When you're engrossed in the movie; when the song gets you high; when the book has you screaming through the pages -- for the briefest of moments, you get to drop your identity.
Your personal history is irrelevant. Your broken heart; the money you owe; your deepest insecurity -- they're all gone and non-existent.
Great art lifts us above the self-definitions and outside of the boundaries which rule our everyday lives.
We get to dream. We get to be kids in the front row.
Charlie Chaplin was so good it was impossible he wouldn't make it. He'd seen people on stage practically from birth, and he was on stage himself from the age of five.
Tupac was such a powerhouse of ideas and anger and poetry that he was never going to be anything apart from the greatest rapper of all time.
Steve Martin was funny but he couldn't make the whole room laugh. He did comedy gigs in empty clubs for eight years before he broke. It took him that long, night after night, to figure out what he was doing. Woody Allen has the same story, his manager's sent him out to clubs every night in New York and he'd bomb. The audience didn't get the jokes and Woody thought he was a failure.
Steve Martin became the biggest stand up comedian ever and Woody Allen changed cinema.
We can be bystanders and critics, but we won't be artists. If you want to be one of them you have to be sweating it on stage every night. You've got to be drawing storyboards when you're in bed with flu.
I interviewed Scott Rosenberg on here a few years back and he said it takes fifteen scripts to get good. How many have you written? Maybe you've written thirty-four and they all suck. But you're still writing, good.
Needless sequels, glorified violence, pop stars with their breasts hanging out-- these things bring people and projects attention immediately. But it disintegrates. They might get noticed and make heaps of money for a brief time, but nothing else lasts. You won't be showing these films to your soulmate or playing their songs at your funeral.
So I'm going to assume if you're a creative person reading this here, you're interested in the art, not the bullshit.
Art takes time. Talent takes time. You just have to keep working. The films you acted in five years ago showed some promise but were mostly awful. The screenplay's you wrote were all over the place.
Even bloggers will feel this. The more we write, the better we get. My first ever article was some generic bullshit about how music is important in movies. It meant nothing, no-one was reading. But I'm getting better at figuring out who I am and what I love about movies. Sure, some posts suck, but that's creativity. We take the risk. The point is, post-for-post, I nail it more often than I did two years ago. Why? Because rather than sleep, I stay up writing blog posts. It's 2am and I have to be up in five hours.
I'm fine with that.
It takes time and discipline. I like how Will Smith put it. He says he'll die on the treadmill, no way is he getting off. He works at it. No wonder he's a millionaire movie star and producer with a beautiful wife and talented kids.. he shows up for work. He could have been remembered as that kid on that Bel Air show, but he's so much more, because he's dedicated to learning and practicing and hustling and trying.
There are no shortcuts. The myths make it sound like Spielberg woke up one day and directed 'Jaws', but the truth is he dedicated all his time, from childhood onwards, to believing in his mad visions, and demanding his Dad get his friends to let him film scenes in the cockpits of their planes.
Don't wait around to be discovered by an agent or producer or magazine, just keep doing the work. You're not powerless. Even if they're not hiring you, not financing you, not liking your sound.
It means you keep working at it. Because Spielberg was just too determined, and Tupac was just too revolutionary, and Chaplin was just too funny. I'm not saying we can be as successful as them-- because they are once in a lifetime geniuses, but we can learn a lot from their work ethic, from their perserverance. They had rejection and self-doubt just like me and you. But the work always came first. No time for excuses.
Nothing can replace experience. We get better.
When you were young, you found out you had talent. Some people can put a sentence together better than others, some can sing a nice tune.
You think that's your ticket.
But talent isn't personal. Talent doesn't resonate.
But your personal story does. The tales and tumbles that make you a unique person.
A hundred years from now you're dead. There'll be others who can sing, others who can light a scene or hold a paintbrush.
But none of them have your fingerprints. Your handwriting is your own and when you look out of your window at night you see it in a way that only you can see.
Show us that. We want to know what you feel, and how it hurts you, and how it makes you scream with joy.
Life is about magic. I'm convinced we know this as kids which is why we leave the sun on and go running around with pretty girls as we stampede towards the ice cream van because if we don't make it in time we might just die.
Being an adult is all about finding excuses for not running after the ice cream. If you're lactose intolerant then fair enough, but for the rest of us - what exactly is our problem?
Life ends.
It stops.
There's no more.
Why even risk the chance of not creating your art. Remember when you were eleven and you stayed out later than you were meant to? Remember when you and Laura rode your bikes over to the hill where smoke was rising from the old haunted mansion? You'd ride so fast, desperate for adventure. Desperate to know life wasn't decided already.
And at some point something in life makes you realise you're not meant to ride your bike anymore. You're not meant to go exploring unknown places with your crazy friends.
One minute you're thirteen and insane and the next you're thirty eight and bored.
That's where art comes in. You get to play. You get to feel again. You get to take risks. Nothing is decided and you can be anyone.
It's not pretend. It's who you really were before the world told you to get good grades and find a job and marry up. It's who you really are.
Every film is about someone throwing off the chains and deciding to be free, or about disregarding the inner oppression and choosing to love again.
Films aren't just fairytales or mythical nonsense. They're the parts of ourselves that get discarded and left on the scrapheap.
Make your Passion project. Do it any way you can. You'll get to play. You'll be running after an ice cream van.
You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling--- seen that. If I ask you about women, you'd probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times.... but you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You're a tough kid. And I'd ask you about war, you'd probably throw Shakespeare at me, right? "Once more into the breach dear friends." But you've never been near one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap, watched him gasp his last breath looking to you for help. I'd ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes ---- feeling like God put an angel on Earth just for you, who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn't know what it's like to be her angel, to have that love for her be there forever, through anything, through cancer. And you wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in the hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes, that the terms "visiting hours" don't apply to you. You don't know about real loss, 'cause it only occurs when you've loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much.
I look at you; I don't see an intelligent, confident man. I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you're a genius Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine, and you ripped my fucking life apart. You're an orphan right? -- You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally... I don't give a shit about all that, because you know what, I can't learn anything from you, I can't read in some fuckin' book --- Unless you want to talk about YOU, who you are. Then I'm fascinated. I'm in. But you don't want to do that do you sport? You're terrified of what you might say.
