5 Things: 4) Health More Important Than Age

 5 Things I Learned Making a $4,500 Movie

4) Health more important than age

Clint Eastwood still directs.  As does Woody Allen.  But the process is grueling for producers and directors for the duration of the project.  Everyone else plays a part or performs a task and moves on.  You are there, working all the way up to the release, and then on to promotion tasks.

A friend of mine who directs studio features told me, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.  Stay healthy.”  I thought, sure six months, a year, maybe.  It took five years.  If you are the energy moving the project forward, when you stop the project stops.  It happens at all budgets.

On the Fox lot I met a mid-thirties director completing his latest $45 million project and had only slept one night in the last four days.  Two forty-hour days with an eight-hour break in between was his reality.   It was a week before release and he would only sleep once or twice more, only when absolutely necessary as work is being done 24/7 at the studio.

I’ve been on the set of a $100 million project and watched a young director, who was not properly prepared for the job, wear themselves down to exhaustion and have to be replaced halfway through principle photography.

Exhaustion can happen to anyone, regardless of age.  The culprit is the never-ending to-do list a piece of intellectual property like a feature generates.  If you’re lucky and the work you do develops an audience large enough, you might be working on something related to the project until you die.  So stay healthy.  You want to get to release.  And even if you never make much off your project, just getting it done still being mentally and physically healthy is an accomplishment.