The Performance Nobody Saw Was a Performance

The day after I fired the production manager, the production designer, and the first AD, I got a call from one of my investors. He didn’t ask how the film was going. He asked how I, personally, was going to fix this. He had money in a feature film and no real sense of what a feature film actually demanded day to day. To him, this was a business problem with a business solution. To me, it was a film I was still trying to shoot with half my department heads gone and a crew that had just watched me let three people go in one week.

I want to be honest about what that call actually felt like. Not dramatic. Worse than dramatic. It felt ordinary, the kind of pressure that doesn’t announce itself as a crisis, just sits on your chest while you keep working.

I had two audiences who needed two different things from me, and neither version was a lie exactly, just incomplete.

My investors needed to believe the film was salvageable, because that’s what their money required from me. Most of them had never been on a set. They didn’t know that losing a production manager mid-shoot isn’t unusual, that crews recover, that the work continues even when it looks chaotic from the outside. To them, every update sounded like bad news, because they had no frame of reference for what normal disaster looks like in this industry. So I learned to translate. I gave them facts without panic, progress without false comfort, just enough truth to keep them calm without giving them anything they could spiral on.

My crew and cast needed something different. They needed to see that the person who’d just fired three people wasn’t unraveling. They needed a director who looked like he knew exactly what came next, even on the mornings I didn’t. I’d walk onto set having spent the previous night on the phone with an investor who used words like liability and exposure, and within minutes I had to be blocking a scene like none of that existed.

Nobody on either side could know what the other side looked like. The investors couldn’t see how thin the crew morale actually was. The crew couldn’t hear how panicked some of the investor calls actually sounded. I was the only person standing in both rooms at once, and the job, the actual job, was making sure neither room ever saw into the other.

I didn’t have anyone to call who understood both pressures at the same time. Other directors I knew hadn’t dealt with investors who’d never set foot on a film set. Other producers I knew weren’t also directing. The specific overlap I was standing in didn’t have a support group.

What got me through wasn’t a strategy. It was smaller than that. I started keeping a list, just for myself, of what was actually true that day, separate from what I was telling anyone else. Some nights it was short. The DoP is solid. We’re a day behind, not a week. Nobody’s quit since Tuesday. It wasn’t optimism. It was just an honest accounting I could check against my own performance, so I didn’t start believing my own reassurances over the real state of things.

I don’t think the answer to that kind of pressure is learning to carry it better. I think the answer is admitting it exists, which is most of what this piece is. Nobody on Les Fameux Gars saw two different productions happening at once, one for the money, one for the crew. I saw both, every day, and said the right amount to each side, and went home each night without anyone to say the rest to.

About Adolf El Assal

Adolf El Assal is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, producer, and international consultant. His films have screened at leading festivals and reached audiences worldwide through Netflix, Amazon Prime, and international theatrical releases.

Explore his work, book consulting sessions, or get in touch at www.adolfelassal.com.