1. Master Yourself

You will always be the front lines for any creative choices you make. You are the one who will choose what kind of stories you want to tell, how you want to tell them and who you want to tell them with. This first chapter in particular is going to focus on things you can do to start mastering yourself, which includes:

2. Master Your Craft

These are all of the creative and technical aspects of making your work. This knowledge comes from a mixture of theory and practice, both of which you will get in film school. Some examples:

• For screenwriters: formatting, diction, grammar, structure, character arcs. For directors: directing actors, breaking down a script, developing a visual language.
• For cinematographers: visual storytelling, including lighting, framing, camera movement, equipment.
• For producers: developing stories, business plans, pitches.
• For editors: the technical software, how to organize footage and assemble sequences.

3. Master the Art of Collaboration

For all of these disciplines, the ability to collaborate is central. If you study the IMDB credits of different films, you will see that the number of cast and crew members often ranges from 200 for small independent films, to 3,000 and beyond for studio blockbusters. That’s a lot of collaborations!

From screenplay to movie theater, a film goes through many rounds of feedback and revisions. Your ability to choose collaborators and projects, as well as to give, receive and incorporate feedback from others, will be central to your ability to learn and succeed as a filmmaker. Just as important is the ability to motivate and inspire your fellow collaborators to do their best possible work. This is a deeply human process, one that takes years to master.

4. Master the Industry

Film is an inherently collaborative medium; just look at the end credits for any major film to see the armies of people who worked together to make it. A strong and diverse professional network will be key to your success as a filmmaker. Top film schools are often criticized for not giving enough access to professional opportunities; this is nonsense. Real opportunities in the film world generally come through personal referrals. If something turns up on a job board, it means that the person could not find someone through their personal network. Initially through internships, and, hopefully, later through paid work (much of which will come through your ever-expanding network), you will be able to see how opportunities in the industry are channeled through an endless series of private networks.

If you want to be any kind of filmmaker, do not try this alone. So many people try to build their filmmaking careers by themselves; it just doesn’t work. You need a solid group of collaborators to make a successful film. This is one of the reasons most filmmakers ultimately move to New York or Los Angeles; being surrounded by crazy people like yourself, people who want to make films, is essential to getting films actually made.

Another word for it is a community.

1. Feature Films

1. AFI 100 Greatest American Films

   This is the canon of American filmmaking. As good a place to start as any.

2. Sight and Sound 100 Greatest Films of All Time

   This includes more world cinema. Watch as many as you can. Watch the films that you find difficult. Learn to articulate what you find good and bad and why.

3. The Criterion Collection

   This is an excellent DVD collection of the great and varied history of cinema.

4. Documentaries

Jean-Luc Godard once said that “all great fiction films tend towards documentary, just as all great documentaries tend toward fiction.” There is a wealth of knowledge to be gained through documentaries, regardless of whether you want to make them. PBS’s POV (Point of View) program has an excellent list of 100 great documentaries on Netflix, included in the resources of this book.

2. Short Films

I was consistently baffled in film school by how few people, directing students in particular, watched short films. Short films are an inherently different storytelling form than features. You should watch as many short films as you can, and again try to articulate what you find good and bad about them. If there is one thing that all film students can do to improve their filmmaking, it’s improving their grasp of short-form storytelling. It will do wonders not only for your film school experience, but for your life as a filmmaker.

It’s also helpful to see the early work of directors you admire to help you understand that they all started somewhere. Chris Nolan, Robert Rodriguez, Lars von Trier and countless others all have early short films available to watch.

Here are some short film resources:

1. Short of the Week

   This is a site that features the best in online short-form storytelling. You can even search by which festivals the films played at, and which film schools the directors attended. This is an invaluable resource for film-makers. As an exercise, try to find five short films that you find truly excellent, then articulate to yourself why they’re great.

