How to improve a director/producer collaboration before it even begins

Part 2 on the pondering of a producer/director collab-lab (aka group therapy)

There is a maze of tunnels beneath the surface of everything, and the escape path is not always before you. Oh, and the ceiling is falling too.

We don’t start making our movies soon enough. So much work should begin even before there is a concept or the start of a team.

We are not fit to make a specific film without deep interrogation on what it really means to make a film in general.

An individual’s pre-project preparation is often confined to secondary education and film viewing but there is so much more that is needed if we want to unlock the potential we all generally hold — particularly the establishment and maintenance of a creative process. I have outlined a great deal of my suggestions for this in prior posts; you might want to do a little exploration on my home page if you aren’t already knee-deep in your own preparation.

But for the sake of today’s post, let’s say you have done that – you observe broadly and harvest those observations, you break it all down into components, adopting tactics, recognizing attributes, setting priorities, and executing operational improvements with a regular cadence. Assuming this is you, you are a good candidate for the new director/producer collaboration lab, but you still have some work to do if you want to be accepted.

On my initial post proposing a director/producer collab-lab, I broke down my own current mission of “making the best version of the director’s vision” and the complexity and specificity around “best”, “director”, and “vision” and how for me these are so much results or products, but all process, with goal being the eventual commitment for “alignment”. A lot of work is required to aim for each of those four things. Today, let’s look at the tactics needed to improve how we do this.

Each position needs to articulate their goals, but none so much as the director and producer. A producer’s goal must be subservient to the director’s, or at least that’s my opinion until someone helps me recognize otherwise. I generally believe the director’s goal is to determine their fullest vision for the film within the circumstances required to make it. I don’t expect them to arrive with the vision already built – it is an ongoing process inherent to the act of making films. It is colossal error that we expect the director’s vision to exist in order to unlock financing, but we can credit our neglect towards mapping out how such a vision best be built successfully with that mistake.

We ask for something to be presented without truly respecting what it takes to build that vision.