Self-Sufficiency
The experience of making a film is comparable to that of starting a business. You have an idea and a goal for the film; you get a team together, figure out processes to make the film a reality, and then create a business plan to distribute it. Once it is distributed, you move on to the next film.
When I initially started making films, it was a very small endeavor, and I held almost every crew position. As I moved on to making bigger films, commercials, and feature films, the team size grew, and I had to scale my production.
At the start of my engineering career, I worked in a mid-level startup company and then moved up the ladder to work at mature companies. I have always wondered about the similarities between making films and running businesses, and here are some of my observations from those thought experiments.
I think businesses usually go through three different phases:
Small, free
Growing, dependent
Big, self-sufficient
When they are small, they do not have access to many resources. The team members wear multiple hats and try to survive problems with whatever tools they have access to.
When we started to build operations on the east coast for one of my earlier companies, it felt very much like creating an entirely new business altogether. I was the quality manager for the products that shipped out, and I was also a designer for the delivery road signs trucks used to drop off material.
I was free to do what I wanted because I got to design and paint the signs and decide where they would go up. I was also in charge of creating and implementing a business process that would check the quality of the material going out.
We did not begin with any tools or processes to check quality. I had to determine which parameters I would measure by talking to engineering teams and senior management, literally creating a checklist in a document. Then, I would print that document for every single product that shipped out. After that, I checked the items and stuck the documentation on the product itself.
I was the creator, and I was the implementer.
Similarly, I was the writer, director, cinematographer, editor, and distributor for the first film I made. It helped me identify my strengths and the areas I needed to improve upon. I was small but also free to do what I wanted.
Eventually, we recruited enough people to streamline the East Coast operations for the company and discovered that it was becoming difficult for just a few people to manage multiple tasks. Relying on a paper trail to check the quality of outgoing units became cumbersome, so we needed an automated tool to help us find all the correct information about products before they shipped out. We did not have the resources to build a tool internally, so naturally, an off-the-shelf enterprise tool became a necessity.
Although productivity increased significantly by implementing this tool, the tool had more functionality than we needed. Further, it was not intuitive, and it presented workforce training challenges; people needed to learn how to use it without making any mistakes. We were growing, but we were dependent on a tool that we did not entirely control.
Similarly, when I began making bigger films, making them to build a portfolio was not enough; I had to start thinking about generating revenue from my creative products. Instead of my filmmaking being a very expensive hobby, I had to make it a manageable, albeit not yet profitable, business.
I looked at distribution options for theatrical releases or online streaming releases. However, I had to depend on some middle entity to take my film and sell it to these platforms for almost every avenue. I was growing, and I was making bigger films, but I had to depend on someone else.
By then I moved to a more mature company and started looking into their internal operations. I realized that the business had built internal tools to manage its internal operations effectively for some key processes.
Naturally, when creating such tools, one has to keep a tool design, development and maintenance staff on board, which is a larger recurring expense than subscribing to an off-the-shelf tool. However, you become self-sufficient since you control the business process and its implementation. (Apple’s transition to house-made M1 chips is a great example of being self-sufficient).
I realized that I was just not able to break through the wall of distribution. The films were just sitting on my hard drive, not getting released. Luckily video streaming on the internet was picking up speed, and I created a private streaming channel for my films where I could sell them worldwide.
I was self-sufficient.
Self-sufficiency is a rare characteristic because it boils down to knowing what you want to do. And in many cases, that just does not happen. To be self-sufficient, you need to know what you are signing up for and what your goals are.
I love this quote by Stanley Kubrick.
“I don’t always know what I want, but I know what I don’t want.”
As a film director, I run into this more often than not. I very carefully try to achieve knowing what I do not want. I do not necessarily know how my film should turn out, but I definitely know what I do NOT want it to be.
This knowledge makes filmmaking immensely collaborative because I can guide all the creative folks I am working with away from a direction I do not want them to go. But at the same time, I am completely open to hearing where they want to go.
For example, actors with a theater background tend to overreact in front of the camera because, in theater acting, bigger expressions and voice projection are inherently necessary. I have vehemently argued with my actors, telling them not to overreact in front of the camera, but they are absolutely free to do what they want to do subtly. I actually depend on them to give me options to choose from rather than me acting out any scenes for them.
Effective leaders know what they do not want.
The same philosophy can be applied to any business. Running a business is inherently a team activity, and the team is there to bring new ideas to the company, taking it where it can go. Additionally, a leader must create a vision and decide where the business should not go.
Would love to know your thoughts!