2. Cinema 16

   Cinema 16 has released an excellent series of DVDs that, among others, feature the early short films of acclaimed directors like Ridley Scott, Guillermo Del Toro, Park Chan Wook, George Lucas, Lynne Ramsay, Tim Burton, Gus van Sant, and many more. Find them and watch them. There’s no better encouragement than seeing the early work of a filmmaker you admire.

3. Vimeo Staff Picks

   This is another high-quality online platform for short films, music videos and other online short-form video content. There are always good things in here, and you can very often see which festivals the films played at.

When you see a filmmaker’s work that you like, get in the habit of checking out their IMDB profile to see if they made any short films. Very often you can find their early work online or in a DVD collection. It’s a helpful reminder that everyone, including your idols, started somewhere.

3. Festival Films

Another great habit is to see the films that play at major festivals. As the Video On Demand (VOD) distribution model takes over independent film, more and more festival films are available to watch online. Most film-makers get their start with festival films, which, with their lower budgets, are more accessible to young filmmakers than major studio fare.

4. Television

Television has entered a golden age, to the point where some say it has surpassed the feature film. One great history, which has an excellent list of shows to get you started, is Alan Sepinwall’s The Revolution Was Televised. The book tells the fascinating story of how television came of age in the HBO era, and features the following shows:

1. Oz
2. The Sopranos
3. The Wire
4. Deadwood
5. The Shield
6. Lost
7. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
8. 24
9. Battlestar Galactica
10. Friday Night Lights
11. Mad Men
12. Breaking Bad

Working through these shows will give you a basis in modern television. If television is your passion, make sure to go deeper into the history of the medium.

5. Read Screenplays

If you want to make films, you absolutely need to learn the art of screenwriting, including how screenplays are structured, formatted and composed. In the Internet age there is almost limitless access to the greatest screenplays in history. Many great writers learned screenplay format not only by reading screenplays, but by literally transcribing them. Set yourself a goal to try and read 50 screenplays before you start film school. This is an invaluable way to see how films are written, which is very different than fiction or other writing styles we’re more familiar with. Also, when you see a great film, go back and read the script to see how the writer communicated his or her vision on the page.

A great resource for the history of screenwriting is the Writers Guild of America (WGA) list of the 101 Greatest Screenplays. There is excellent overlap between this and the AFI 100 Greatest Movies list. Make sure to read modern screenplays as well, as the form perpetually develops. For a fascinating and essential look into the history of screenwriting, check out What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting by Marc Norman, the Academy Award-winning writer of Shakespeare in Love.

6. Read the Great Writing of Our Species

This means great drama, literature, history, philosophy, nonfiction, journalism and beyond. Your work will only be as good as your knowledge of the traditions of storytelling and the human condition in general. When David Simon wrote The Wire, widely considered the greatest television show in American history, his main inspirations were his multi-decade career as a Baltimore crime reporter and his fascination with Greek tragedy, in which he saw a powerful metaphor for our troubled times. These provided both an experiential and a dramatic lens through which he created one of the most important shows in the history of television. It wasn’t just because he’d seen a lot of Steven Spielberg movies or made his way through all of the Grand Theft Auto series (though both of these are awesome).

Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Toni Morrison and others are the backbone of how and why great stories are told. In them you will find the blueprints for thousands of stories and characters you’ve already seen.

A good place to look for the canon of world storytelling is the Norwegian Nobel Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest Works of World Literature, which is listed in the resources section of this book.

Yes, it is important to understand movies and television, their history, how their stories are written and structured, and how they reflect each other. But you will do yourself a disservice if your creative well is only a century deep. It behooves you to develop an insatiable curiosity not only about film, but about the world in general.

Another important source of information and reading is your daily newspaper. Use it and the other reading and viewing material to slowly form your own understanding of our place in the world. That is how you will continue to deepen the well, and one day, when you’re searching for the words and images to express yourself, they will be there, as if by magic, waiting for you.

