Nostalgia is a wonderful thing. These days, in my mid-forties, I find myself being nostalgic quite a bit. About food, about the cities I grew up in, about how life was “simpler” maybe.
On some of these nostalgic YouTube deep dives, I end up watching old ads. That tends to happen, since that’s what I do for a living. Simple, idea-based films that struck a chord when I was a kid.
My present self longs for briefs and scripts like that to hit my inbox. They seldom do. So I figured maybe I should write scripts like these myself. I’m no writer by far, but hey, gotta try something, right? The scripts I feel most nostalgic about, presented as part of a bunch of “options,” find themselves rejected for something more economical or client-friendly. I don’t feel bad about that. For someone who isn’t an advertising writer, I don’t expect to land a magnificent script every time I put pen to paper.
But it got me thinking. As a filmmaker, what is it that we actually do? Do we create? Or do we execute?
Most creative decisions are taken by marketing teams, with rarely any input asked of the filmmaker. When I started out, I remember having real discussions with the creative team on how to shoot a script. We’d bounce ideas, debate, argue our way to a solution. I rarely have those discussions anymore. I might get asked a cursory question about my opinion, but it’s rarely a point of actual discussion.
Another pet grouse: the director’s treatment note. It used to happen after a project was confirmed, once budgets were locked and direction agreed. Now it’s something we’re expected to produce just to land the project in the first place. The dichotomy is, I write these treatments knowing full well the budget that eventually gets approved won’t let me turn a word of it into reality.
So we rein in our creativity. Something that’s supposed to be let free gets leashed before the project even begins. It trickles down into almost every decision after that. The client team picks the costumes, the style of music if we get to make original music at all (mostly it’s stock, because, well, budgets), sometimes even the shots themselves.
Filmmaking was always a collaborative project. Somewhere down the line it went from collaborative partnership to collaborative execution.
And then we expect “viral” films at the end of this.