Making it (Understanding your meta) - Part 1
In the summer of 1999, I went on a trip around Italy with my father.
We had lived in different cities since I was 7, so to have an extended time together, 10 years later, was a big deal, and a good way to see parts of Italy I had never visited before. We went to Milan, to Bologna, and then, to Venice. At the very time we were visiting, the Venice Film Festival was going on. We went to check it out, even if I was not allowed to watch any movies; I was 17, and the movies shown were not rated yet. Walking around the festival, just for a few hours, a realisation struck me: cinema existed. People who made cinema exist. Growing up in a small city in Sardinia, I never felt that reality. Filmmaking seemed like a foreign, distant, unreal concept.
But now I was in the middle of a massive event that showed me the existence of a massive industry whose only reason for being was to make movies happen. And I loved movies. All of a sudden an idea came to mind; maybe that is my path.
I started my final year of high school just a few days after that trip, and I resolved that I would become a film director. I dove deep into studying all about filmmaking, listening to director commentaries on DVDs, and looking into getting some equipment to start working on personal projects. My drive was completely unobstructed by fear. Some would call that a lack of awareness of the complexity of the world, but that kind of fearlessness is filled with a kind of wisdom that many lose over time, It took me twenty years to get back to it.
Because a thing happens right after school is over. You realise that you need actually to find a career path. If before I was completely immersed in my creative ideas, and my belief that those could turn into reality was complete and unwavering, now the priority was to make it. To achieve the dream of being a working creative.
I think a good way to look at it is that I went from focusing on play (the love of cinema), to focusing on the game (the industry around cinema). And I had no idea where to start.
Creative careers don’t have a set path. There are schools dedicated to art and communication, whose efficacy is debatable, and are often insanely expensive. But there is a lot of literature dedicated to the best strategies to achieve the creative life goal, and it's growing, year by year, as the internet becomes filled with courses and texts on how to grow your creative career. I've obsessed over some of those texts and courses and spent years trying to strategise by following those rules. I wanted to learn how to play the game.
But, there is a key problem that I've identified after years of working as a creative: those strategies are focused on a very specific metagame. When it comes to cinema, the large majority of the guides are based around making it in Hollywood, its habits, its politics, and its economy.
But I was born in a small city on a large island, a place where very few movies had been made over the years (reading Federico Fellini's biography by Tullio Kezich, one learns that, apparently, for a long time Sardinia was considered to be bad luck for movie productions by the Italian film industry). Sure, the plan was always to move somewhere else. At one point, the idea was to move to the US; New York University was the dream, until I learned about the tuition costs of going there, an amount of money that seemed quite unreal for someone coming from a country where education, comparatively, is borderline free.
Then I heard about a good film school in Prague, a one-year course that would give me practical skills to aid all the theory I had accumulated by reading books about cinema and listening to commentary tracks on DVDs. Even if the school ended up being a bit of a mess, the experience of being there was good, especially because most of my colleagues there we fantastic people and we had a good time creating together. I left the school with the confidence of knowing that the path I wanted to follow was meant for me. I did love to play, I did love cinema.
But once back in Italy, and spending some time meeting people in the television and movie industry in Rome, I realised that the way the game was played in my home country made it very hard for play to really breathe, unless I wanted to wait a long time to get my shot. It was an industry where age and status was more important than good ideas, ambition or drive. So I moved back to Prague, realising that it had potential beyond my school: it was a place with a healthy local film industry, and a very active service industry, that aids foreign productions to realise big movies with reasonable budgets and high-quality crews.
For the first few years in Prague, I actually was involved with a production company that was developing movies, Hollywood style. There was a moment where I managed to connect them with a giant video game studio and there is an alternate version of my life where my career explodes after helping produce a high-profile video game adaptation; but, thanks to a subpar script, that never happened. I even developed a TV show idea with them, a very useful experience. But eventually, the 2008 financial crisis hit, and the ambition of the production company I was collaborating with shifted away from the development of original ideas and towards co-productions.
But I kind of kept working in the same direction, thinking that the strategy to follow was still the one of making a proof of concept that could resemble a mainstream movie, and use it as a pathway to a career... without realising, for a long time, that I was trying to fit a round hole in a square peg. I was using "Hollywood strategies" in a context that was extremely disconnected from Hollywood.
I was playing the wrong game. And I was losing my love for play.
It all changed, as it often happens, with an accident, which I will explore in Part 2 of this post.
