The Most Generous Thing an Artist Can Do
I don't remember the first time I watched Superman. I remember the hundredth. More specifically, I remember what happened after the hundredth. When I was about ten years old, my father brought home our family's first VCR. If you grew up with streaming, it's difficult to explain what a miracle that felt like. Until then, movies disappeared. You saw them in the theater and then hoped they might reappear months, or years, later on television, interrupted by commercials
The Meanings Hidden in Plain Sight
There are moments in your education when someone says something so simple that it permanently changes the way you experience the world.
For me, one of those moments happened in 1999.
Learning to See Beneath the Surface
Essays on storytelling, creativity, filmmaking, and the search for a well-directed life. Some lessons take years to understand. Others arrive in a single moment and quietly reorganize the way you see the world. For me, one of those lessons began with a question that followed me through years of teaching filmmaking: Why do some stories stay with us while others disappear almost immediately? For a long time, I thought the answer had something to do with technique. A better came
The Question We All Secretly Ask
Success has an interesting way of disguising itself. When we're young, we often imagine it wearing someone else's face. We want someone else's career, someone else's confidence, someone else's life. For years, I wanted to be Steven Spielberg. Not just make movies like him. I wanted his life. It wasn't until I began teaching filmmaking that a single question from one of my students completely changed the way I thought about creativity—and ultimately about my own life. This isn
