What A Director Needs To Know Before Taking The Job by Daniel Stamm
Film Courage: We had a comment on our channel the other day and it lends itself to something that we were just talking about off camera and just having certain people on your production that are in your camp and you said someone had given advice to someone you know about this?
Daniel Stamm, Filmmaker: Yes, a friend of mine is a female director who is very successful in TV right now and before she did her first episode she asked some other huge TV director (I forget who that was) if you had to give me one piece of advice what would that be? And he said make sure that you have someone that is on your team meaning that has not been hired by production, has not been suggested by the producers but someone that you have worked with and trust and that you bring into the project. Which it doesn’t seem obvious in the beginning because you are so taken by all of the great talented people that production is throwing at you that you are happily taking that one, that one, that one.
And in the beginning everything is rosy anyway. The energy is like everybody is excited, there are no problems. But I think the process is one where no matter how great the producers are that you work with I always look at them in the beginning and like “I know we’re going to have a screaming fight at some point.” It doesn’t matter how great they are, it’s just like you are going through this war together, you’re exhausted and you don’t have 100 percent overlapping worldview and creative views otherwise you’d be the same person. Just by virtue of not being the same person that friction especially with the money involved will at some point lead to the moment where you find yourself on set being screamed at…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
