If you’re going to make movies, or do anything creative, or do anything, this is going to be a problem.
My favorite (and by favorite I mean, still makes be burn with white hot anger two years later) critique of my work was given regarding the script for my film, The Picnic. The critique was, in its entirety, “You can’t have angst in a beautiful setting.”
Leaving aside the facts that:
1) Yes you can, obviously.
2) This statement is so sweeping that it is impossible to discuss or refute in a meaningful way
3) Any reasonable person would say a contrast between setting and emotions experienced therein is more interesting than the opposite.
4) Even Bambi had a great deal of angst in the forest
and
5) Le Bonheur, the film which most influences The Picnic, centers around an extraordinary amount of angst in a beautiful setting. You could summarize the entirety of the French New Wave as “angst in a beautiful setting” and you wouldn’t be far off.
But no, none of that is the point. The point is, I had given the script to this person months earlier for notes. This critique was delivered literally four days before shooting started. Had it been in any way valid, it was far too late to change anything about the film. The one and only effect was to make me doubt myself and my work. I was able to shrug it off, but it didn’t help.
It’s melodramatic and usually inaccurate to believe someone is “out to destroy you.” They may even be trying to help, in an extremely misguided way. But at some point, intent is irrelevant. If this person had set out to intentionally sabotage my film, he couldn’t have done much better. Valid criticism exists, but valid criticism is given at a time when it could be useful, is constructive, and offers solutions. Maybe people who already have a great deal of success can laugh this stuff off. I can’t and if you’re reading this, you probably can’t either. Not if you’re working one or more dayjobs. Not if you’re human enough to wonder from time to time if you can really pull this off.
Negativity like this is a cancer, and so are people who spread it. It’s that simple. Remove it, and remove them.
Filed under: Uncategorized
