Ariston Anderson conducted a fascinating interview with Francis Ford Coppola that was recently published on Behance’s The 99 Percent blog.

Among some excellent tips on improvisation, working with powerhouse actors, and developing your artistic style, he offers these three rules to aspiring filmmakers:

1. Write and direct original screenplays
2. make them with the most modern technology available
3. self-finance them

Read the whole article Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration via The 99 Percent

Two observations:

If you consider yourself a working artist, you’re likely a starving artist.

If you’re starving, it’s very likely your own damn fault.

Now I’m really going to piss you off.

Starving artists are much like the hordes of zombies that frequent our popular culture today. Think about it: they spend all day milling about with other zombies, mindlessly looking for morsels of food. If a fresh brain (or, potential audience) happens to inadvertently cross their field of view, they pounce (or, slowly coagulate en masse as zombies do) and a few of the zombies get some scraps or the brain is scared away, unscathed. Either way, the still-hungry zombie hordes shuffle off and resume milling about.

Why does this image endure in our society?

Because it’s largely true!

Does that piss you off? Good! It should.

Does that make it fair? No! It doesn’t.

Do you want to do something about it? Maybe even to prove me wrong?

Excellent! Read on.

I’m feeling energetically giddy again.  I feel a great sense that anything is possible, good, and has promise.  And I want to do everything at once.  It’s energy overload.

This can be tremendously helpful in my creativity, but if I don’t learn to harness it better, I’ll get sidetracked by everything rather than making a quantum leap in impact for one thing.

I’ve been reading Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen.  I get so excited when an idea resonates.  The excitement starts with the thought, “I want to do that.”  And, because I’m fearful I’ll either forget the idea or lose the excitement driving it, I’m compelled to do that right now.  And I’ve stopped reading and started on that.  Then, I’m so excited about that, I want to do this.  And before I know it I’m simultaneously working on this.  Or this.  Or this.

Raw creative energy at its finest, manifesting itself as a thousand-ideas-at-once.  When it hits, it feels like being sidechecked and dragged around the ice by a sweaty, growling hockey player with no front teeth.  When the ride’s over, I’m breathless.  What a rush!  But am I any closer to the goal box?

Figuring out how to deal with this is a lot like asking how to wrangle a lightning bolt.  Here’s a trick that works for me:

Whenever I’m trying to focus on one task that’s generating a lot of other ideas I want to remember but don’t want to process in the moment, I take out a 3×5 index card, or if I’m feeling particularly frisky, a letter-sized page folded in half lengthwise.  Having a narrow width to write on (3″-4″)  seems key, so that I can keep it just to the right (or left, for you southpaws) of what I’m working on.

When I get an idea tangential to my chosen focus, I force myself to simply write it down without acting on it, and immediately return to what I was doing.

Simple, no?  Yeah, try it sometime, bub.

The real magic behind the trick is the immediate return to my chosen task.  By capturing the idea nugget, I mitigate the urge to deal with it for fear of losing it in the deluge of the idea storm.  I can have my daydream moment (or half-hour, as just happened while writing this–I never claimed to be perfect) and get right back (more or less) to the task at hand.

Photo by maggieandcharles.

Filmmakers, product placements are here to stay. At least in the realm of studio-produced films. Shrewd and cost-conscious studio executives are increasingly looking at well-known brands as a reliable source of money to offset spiraling production costs.

According to Top Gun co-writer Jack Epps, quoted in a recent New York Times article, “if you want to catch an executive’s attention right now, it’s not just selling the script, but you’re showing them how to create a brand.”  The article goes on to mention the lucrative product placement deals struck with Hilton Hotels and American Airlines for 2009′s Oscar-nominated Up In The Air.

Opponents against product placement, notably from the WGA-West, argue that such practice can essentially reduce the creative screenwriter’s job to that of advertising copywriter.

The writers make an interesting, if hollow, implication. Writing good advertising copy takes no less talent than writing a good screenplay. Really good advertising copy creates an emotional reaction in readers much the same way a well-written film moves people. I can’t help but think of Hugh Macleod’s “Sex & Cash Theory”.   Macleod reminds us that the commercial v. artistic debate has raged for years. In fact, the Times article points out that cinematic pioneers the Lumière brothers placed a laundry soap product in their 1896 film “Washing Day in Switzerland.”  Yes, products have been placed in movies for over 100 years. I don’t think placements are going away any time soon… or ever. I think Macleod’s advice to ignore the debate all together is well placed.

Photo by A3sthetix

In a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal two unrelated articles point to the struggles artists face as they straddle the two extremes of pure creativity and pure marketability. The first article notes that ABC Network is taking great pains to test audience reactions prior to giving a style makeover to the title character of its hour-long comedy Ugly Betty.  Notwithstanding claims of following their creative instincts, producers are soliciting a lot of input from viewers on if and how soon Betty should have her braces removed.  On the other end of the spectrum, the second article discusses how Manhattan’s New Museum lowered its building ceiling by two feet—at considerable expense—to accommodate the request of in-demand sculptor Urs Fischer.  Fretting over Betty’s braces seems like overkill, but remember the audience backlash when Felicity’s title character cut her hair?  Similarly, can a business really justify the cost of lowering a perfectly good ceiling just because the artist thinks it makes his art look more impressive?  It can… as long as it sells.

BOTTOM LINE – How do you find balance between artistic intention and audience reaction?