7. Study the Great Visual Work of Our Species

In the great documentary Visions of Light, we meet some of the heavyweights from the history of cinematography: Vittorio Storaro, Conrad Hall, Vilmos Zsigmond, Sven Nykvist, Haskell Wexler and more. These are the men (unfortunately this field is still male-dominated) who photographed some of the greatest films in history. What you will notice if you listen to them talk is their knowledge of visual art.

Vittorio Storaro, cinematographer of Apocalypse Now, Last Tango in Paris, and The Last Emperor wrote an extensive treatise on the use of light in painting and photography. Darius Khondji, who photographed films as varied as Se7en and Midnight in Paris, always carries a copy of Robert Evans’ seminal photography book The Americans with him when he shoots. Painters like Edward Hopper, Johannes Vermeer and Rembrandt have influenced generations of cinematographers and directors.

Your knowledge of the world’s visual art, including photography and painting, will only deepen the well you draw on as a creator.

8. As You Progress, Pick Five Works of Art That Move You and Study Them

A fellow film student once made a really good student film. It stood out like a small marvel among our many confusing and half-formed creations. After her screening, she got the usual question from her friends: How did you do it?

This question has many answers, but here’s one of them. This film-maker watched Breaking the Waves by Lars von Trier 40 times. She watched it with the sound on and off, she watched it until the story melted away and all she saw was the raw filmmaking. At one point, something in that film spoke to her, and she worked her way through it until she finally understood what it was so well that she could articulate it in her own film. Her own film was not a rip-off; it was an original, moving story that was inflected and deepened by what she learned from Lars von Trier’s film. None of us would have seen the reference if she hadn’t told us.

As you continue to study the creative work that came before you, certain pieces will seize you. When this happens, take extra time with them. If it’s a film, watch it over and over to see how it’s made. If it’s a photograph, study it intensely. Same for novels, plays and nonfiction. Find the other work by these artists; read their biographies. When you fixate on a work of art, it very often reflects a core theme in your life. Spend hours poking at these wonders; you will find untold riches in them.

As you keep working, you will find that this list changes. Repeat the process. Never stop learning. The question, addressed earlier, of choosing graduate versus undergraduate film school, is also about the depth of your well and your ability to dig deeper. The goal is to become the eternal student. Film school, whether you attend one or not, is only the beginning.

1. Set Overarching Goals

In your quest to become a filmmaker, there will be thousands of little steps throughout the process, and it can be very easy to lose sight of what you’re actually trying to accomplish. This is why it’s important to write down your goals, and set time periods in which you would like to achieve them. Then you can evaluate your day-to-day and week-to-week choices against what you’re actually trying to accomplish. Take time every few months to sit down and write out a list of goals for the next three months, six months, one year and five years of your life. Keep that list someplace visible, where you can see it. This will not only allow you to evaluate your daily activities against those goals, but to hold yourself accountable for achieving them.

2. With Those Goals in Mind, Learn to Make To Do Lists

There are many different productivity apps today that create to-do lists. Whenever you have something you need to do, from applying to film school, to watching a movie, to everyday errands, learn to write down a “To Do” in your app or on your paper list.

I will go into more detail on this later, but one important thing to know is that you have to break creative projects into simple, actionable steps. Instead of putting down “write a feature,” you should break that process down into the smallest steps possible. Instead of the result you want to achieve, focus on the steps you want to take and when you want to accomplish them. An example of a task that would lead to writing a feature would be: “complete a character tree for my protagonist,” or “write a one-page outline.” Give each of these a date you need to complete them by, and put them in your calendar. If you break a process into actionable steps and a timeline, you will be much more able to answer the question of “so what do I do right now?”

The essential principle behind these to-do lists is that you need to get these tasks out of your head and onto a list, so you can simply complete the tasks without worrying about organizing them or forgetting one. Mihály Csikszentmihalyi is a Hungarian psychologist who has popularized the concept of fl ow, which is a mental state where a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and enjoyment in the process of the activity.

If you’re lucky, you’ve experienced flow in your life: it’s when you lose a sense of time while performing a creative task. Hopefully you’ve experienced it while watching films or television; sometimes it seems like three hours have passed in five minutes.

