Why the Best Filmmakers Never Stop Watching Movies

The Creative Process Starts in Front of the Screen

Most people consume movies like candy — every now and then, and without much thought or passion. You know people like this. For most people movies are time-killers, showbiz things they often regret seeing for a second, and then forget it ever happened. Most people don’t remember the movies they saw, or care who made them, or what they mean. Why should they? For most people, movies are distractions, high-calorie indulgences that come and go and help lay waste to a Saturday night. That is, after all, their right.

We are not like most people, you and I. If you’re here, you’re likely a pilgrim of film, one of the art form’s tribe, a budding foot soldier committed to the fathoming, appreciation and craft of the medium. To us, movies matter, and who makes them and why are crucial questions. Movie culture is our home planet, and our native language.

If you are in fact a novitiate to this realm, and you are aiming to dedicate yourself to making films or studying cinema or both, then you should know there’s only one rule: go large or go home. Director Richard Linklater, in a talk to students at the New York Film Festival in 2017, said it clearest: “You dedicate your life to it… I’ve talked to people and they ‘kind of like’ films and they ‘kind of’ want to do this, or they’re ‘thinking about’ that. Any artistic medium, you can’t just dabble and be ‘kind of’ interested. You have to dedicate your entire life to it. You gotta go all in.”

The message is clear: in order to achieve anything, in any art form or entertainment medium, you have saturate yourself in the work that’s out there. And not just for a summer, or a year — but forever. Til you die. You don’t play. For people serious about movies, everything is at stake.

Being hardcore, from a creative point of view, first means getting out there and making something. Today. And everyday — go shoot, write a treatment, help produce someone else’s film, whip up a short for YouTube, rewrite a script, sketch a storyboard, take old footage or someone else’s footage and make something new… Anything. Every day, like the sun rising and setting. Make something. Not because it’ll help your career, but because it’s who you are.

What this also means is watching films — and by that we don’t mean just catching the current Marvel blockbuster or rebinging Breaking Bad for the third time. We mean the cultivation of an adventurous moviewatching habit, in the spirit of QT.

Watch films from every decade, in every genre, whether or not they’re genres you love. Make it random. This is your medium? Go exploring, make a map of it in your head, and use it for resources. Look for stuff you can use, ideas, angles, tones. Look for what certain filmmakers do with the camera and the image and the cut, and how certain visual styles affect your experience. Look for lineages and connections, strategies and tendencies that run from one decade to the next, and one culture to another. Discover film history — which only runs for about 123 years — from the inside out.

Serious aspiring painters and poets don’t develop their skills in a vacuum — they absorb everything they can within their disciplines and beyond, going back centuries. They’re on a mission. Get the legacy into their blood, and then go forward, and cut new ground.

Be a filmmaker who knows cinema. Think of it as filling a well — your well. Creating in any mode will drain the well, and so you must refill it, keep it topped off, every day. Be a cinephile. Go all in.

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