You’re Allowed to Be in the Good Old Days
What a weekend with no cell signal taught me about surviving this industry
This past weekend I did something I haven’t done in a long time. I disappeared.
My girls and I packed up the mom van (I love my van you can judge all you want 😜) and drove out to a campsite with no wifi and no cell signal. The kind of dead zone where your phone stops being a portal to everything wrong with the world/film industry and goes back to being a very expensive flashlight.
And for four days, I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t check my notifications or be anywhere but completely present, in the moment, with my girls.
I knew that the fire needed another log. I knew my daughters were laughing at something across the campsite. I knew that it was Mr. Green with the candlestick in the kitchen (if you haven’t gotten the card game version of CLUE I highly recommend it.) I knew the sun was going down and we were going to make it to the creek just in time.
It was just life, what really matters.
The industry will still be a mess on Monday
I want to be honest with you, because you know I always am. The industry is hard right now. Production is down, budgets are tighter, and a lot of talented people are sitting on the bench wondering what they did wrong.
And the answer is…nothing. You did nothing wrong.
But there’s a trap hiding inside a hard season, and I have watched a lot of filmmakers fall into it during the last few years. When the work gets scarce, we start treating our lives like a holding pattern. We circle. We wait for permission to land. We tell ourselves we’ll go camping, take the trip, be present with our kids, as soon as things pick back up.
We put our lives on the back burner waiting for the perfect time to take a break.
Except later is not guaranteed, and time doesn’t stand still. Your daughter is only 12 once. Your friends are only all in the same city for so long. Your body only wants to sleep on the ground and call it fun for a limited number of years, trust me on that one.
There’s a line from The Office that has been living rent free in my head since the show first aired. It’s Andy Bernard, of all people, in the finale.
“I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”
Andy was talking about not realizing how special the place he as in was, and only realizing it once he was getting ready to say goodbye.
But every filmmaker I know is living that line right now and doesn’t realize it. Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about hard seasons. They become the good old days too. The scrappy years. The years you made things with your friends because nobody was paying any of you anyway. The years you learned the most because you had no choice.
You are in somebody’s good old days right now. Possibly your own.
Your life is the raw footage
I spent years as an editor before I ever ran a post department, and if that work taught me anything, it’s this. You can only cut with the ingredients you’ve been given.
The same is true of your life. Every film you’ll ever make gets built from what you’ve lived. The way firelight moves on a face. Your brain syncing to the sounds of nature so you can tell time without a watch. The specific laugh your kid does when she thinks nobody’s watching. That’s not time away from your career. That’s the dailies.
The filmmakers whose work moves me have always been the ones with full lives. Not full calendars. Full lives. They noticed things. They went places. They let themselves be people first and filmmakers second, and their films were better for it.
So if the industry has you feeling stuck, here’s my unqualified professional advice as someone who has watched hundreds of projects get made. Stop chasing after the awards. Go outside. Take the trip. Leave the phone in the glove box. The edit will wait. It always waits. That’s the one reliable thing about post.
You don’t have to earn your place in this industry before you’re allowed to enjoy your life. You already belong. You belonged before the credits and you’ll belong after them, because belonging was never about the credits in the first place.
The good old days are not behind you and they’re not on hold until the industry recovers. They’re happening right now, at whatever your version of a campsite is, with whoever your people are.
Don’t miss them waiting for a green light.
Until next time,
Shawna
P.S. If you have a filmmaker friend who’s having a hard season, forward this to them. Sometimes we just need to be reminded we’re not alone.