Flow in creative work, be it writing a screenplay, directing a film, composing a shot or editing, usually comes from a deep place of preparation and organization. It is hard to really lose yourself in a task if your mind is focused on trying to remember something you need to do. Multitasking is also death for this, so learn to carve out distraction-free “sacred time” in your day to do these things as well.

If you’re having difficulty turning off the Internet to write your script, film school application or other creative work, I recommend an app called Freedom, which turns off your Internet connection for a set amount of time. I generally use it when I’m at that über-difficult beginning of a creative project (including this book).

3. Schedule Time to Complete Your To Dos, Then Actually Complete Them

The calendar is the final part of this oversimplified look at personal productivity. As you generate your large To Do lists, it’s important to schedule out time to complete each task, keeping in mind any important deadlines. As you progress in your creative life, you will find that many projects you take on will not have any fixed, external deadlines. It will thus be up to you to decide a reasonable amount of time to complete a project, and then stick to it.

As you progress, continue to revise your goals, To Do list and calendar. If you can keep them in harmony, you will slowly progress toward your goals as a filmmaker. Strong organization skills combined with your creative ritual are what will sustain your creative career. Developing these skills before film school, when the costs are high and time is short, will be invaluable for you.

1. Pick the Same Time and Place Every Day

So much of creative work, particularly writing, centers around habits that prime the creative juices. Choosing a time and place that you go to every day will slowly transition your mind into a place where it spits out the good ideas you need to get your work done.

It’s best to abandon now the fantasy of the creative genius who lives out his daily life, while waiting for inspiration to strike. All accomplished artists build their lives around some sort of daily routine. You cannot rely on inspiration to get your work done for you; it will be your perspiration that brings a screenplay from your head onto the page.

Studies show that the morning is generally better for productivity. Depending on your schedule, you can rise and hit the desk anywhere from 5:00 to 10:00 a.m. What’s important is to be consistent and disciplined.

In Stephen King’s excellent On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, the novelist discusses his vision of “the muse.” A muse is a creative force, generally personified as a woman, who is a source of inspiration for a creative artist. In On Writing, King describes a slightly different kind of muse:

That basement guy might also be called your unconscious. Ask writers where their ideas come from and they’ll often be hard-pressed to give you an answer. As you continue writing, you’ll realize that while you can identify the roots of some ideas, others will remain mysterious. The only way to get them is to show up every day and do the work.

2. Find Solitude

To maximize your ability to get your writing done, you’ll need to find—and sometimes create—solitude. Every writer will have a certain amount of noise and movement that’s tolerable, and you will have to experiment a little bit to find what works best for you.

You can try any number of environments, from your own apartment, to libraries and coffee shops, to see what gets your creative juices flowing.

It’s important to remember that there is no such thing as a perfect writing environment, and that perfectionism can often be procrastination in disguise. The most important thing is to get the writing done.

3. Minimize Distraction

The Internet is a cancer of distraction for anyone trying to get serious creative work done. Especially when you’re starting off on a creative project, you’re probably going to need to turn it off. Fortunately, there are tools at your disposal. One program I find helpful for dealing with distraction is called Freedom. Freedom will turn off your Internet connection for a set amount of time. The only way you can turn it back on is by restarting your computer, a decision that is often quite humiliating. The program costs about $10 and can easily be found online.

4. Make Something Warm to Drink

Many writers immediately hit the desk first thing after they pour their coffee. Others are obsessive tea drinkers. There’s something about coffee and tea that give people a much needed secondary task while they’re working on something. Making tea can be a small, peaceful break while you’re formulating a thought or find yourself stuck in a momentary rut.

5. Music (or Other Background Noise)

Many writers, including Stephen King, listen to music while writing. There’s a great deal of variance in what people listen to. Some like music that could fit on the soundtrack for whatever they’re writing. Others just like a peaceful background noise, like what you hear at a coffee shop, to keep them focused on the task at hand. Finally, some writers will listen to the exact same album every day while working on a project. Something about hearing the exact same thing helps them get into the creative flow.

