Collaboration = Alchemy

some of the cast/crew of How to Build a Fire

I could never be a full-time writer. I need people. Don’t get me wrong, I can spend plenty of time romping through the forests in my head, and I feel blessed to have the solo creative time I do, but for me, there is nothing that compares to the thrill of creative collaboration. To be in space with people at the top of their game, oftentimes with vastly different skillsets from my own, and to watch each of them add value and richness through their given talent, is like watching a magic spell take effect. Ingredients come together, build upon each other, compliment and contrast, and when it all works, it feels alchemic, like science or reason couldn’t possibly explain the effect.

Film sets are a unique creative environment. I realized this first as an actor. Many people don’t understand what actors get out of film-acting compared to theater: “There’s no audience,” they say. This couldn’t be further from the truth. While there’s nothing quite like the attentive conversation that happens between a theater audience and performer, a film actor has the most laser-focused and dedicated audience one could ask for. On a film set, the common goal of every human on hand is to nail the moment: make it as connective or beautiful or funny or gut-wrenching as it can possibly be. People in the room hold their breath. They contort their bodies to aim a camera just-so. They watch for the slightest, perfect breeze on some meticulously chosen stray-hairs. They hold the work in prayerful quiet, because this might be it: an unrepeatable moment that makes everything they do worth doing. And then they do it again. Or many agains. And once more for safety.

I don’t know of any other workplace that’s like a set when “action” is called. Where someone typing up a catering schedule and someone securing a C-stand so a light doesn’t fall over sit in the same silence and pay attention to the same fruit of their very different labors. That’s as if somebody at the compliance office and the assembly line of the same car company got to stop and listen to the sound of a person starting the minivan they both had a hand in making for the first time. Can you imagine if everyone got to have that kind of direct connection to their work? That’s a relationship that creates pride and reverence. Not all the time, of course, but it opens a path to it that is so much clearer than it is in most work environments. That silence clarifies the power of the collaboration— distills it. We pause and watch as the disparate parts harmonize.

When the work works, that direct relationship breeds investment. On the set for How to Build a Fire, it was amazing to see that investment grow by the day. The more material people saw brought to life, the closer in the crew would lean. I would find myself cornered by a PA or a grip during lunch, telling me in a serious undertone, “hey- this is really good. The more I see, the more I’m getting into the story.” The machinery became smoother, more focused. People could feel, in real time, each small part adding to the whole.

And it all makes me wonder: how do we bottle this? How do we create spaces for reverence in the other things we do? In our work, our friendships, our families, our politics? It seems we are utterly lacking those prayerful silences in which to step back and take in the fuller picture of what we are creating together.

There is nothing like the feeling of trusting a collaborator whom I respect. If I can communicate the important contours of a moment— the shape and color it takes on in my mind— and successfully express the “why” of that moment needing to become real, then when I put its various pieces in the hands of artists and craftspeople I respect, extraordinary things will happen. I will watch that moment gain dimensions I never thought of. The work will bend toward something more real and vital because of the addition of hearts and minds: the force-multiplier of invested human souls. That is alchemy. That’s why I always balk at a filmmaker calling their work a “My-Name Film.” You didn’t make that film. A big group of people came together to commit themselves to your dream, to add their own dreams to the mix, and pull off something akin to a miracle. You all sat in the same silence, reverent to the same crafted moments. And then did it again. And then once more for safety.

-Jamie