This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
I am currently editing a movie I directed, I wrote the movie based on my family’s history in Poland. But the movie really is a kind of bittersweet comedy about two cousins going to see where their family is from and they go on like a Holocaust tour. There’s a certain level of hubris that comes along with writing something that you think is so great that 150 people in Poland are going to have to work on for 16 hours a day for months at a time.
And you could kind of lose sight of humility. You can kind of lose sight of feeling that you’re just a part of it and not necessarily even the main part of it. And so the thing that’s most helpful for me is just to kind of constantly remind yourself of the value of humility, of the value, of not thinking that the way you think something should be done is the only, or even best way, or even a good way. I spend my days now editing the movie I directed and that I wrote, that I act in, and it’s about my family with an editor. And he does not have those same connections to the movie. He did not write it, it’s not about his family. It’s not something he directed or acted in. And yet I find myself deferring to almost every idea he has because he’s an editor and he understands how movies should be edited. Just because I happen to do those kind of important jobs while the movie is being made does not mean that my intelligence or skill set applies to this part of the process.
And that occurred to me in every possible interaction I had in Poland, shooting this movie, somebody who’s doing props, I don’t know anything about props. I don’t look at what people’s phones are when I’m on the street. I don’t think about people’s watches. I don’t think about people’s glasses. I don’t think about the bread that they’re eating. And I had these wonderful props teams who are experts in all of those things, of not only what looks good on camera, but what works good with the kind of products that you can get for free from companies. And so I am like not an expert in most things that occur on a movie set. And that kind of humility, that kind of eagerness to learn from others and the eagerness to defer to others has just been, I don’t know, a great asset for me to just go into rooms knowing that most people I’m working with know 1000 times more about their jobs than I do. So it’s important to defer to them, to be humble, be open to learning, and also provide a space for other people to excel.