Again, a little bit of experimentation will be necessary here to see what works best for you, but it’s something to be aware of.

6. Work in One- to Three-Hour Sessions with a Break in Between

Most scientists studying creativity and mental work agree that one- to three-hour sessions seem to be the most effective for all varieties of daily work. If you study the routines of famous writers, many incorporate long walks or running into their daily routines. These can offer the opportunity for ideas to percolate away from the desk. When they return, they very often find that a difficult question they were working on has now been answered.

7. Set a Daily Goal (Pages or Words)

Especially early in your writing career, it’s important to have set goals for the amount of writing you want to produce in a given day. Some examples would be 2,000 words of fiction, or five screenplay pages. These daily goals are important, because it can be very easy to walk away when you’re in a difficult moment. As a writer you are both athlete and coach, and it’s important to push yourself beyond your comfort zone. Remember, the miracle of writing is that everything can be rewritten.

8. Finish on a High Note

Many writers, including Ernest Hemingway, religiously believed that you should quit writing at the moment when you feel you know what’s going to happen next. This allows you to always have something to start with the next day, as opposed to starting in a rut or someplace where you’re stuck.

Unfortunately, this will not always be possible (no writer has only good days), so sometimes you will be approaching the same problem. If you get really stuck, sometimes going for a walk or sleeping on it will help your unconscious mind unravel the problems you’re facing.

These are some ideas to get you started on your writing ritual. Remember that the most important part of any creative ritual is showing up, rain or shine, to do the work. As William Faulkner once said,

1. Screenwriting

Screenwriting is inherently different from fiction writing. Unlike a novel, most people never read screenplays in their daily lives. In addition to reading several screenplays, taking a screenwriting class (they seem to be offered everywhere now) will give you some basics in dramatic writing, as well as the formatting that is so specific to screenplays. It’s always an advantage to have some experience going into film school, where you’ll be surrounded by intelligent people who can give you feedback. Any basic knowledge of dramatic structure and basic formatting will be of great use.

2. Acting

Acting classes are also widely available and can be incredibly useful, particularly for screenwriters and directors. Even if you don’t want to become an actor, learning the actor’s vocabulary and tools will be a key part of your collaboration.

As a screenwriter, you will have to live as each of your characters while they pursue their goals. Understanding the actor’s process, including ideas like objectives, actions and adjustments, will give you tools to help your characters become more realistic and alive.

As a director, the actor’s performances are your responsibility, and there is no better way to learn what kind of direction is helpful, and what isn’t, than sitting in the actor’s chair yourself.

To help you prepare for an acting class, and to better understand what an actor does, A Practical Handbook for the Actor, written by six working actors, is a brief and essential window into the actor’s craft.

3. Editing

Nowadays everyone feels like they can edit, but there is still a vast gap between the drag-and-drop home editor and the sophisticated editing software that most movies are cut on. Learning how that software works, all while learning how editing shapes storytelling, will be of great benefit when you enter film school.

4. Graphic Design

This one might seem a bit odd, but if you look at how many responsibilities the average filmmaker now has, a basic sense of graphic design is key. As far as branding goes, most filmmakers have at least a personalized website and business cards, but they also often do their own titles and posters for their films, as well as Vimeo and YouTube covers, Facebook pages and more. This extends as well into more basic items like resumes, which you will probably be sending out a lot.

The single easiest way to improve your image online and off is to have a sense of graphic design. Even if you don’t do the work yourself, having a basic knowledge will allow you to more clearly articulate what you want to your designers, which will cut down on their hours as well as frustration.

One way to keep current is to follow graphic design blogs to be aware of visual trends; also, why not start a Pinterest board about your favorite movie posters? This will be of great help for the day you put together marketing materials for your film, and also teach you about visual communication to boot.