Making Movies is Hard, Making a Great Movie is Almost Impossible

In Tom Hanks's new debut novel "The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece," he wrote about making movies as

a stressful job done by vulnerable human beings - all cracked vessels, all fraught with insecurities.

But as filmmakers, we do it anyway. Whether we work in front of the camera or behind it, it's way more than just a job, isn't it? It's not necessarily a calling because we all arrived here directly or indirectly from any number of different trajectories. Some started working in the film industry by chance because they knew someone who was already working in the industry and they needed someone in a hurry with a certain set of skills. That person happened to be you! Or like me, you may have started on a different career path but you somehow gravitated to the movies because you wanted something more than what your old job provided. More creativity, more money, more something...

I know that this year has been very challenging for many of us who make a living in the film industry. The industry shutdown has impacted all of us. That diminishing bank balance or increasing line of credit is terrifying. But I'm optimistic that the end of this global film industry shutdown is in sight. The WGA ratification vote deadline literally passed as I wrote this article at 1 p.m. PDT on October 9, 2023. Hopefully, the 11,000 WGA members voted in favour of the deal that was hard won after 146 days of strike. We are still waiting for the SAG-ACTRA negotiations with the AMPTP to conclude with a deal. With any luck, the actors will get a fair deal and we can all put this behind us. We all want the cameras to start rolling again.

While we are waiting, I encourage all of you filmmakers as well as anyone who may be feeling a bit doubtful about what they do to listen to this honest, insightful interview with Tom Hanks on CBC Radio Q with Tom Power.

Tom Hanks is undoubtedly one of the most famous and well-respected actors in the world. He is the Jimmy Stewart of our generation. He has won practically every award there is and has acted in every genre of movie or TV show over the past 40 years. He has also written, directed, and produced projects so he literally has done it all and seen it all. So when he tells us that when he arrives on set early, he still questions whether he has done enough to prepare for the day or whether he deserves to be there in the first place. That speaks volumes to me. Whether you work in pre-production, production, or post-production, what we bring to our job matters. Certainly, not every actor or person working in film can have the humility of Tom Hanks to admit to being vulnerable. We have all worked with a**holes who overcompensate to prove otherwise. But whether we like it or not, we are constantly being judged and evaluated. We bring to each job the collective baggage of all the other jobs that we have ever done.

If you don't work in the film industry, you probably don't really understand what it takes to bring that motion picture onto the big screen in theatres or small screen in your living room. The amount of work that we put in to suspend your disbelief for that hour or two took months if not years of work by hundreds of workers. In his interview, Tom Hanks talks about a short scene in the classic movie "The Maltese Falcon" where we see Humphrey Bogart come out of a taxicab and look both ways before crossing a busy New York street. As simple as this scene looks, it involved shooting at night on a backlot with 60 background performers and moving as well as static cars. Then there were dozens of people working behind the camera to create this illusion on the day. This was 15 seconds of screen time that took 6 hours to shoot. But this is what filmmakers do - capture that lightning in the bottle. To make something real out of something totally manufactured and controlled.

It takes hard work to make a movie. The 12-hour days are long. When we're working at night in the dark in cold, rainy conditions, it feels even longer. Obviously, not every motion picture that we make is a masterpiece. It's astonishing that movies get made at all when you consider all the odds stacked against them. Thousands of movie scripts never make it past the first reading. The lucky ones that get optioned may languish for years waiting for rewrites, financing, casting, and a multitude of other critical factors to fall into place before they go into production. During production, a million things can go wrong and some usually do, but somehow the motion picture goes in the can. Then there's the long process of post-production where another gauntlet of other factors can turn the project into a total disaster. Poor editing, lack of funding to complete, bad soundtrack, poor visual effects, etc., etc. Next comes the marketing and the press culminating with the final release. What if Rotten Tomatoes gives it a bad score? What if its box office does not make enough money to break even? What if someone posts something incriminating about one of the stars? What if the audiences just aren't ready for a movie like this yet? There are so many things that can go wrong that it is miraculous when it all comes together to produce a hit. But as a filmmaker, I don't think you're doing this to make the next big hit or critical masterpiece.

For Tom Hanks, it's about the journey, not the destination. He's had his fair share of duds as well as of course many more successful motion pictures. But as he explains, it's the people that he has worked with and the memorable, enjoyable times during the making of his movies that he values the most. He recalls the time the crew celebrated his birthday inside the fricking Louvre Museum when they were shooting "The Da Vinci Code". He got to tie his laces on an apple box in front of the Mona Lisa! He values the work that all the film workers bring to a production. From the makeup artist who got up even earlier than him at the beginning of his day to the location PA who made sure that a bike courier didn't ride into a shot to ruin a take, we all have an important role to play.

When times are slow and down as they may have been for you during this year of film industry shutdown, we may lose sight of what a privilege it is for us to work in this world of make-believe. Just as a guy like Tom Hanks knows that he needs to bring his A-game to set even if he doesn't feel like it because it's a pro, we should be proud of the hard work that we bring to production when those productions return. What we do matters. Whether you're a genny-op who arrived at a location at 3 AM to lay down enough cable for the movie lights to light the actor just right for that critical shot or you're a prop builder who decided to work later to reprint that hero prop because you thought it would look better on camera if you tweaked it a certain way. Your attention to detail and the care that you bring to your craft matters to your peers, it matters to the production, and it matters to guys like Tom Hanks. I hope to see you back on set soon!