Producers on agency, production co. sides of the biz offer advice to aspiring directors, producers
By A SHOOT Staff Report
“Break a leg” is theatrical slang for good luck. But there’s more than luck involved in breaking successfully into the industry and evolving into a working producer and/or director.
Each step along the way is a challenge—one we hope to make a little easier through career advice offered by a cross-section of producers from the ad agency and production house sectors.
To help foster opportunities for those seeking a meaningful foothold in the business—and in the spirit of SHOOT’s 16th New Directors Showcase event set for Thursday evening, May 24, at the DGA Theatre in NYC—we invited agency and production house pros to offer career counsel to aspiring directors and producers.
To gain prudent career-building advice, SHOOT posed the following four questions to established producers:
1) What advice do you have for new directors?
2) What advice can you offer to up-and-coming producers?
3) Learning is an ongoing process even for the most seasoned producer. Would you share a recent lesson learned on the job, perhaps related to a project involving new technology (i.e., VR, AR, AI, etc.) or another experience?
4) What recent project are you particularly proud of—and why? You can include a direct link to it.
Here are portions of some of the feedback and informed counsel we received.
CLICK HERE to page through the survey responses, or click on the NAME or HEADSHOT below.
Review: Director John Crowley’s “We Live In Time”
It's not hard to spend a few hours watching Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield fall and be in love. In "We Live In Time," filmmaker John Crowley puts the audience up close and personal with this photogenic British couple through the highs and lows of a relationships in their 30s.
Everyone starts to think about the idea of time, and not having enough of it to do everything they want, at some point. But it seems to hit a lot of us very acutely in that tricky, lovely third decade. There's that cruel biological clock, of course, but also careers and homes and families getting older. Throw a cancer diagnosis in there and that timer gets ever more aggressive.
While we, and Tobias (Garfield) and Almut (Pugh), do indeed live in time, as we're constantly reminded in big and small ways — clocks and stopwatches are ever-present, literally and metaphorically — the movie hovers above it. The storytelling jumps back and forth through time like a scattershot memory as we piece together these lives that intersect in an elaborate, mystical and darkly comedic way: Almut runs into Tobias with her car. Their first chat is in a hospital hallway, with those glaring fluorescent lights and him bruised and cut all over. But he's so struck by this beautiful woman in front of him, he barely seems to care.
I suppose this could be considered a Lubitschian "meet-cute" even if it knowingly pushes the boundaries of our understanding of that romance trope. Before the hit, Tobias was in a hotel, attempting to sign divorce papers and his pens were out of ink and pencils kept breaking. In a fit of near-mania he leaves, wearing only his bathrobe, to go to a corner store and buy more. Walking back, he drops something in the street and bang: A new relationship is born. It's the... Read More