Filmstack Inspiration Challenge #39: Being Reminded of the Possible

On August 20, 2025, Ted Hope launched the Filmstack Inspiration Challenge, with Avi Setton soon joining as community organizer, scheduling writers and keeping us all on track. Here’s my contribution.

“You should do an issue about inspiration,” Ted Hope said in the summer of 2003. “Ask filmmakers who’s inspiring them.” It was a good idea, I thought, so a couple of months later, the Fall, 2003 issue of Filmmaker was our “Who Inspires Us” issue. Sofia Coppola was on the cover with Lost in Translation, Andre Salas wrote about filmmakers shooting Bad Brains and the Cramps, and I interviewed Gus Van Sant about Elephant. But our biggest page count went to that section on inspirations, where 36 filmmakers responded to our (or, rather Ted’s) query as to who, or what, was inspiring them in their creative practice. Director Derek Cianfrance wrote about a Cirque du Soleil performer, the only one in his troupe who dropped two balls, a sign that he was trying to surpass his personal limits. Screenwriter Howard Rodman cited the artist Andreas Gursky and author Julio Cortazar, among others. Joe Berlinger named his kids and his fear of retirement. Screenwriter Naomi Foner picked “people who tell the truth, even when there are personal consequences.” The late editor Jim Lyons brought up Andy Warhol. The experimental filmmaker James Fotopolous provocatively listed Richard Nixon.

This issue has been a favorite of mine, so when I saw Ted’s Filmstack Inspiration challenge, I knew I had to participate. But looking back at that old issue, I realized something: we never really defined “inspired.” What qualities produce inspiration? What makes inspiration different than influence?

If, as Filmmaker’s editor, I had looked outside of my film bubble I might have come across the scientific work of T.M. Thrash and A.J. Elliot, who, in the same year, began a series of research papers with titles like “Inspiration as a psychological construct” and “Inspiration: core characteristics, component processes, antecedents and function.” In a 2014 article in Frontiers in Neuroscience, Thrash along with several colleagues continued this work, analyzing why “inspiration” had been so rarely studied in the scientific literature. Among the reasons are two that resonate: “ambiguity about whether inspiration is distinct from related constructs” and “preconceptions that inspiration is unimportant relative to ‘perspiration.’

The first of these reasons is undoubtedly referring to that related issue of “influence.” “Who are your influences?” is the most common filmmaker interview question, and answering it produces a kind of genealogy — references that look backwards in very specific, material ways. But I don’t think any of would say that we’re truly honoring inspiration by making work similar in some ways to another’s. The second reason is more interesting, and gets to the heart of the inspiration question. Do you need inspiration if you can just work hard? Keep going until you nail it? Again, I’d argue not — to get yourself out of your creative comfort zone, there needs to be some spark of ignition, whether registered consciously or not, that sends you down a new path. Nietzsche described the experience of inspiration like this: “One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form - I never had any choice.”

In 2017, on the magazine’s 25th anniversary year, I published in Filmmaker a series of pieces reflecting on articles past, and I revisited that “Who Inspires Us” piece, asking six filmmakers to review and update their choices. For most, their inspirations had moved on. Except for one person: Derek Cianfrance. Fourteen years later, his thoughts around the appeal of that Cirque du Soleil juggler had become clearer. He found in the failure of him fumbling those balls an enduring spark. He wrote:

I am reminded by the profound effect this moment had on my life and mission as a filmmaker. Failure has become my constant rallying cry for every project I’ve worked on and every collaborator I’ve worked with since — although I might warn from espousing the virtues of failure to any would-be financier. It seems that to get any project off the ground, you have to prove its success and virtues beforehand - you need proof. This result-based approach feels, ultimately, anti-creative to me. If you have proof of something, if you know what the outcome will be, then what is the point of doing something? To me, the thrill of life and work comes from the experiment. Some things succeed; some fail. And so for every moment in every movie, with every actor, composer, DP, etc., I lead like a scientist who doesn’t know the end result. And I continually push myself and my collaborators to be like that juggler from so many years ago. Embracing failure is the wind beneath my creative wings.

Thinking about who’s inspiring me at the moment, I’m reflecting more directly on filmmakers who I don’t think are failing but who are definitely making work that risks that failure — and for whom the perception of that risk is part of their work’s creative reward. These are also filmmakers, mostly younger ones, who are recalling for me a time when I myself worried less about falling flat on my face. Three come immediately to mind. The first is Yashaddai Owens, who made Jimmy, a feature-length bio-pic about James Baldwin in Paris on a five-figure budget, heading there with his Bolex, leaving little business cards in cafes with Kickstarter QR codes, shooting guerrilla on the streets, just trusting that somehow 2020s Paris could pass for 1948. The second is Debut, by Julian Castronovo, a devilishly original autofictional feature touching on many of my literary (Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Bernhard, Paul Auster) and art world (Ana Mendieta, Sophie Calle) loves, and on a production budget of just $900. And, finally, there’s Pete Ohs, who has been making what he calls “table of bubbles” movies. Once a year he gathers actors, works out a scenario, co-writes the script with them, shoots six days, takes a one-day break and figures out with them the second half of the movie, and then shoots again for six more days. He’s his own DP, editor and sound person, and he works with crews of just three or four people. He’s made five of these films so far, beginning with 2022’s Jethica, which had a production budget of less than $10,000. His latest, Erupcja, co-stars Charli XCX, a bit of star casting that occurred near spontaneously, after he met her in a bar. (Robin O’Hara and I produced a film almost 25 years ago that used somewhat similar methods, although the budget was $300,000, and the crew was about 11.)

After seeing Erupcza, as well as thinking about the work of Owens and Castronovo, I was inspired. These filmmakers have reminded me of what’s still possible.