Ninjas, Cyborgs, Crazy Russian Killers and Hard-boiled Detectives

Animation phenom Chuck Jones tells the story of an art class he took where the professor gravely informed the students that they each had 100,000 bad drawings inside themselves.  And that the sooner they got those out and on paper, the sooner they would get to the good drawings.

I’ve always wondered how that applies to scripts and stories and films.  How much bad dialogue do I have to write before I get to HIS GIRL FRIDAY or PRINCESS BRIDE?  How many sub-par plots do I have to wrestle to paper before I strike gold, like GOOD WILL HUNTING?

Did you know that some highly experienced Hollywood writers will write out 100 new loglines to get to one that might hold promise?

Consider your own film evolution.  With any luck and due diligence, your work is improving.  10% Inspiration.  90% Perspiration, that’s what they say.  I look back, amused, at some of my first short films about such important topics as Ninjas, Cyborgs, Crazy Russian serial killers and Hard-boiled Detectives.  Although I’m a huge proponent of adding Ninjas to spruce up any film plot (maybe FIREPROOF 2?  Hopefully?)  I am happy to report I have broadened my horizons.

But I had to learn an important lesson about creative juices:  we are the sum total of the films we watch.  Where did my ideas come from?  From the film diet I was ingesting.  Sci-fi, Action-Adventure, Chop-socky, Detective stories.

There’s an informed line from LITTLE WOMEN where grown up Teddy is talking with grown up Amy March and tells her “my ‘music’ is no better than your ‘art’…mediocre copies of another man’s genius.”

We have to understand that our greatest, most original stories inside of us are buried right now under heaps and piles of yesterday’s movies.  Go to any student film festival out there and you will not see a lot of truly original work.  What you will see are a bunch of THE OFFICE-like mockumentaries, or little Quentin Tarantino clones or horror knock-offs — mini-renditions of whatever is playing the theaters or TV at the time.

This is your first and most basic instinct as a filmmaker — to duplicate what you have seen.  And that’s an important first step in learning.  To mimic.  It’s how we learn to talk.  It’s how we learn most things.  But we have to go further.  What Chuck Jones’ surly professor knew was that we had to dig past all of that junk to get to the good stuff.  The ORIGINAL stuff.

Have you heard about the 10,000 hour rule?  It comes from a book called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell who writes:

“The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”

10K hours — what that amounts to is about 5 years of 40 hours/week.  Practicing.  Perfecting.  Honing.

Perhaps you’ve spent 10,000 hours watching movies.  Well, that won’t make you a filmmaker.  That makes you a professional audience.  To become an expert filmmaker you simply have to accumulate 10,000 hours making movies.

So what are you waiting for?  Start digging past all the junk and get to the good stuff.

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