I guess people actually read this stuff, so I’m going to preface it with:

The theme of this post is “compromise”…

#7 Uncompromising is for closers…

(A monologue that bears repeating from Glengarry Glen Ross)

Some time into post on Savage County I was walking out of MTV and saw this poster in somebody’s office:

It reads “THE UNCOMPROMISING DIRECTOR / WHO CREATED FILMS / THAT DEFINED GENERATIONS.”

I think this was at the end of a long day of trying out editorial suggestions I wasn’t that into and I got really, really hung up on the word “uncompromising”. Because, face it – starting out – being uncompromising isn’t a trait that anyone’s going to praise. In fact, they won’t even consider that you deserve to have it. Case in point – discussing Avatar with my boss I mentioned that I was jealous of the kind of control James Cameron had over every frame of the film. He said “Yeah, well – there aren’t a lot of James Cameron’s out there.”

But, James Cameron wasn’t exactly James Cameron back when he was shooting Piranha II: The Spawning (remember? the one where the Piranhas fly?) A lot of people have made a lot of compromises to get to a level at which they’re allowed to be uncompromising.

Making a $250K horror movie means that you’re making a movie out of compromise more than almost any other raw material. I can’t figure out any way to resist this that doesn’t make you seem like a problem to your betters or earn mutiny from your crew (because you’re a dick.)

Which leads to:

#8 So, if you have to compromise, make each compromise an improvement.

Obviously, this is only maybe 75% possible, but it was my mantra on Savage County: “Changes are going to be forced on you… Make them changes for the better.” Which is on the one hand, kind of a uselessly self-help-y platitude, but on the other hand, something that helped to keep me sane and keep me from making complaints that would fall on deaf ears.

I am not wired to be an optimist. I kind of revel in doom and gloom. That’s a slippery slope when you don’t have enough resources – it’s pretty much a formula for negative self-fulfilling prophecy. So, I took each news of “we don’t have X or Y” or “this or that went wrong” or “there’s not enough money to _______” as a chance to revisit my thinking about whatever we were shooting. It sound Pollyanna-ish, but just reminding myself, with each new problem: “This is a chance to make the movie better” was helpful. And, when lots goes wrong, you get a lot of opportunities to re-think.

#9 Compromise can be an opportunity to get the best from your collaborators.

This is obvious, but: everyone working on a film set is a filmmaker (not necessarily a director). It was as true for Savage County as anything. Occasionally, this manifested itself in armchair directing, which I didn’t usually find to be helpful. What was helpful (and what saved the day) is when I could cede control of things that maybe in a perfect Stanley Kubrick/James Cameron world have been fun to take control of to everybody else working on the film.

The lowbrow version of this is to simply prioritize and delegate. But, along with my mantra about change being forced upon me was some sub-mantra about getting the best that people can offer rather than exactly what I want.

This is, after all, the benefit of having a great team – that you can kick challenges to the people you work with (in my case, particularly the DP – Paul DeLumen and Production Designer – Darian Corley) so you’re not stuck in the prioritize/delegate mentality. Why wouldn’t you want to be? You might be on week 3 of not sleeping and maybe you don’t have a brilliant answer to the highest priority problem (“How the fuck am I going to cover this scene in 20 minutes?”).

I guess this is just outsourcing Lesson #9 – with the difference being – sometimes the surprise compromise forced me to challenge myself to do not what I wanted to do, but improvise with something better. Other times, a surprise compromise ended up in me saying “I have no idea how to solve this problem – please help and just be awesome.” And, people were awesome. Both meant I didn’t get to claim the virtue of uncompromising-ness, but both kept things going.

#10 – Not having a release date sucks.

I’m going to guess that I duck the question “when’s Savage County coming out?” three to six times a day. I don’t know. It’s the question that’s supplanted “how do you make money on internet content?” The two questions are interrelated, and because the answer to the second question is “you figure it out as you go… you try stuff… you try other stuff…” the answer to the “when does it come out?” is impossible to answer.

Releasing stuff on the internet means that you’re reinventing the distribution system every time you distribute something. It’s not as simple as throwing stuff up on YouTube or Vimeo, because you spent $250K on it and you need to make the money back.

So, you shuffle your feet and say “well, I know we said February or March, but it most likely won’t be… which isn’t to say I know when it will be…”

#11 – Suck it up and buy a huge-ass hard drive up front.

Dear Drobo: please sponsor me. I will whore myself six ways from Sunday for your fine product.

We’ve been cutting Savage County on a MacPro and 2 Macbook Pros. This means that my big LaCie SATA RAID won’t work on 2 out of our 3 computers. For everything else, we’ve got 2tb LaCie and Gtech hard drives – always duplicates – so 2 drives for all the media. But renders are big and FCP autosaves are big, so there end up being “transpo” drives and “additional media” drives. And if you add up the tabs for all these fucking drives, we would have been better off buying RAIDS (even in duplicate) up front to cut on.

#12 – Before you shoot in Memphis in the summer – buy 30 pairs of these for yourself and your crew: