A director is the driving artistic source for a motion picture.
It is the director's responsibility to communicate to the cast and crew members all aspects of
the filmmaking process.
This whole chunk of land will be decimated.
Are you saying the whole San Andreas Fault might go off?
Everybody down!
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.
Did you always know that you wanted to be a director?
Yeah, I mean, the funny thing is that I don't remember this,
but my mom said that when I was around six years old,
I told her I was going to be a film director.
I always knew I wanted to do something creative for a living.
I was a chronic doodler from second grade on.
I'm from a culture and a place where film directors don't come from,
and people didn't own video cameras when I was a kid,
let alone, like, become film directors.
But there was a conscious decision at 17 years old when I went to university
and realized that I wasn't in the place I needed to be,
that I had to find something that I would do for the rest of my life
and something I could pour all my passion into,
and I was not good at nine to five jobs,
so I had to figure something out quick.
And I just didn't know whether you could make a living at it.
Well, let me tell everybody watching,
if you can be creative for your living,
drop everything else and run for it.
There's nothing more satisfying than creating and getting paid for it.
Keep doodling, keep drawing, keep singing, keep writing.
That is going to provide you with the kind of life and living
that you're never going to regret.
What did you do to my car?
It should to hover much better now.
I am prepared to accept one of your traditional gestures of human gratitude.
Our tradition is to punch you in the nose, whole still.
Your gratitude is implied.
Are there any other personal qualities or characteristics
that you think teens need if they want to succeed in this industry?
I think they have to work hard at it.
It's not going to be handed to you.
You should study the stuff that you like and figure out why you like it.
You should study the stuff that you don't like
and figure out what they did wrong,
and then go one step further and figure out what you would do to fix it.
It would be great if we could get it since we were looking up, coming down,
and always moving.
You really got to find your voice, find things you care about,
but then run it through a litmus test of,
is this just something you want to see because it happened to you
and you're interested in it, or is it something you think an audience would want to see?
There's a very hard question to answer,
but if you really put it through a filter of,
if I didn't know this idea was mine and I heard it or saw it preview for it,
would I say I got to see that movie?
And learning how and what to say to people,
because I don't want to just tell people,
here's what I want you to do exactly.
Move the hand here and on frame 17, have it there.
If I can instead engage them creatively,
then suddenly the brain power has been magnified.
More ideas.
All right, you remember this one, we did this as part of the table.
I do remember it, yeah.
Okay, great.
Take it away.
Joy.
Yes, Joy.
You'll be in charge of the console, keeping Riley happy all day long.
And may I add, I love your dress, it's adorable.
Oh, this whole thing?
Thank you so much.
I love the way it rolls.
What advice do you have for any young aspiring directors?
Finish something.
Write something, direct something, finish it,
show it, exhibit it.
And the challenge with being a director as opposed to,
say, being a painter or a writer,
even though I've done both of those things too,
is that you can do those by yourself.
As a director, you have to face the fear of the unknown
and test yourself kind of in public with a bunch of other people
in order to achieve it.
There's times where the insecurity just overwhelms
and you wonder, how am I going to make the right decision?
And the bad choice is to retreat and get quiet about it.
The good choice is to turn around and go,
guys, what's the best way to do this?
It may work.
You may fail and you have to do something after that
and keep working.
A lot of people never finish anything
because they're afraid of failure or success.
I think especially hard, though,
for young people who feel very vulnerable.
Do I show this drawing to somebody and ask for advice?
Do I show what I wrote?
Absolutely show it.
At some point, it becomes almost less about talent
and more about tenacity.
You need to have the strength to just keep going
and showing up even when it's really hard and you want to quit.
You just show up and try again.
What you saw was a place where the best
and the brightest people in the world came together
to actually change it.
We've been looking for someone like you
for a very long time.
Make films.
I mean, it's so much easier now in terms of equipment
than it was when I was a kid.
When I was starting out, you know,
in the 80s and the 90s, it was filmed.
16 millimeter, 8 millimeter film.
You can't even get your hands on 35
until you've made professional.
But now you have so much with, you know, with digital.
Everybody has a cell phone
which can shoot very high resolution in their pocket.
And they're very cheap editing programs.
Make films. Just go out and make them.
I think 95 or more percent of the job is storytelling.
So any sort of study of story structure
and, you know, writing and character relationship stuff,
that's the meat of it.
School was great, all right?
What was that?
I thought you said we were going to act casual.
Riley, is everything okay?
Sir, she just rolled her eyes at us.
All right, make a show of force.
I don't want to have to put the foot down.
No, not the foot.
Constantly shoot. Constantly make movies.
Constantly do shorts.
Constantly shoot anything that you can.
It will polish you and get you ready.
It's like you'd never give a kid a guitar
and say, all right, you go on tonight
because it's going to be a two-hour concert, right?
It doesn't happen. You have to practice.
Filmmaking is the same way.
It's just like anything else.
If you're really passionate about it
and you're honest with yourself and you make the decision
of, like, this is what I'm going to do, then you do it.
That's the only way you can live your life.
You can't lie to yourself about this stuff.
You can, but you're not going to end up anywhere with it.
So I was very honest with myself
if that's what I wanted to do.
And I just kind of stuck with it
and decided to figure the rest of it out as I went.
