INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING AFTER SUNDANCE
The highs in a creative career can be so high. It's the ultimate dopamine hit. And there's a moment that comes after almost every one of those highs that nobody prepares you for. It's not the moment of failure. It's not even the moment of success. It's the day after.
I was talking with filmmaker Erin Brown Thomas recently, whose short film Chasers premiered at Sundance last year, and she described it as a roller coaster. The higher the peak, the more inevitable the drop.
IS IT MEANT TO BE, OR AM I JUST FORCING IT?
There's a version of ambition that says the harder something is, the more it must be worth. If it were easy, everyone would do it. That line has a way of embedding itself early and then running quietly in the background for years, deciding which discomforts get tolerated and which get mistaken for signs.
But there's a second, quieter question underneath that one, and it doesn't get asked nearly as often: what if the difficulty isn't proof of anything at all? What if some of it is just friction, and some of it is you, personally, jamming a key into a lock that was never going to open?