problem with badges is that you can never see what’s written on it when you need it. People wear them as a belt, forget them or the badge is just showing the wrong side of itself. And when you’re working at full speed for 2 days, you don’t have time to stop, walk to the person, turn their badge to learn their name. So, for my next film, I will be more specific and insist on having stickers. (Although I already mentioned it and was told that people will refuse to stick something on their clothes… Maybe that will be one of the criteria when building the next team: if you’re too fancy for wearing a sticker go to Hollywood.)

From Robert Rodriguez: Your job is not to avoid problems. It’s to solve problems creatively.

Robert Rodriguez made me realize that I had it backwards when it came to filmmaking. I thought a good day was when everything went according to plan. With time I understood that if everything goes according to plan, it probably means that your plan is small. Things are ought to go wrong when you work with so many moving parts, from actors forgetting their lines to Hotel Manager wanting you to leave their lobby 2h earlier than agreed, to birds singing continuously over a Studio that didn’t invest in soundproofing their roof (!), to a Steadicam operator that doesn’t get your blocking and does it his way… After the shooting of Chloe, I emailed the backers of the film and I wrote that the shooting went great. And I meant it. But it didn’t go great because everything went according to plan. A lot of things did not go according to plan and we were forced to make changes to the perfect-on-paper-plan on the go. But it went great because we did it. We found creative solutions we wouldn’t have thought of otherwise without going over-schedule. Rodriguez reminded me that being a filmmaker is essentially being a creative problem-solver.

From David Fincher: Let nothing derail you

Fincher shared what his “film school test” would be if he were to teach filmmaking. He’d ask someone to stand up and tell about their film idea. Then he would yell at them “sit the f–k down!” and if the person did, they would have failed his film school test. Because filmmaking is pushing against and past all the people and situation that are yelling NO at you. This lesson is my lifelong lesson. It’s a lesson that asks me to deconstruct everything I’ve been taught a woman and a kid from immigration should be: someone who listens, obeys and complies to authority. If you’re part of any minority you probably have this in your DNA too: obey or get punished. As a woman and as an immigrant you learn to follow the rules and the rules are often written for you to stay small, quiet, obedient and use your brain and productivity for others to thrive. The irony is that I consider myself a strong human and I know I am perceived as strong from people who meet me. And I am. I am strong for a woman. All this was done on a subconscious level of course. It’s been a decade that I’ve started to consciously de-educate and re-educate myself. During the making of Chloe, there have been many instances where I pushed past my ingrained instinct of saying yes, okay, thank you, it’s fine each time someone was telling me to dream smaller. I remembered this lesson from Fincher and DuVernay’s call to action and I pushed through for the better, always. This lesson will be easier to learn for all soon I hope, as times are changing and rebellion from minorities won’t be perceived as threats that need to be tamed or destroyed but will be seen for what they are: attempts from an individual to push beyond its comfort zone to share a story and connect.

Chloe now enters its post-production phase. If you’d like to join the gang of supporters and help us make it better, faster, stronger, you can check our page. I’ve added some cool new perks including access to the VFX work and to the creative process to make a poster for a short with an agency.

Onward.

PS: I stole the title of this article from Ryan Holiday’s post on productivity. He is not a filmmaker but I re-read The Obstacle Is the Way while prepping for Chloe and it was one of the wise decisions I took.