Metanoia

Metanoia (metánoia) is an ancient Greek word that literally translates to "changing one's mind" or "thinking differently". It is derived from the prefix meta (meaning "beyond" or "after") and noeo (meaning "to perceive" or "the mind")

Breaking out of the “things should be done a certain way because that’s the way they’ve always been done” mindset is hard. I struggle with it. I have friends who work in film who can’t shake it, and I think it holds them back. They believe there is only The Way, and that anything outside of that leads to failure and ridicule.

Over the past few months, through conversations with friends , I’ve had something like a filmmaker’s awakening.

Here’s an example. I was out for dinner with a friend who’s a VFX artist. We were talking about the future of everything, and I pitched him an idea. I want to build a proof of concept in Unreal Engine, an action sequence, and I need someone who understands how to shoot action to help make it work. I happen to have a friend who is a top stunt performer. So I asked my VFX friend whether it would make sense to bring the two of them together on this project.

He smiled and said: “That’s the way it should be done but nobody ever does it that way.”

The Road Less Traveled

If you have an outside-the-box idea taking up space in your head, say it out loud. Get it out there. It’s not doing anyone any good rattling around in there, and sitting on it long enough turns it into one of those terrible “what if” moments nobody needs.

Throw out half-formed ideas. Let then be mediocre in front of someone you trust.

We all have ideas. The problem is that somewhere along the way, the bad idea became something most of us are afraid to be associated with. We start treating it like a credibility threat. And in some instances it probably is. But if you can trust your audience not to turn a bad idea around on you, then you should go for it.

This is what I love about brainstorming. Spitballing ideas, blue-skying, riffing, floating something past someone. However you frame it, the invitation is the same: throw it out there. The good, the bad, the ugly. Sometimes you take two mediocre ideas, smash them together, and find a diamond in the rough..

Go hadron collider with those ideas…

And with the right people, it becomes a safe place to sound like an idiot. Which is something I do more often than I'd like to admit. But having seen what comes out the other end, it's a place I'm willing to go more and more often.

“I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream”. - Vincent van Gogh

Dreaming first, then painting. Not painting and hoping something emerges, but forming the vision or idea before he even touches the canvas. The idea generates the action.

For a filmmaker I think that reframes what “development” actually means. A lot of us treat development as the phase where we figure out what the project is. But the quote suggests that maybe the figuring-out happens somewhere quieter, slower, more internal, and that development is really just making the dream legible to other people.

There’s also something in the word “dream” that resists the language of optimization. You don’t schedule a dream. You don’t pitch a dream in bullet points. You live with it, turn it over, let it get weird and specific, and eventually it becomes undeniable enough that you have to act. It becomes an idea.

It’s the gap between dreaming and painting where most projects die. The idea was great but what ran out was the capacity to keep moving forward with it without someone else confirming it was worth moving at all." That patience, or stubbornness depending on the day, is its own skill.

So, with all that said, I want to put an idea into practice in public, not just talk about it.

You’ve met Gavin Booth here before. He’s been practicing the art of NonDe for years, and the two of us are constantly in each other’s ears about ideas in progress. Last week he called me with a new film idea, and I thought: this is it, this is the moment. Instead of watching this thing develop in private and then talking about it after the fact, what if we brought everyone along from the start?

So that’s what we’re going to do. Follow the dream before the painting. Watch what development actually looks like when it’s done in the open, from the first conversation to wherever it leads.

Good Idea?

I guess we’ll find out.