Film documentarian, Richard Brehm discusses the rigors of the creative process and how meeting the challenges can solve our hardest problems.
James Cameron rewrote the paradigm for making movies on Avatar using scientific method. It was all about finding a way to breathe life into the fantastic characters in his head. Yes, Pandora was breathtaking, the story was emotional, and the 3D opened a window into an immersive wonderland, but the trick was making us believe in the 9 ft. blue Neytiri.
Cameron is an unparalleled storyteller and filmmaker, but he is also an engineer down to his bones, and so he used scientific method to solve his challenges. It was hard, the system broke down daily and there were unforeseen problems every step of the way, but his process saw it through.
Years later, Cameron returned to Pandora for The Way of Water…and raised the bar again. This time, he’d film characters, creatures and action scenes in, around and under water. This one choice forced his team to re-consider every step of their process and remake the paradigm all over again.
In life and in creative ventures, we’d all stand to learn from Cameron’s uncompromising approach to realizing his vision.
As he says, “figure it out.”
“My priority was the movie. But the priority is not the movie. The priority is the process. A good movie will come from a good process.”
Figure out the process and the vision lives.