The minute you start the process of deciding to make a film and you're communicating that vision to anyone, you're in the process of selling. If you don't understand that, you're not in show business. You're just not.
Interpretation
Creating a film involves both artistic vision and the ability to sell that vision to others.
This quote highlights the dual nature of filmmaking, where the creative process begins simultaneously with the need to communicate and sell that vision to others. Peter Guber emphasizes that understanding the selling aspect is essential for anyone involved in the film industry, as it directly connects one’s artistry to the broader commercial landscape of show business.
In practice
In a film industry seminar discussing the importance of marketing films.
Beside every great success are the seeds of enormous failure. In every failure, there's the opportunity seeds of great success. They're not miles apart. So if they're that close together, and if you're really working, you're always gonna have that likelihood that something's not going to work.
Stories aren't the icing on the cake; they are the cake!
In any situation that calls for you to persuade, convince or manage someone or a group of people to do something, the ability to tell a purposeful story will be your secret sauce. Telling to win through purposeful stories is situation, industry, gender, demographic, and psychographic-agnostic. It's an all-purpose, everyone wins tool.
Today everyone, whether they know it or not, is in the emotional transportation business. More and more, success is won by creating compelling stories that have the power to move people to action. Simply put, if you can’t tell it, you can’t sell it.
Telling purposeful stories is interactive. It's not a monolog. Ultimately, purposeful tellers must surrender control of their stories, creating a gap for the listener(s) to willingly cross in order to take ownership. Only when the listener(s) own the tellers' story and make it theirs, will they virally market it.
Miss the audience's heart as a filmmaker, and the only wallet that gets hit will be your own. That's because the heart is always the first target in story telling.
The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights.
Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.
It's incumbent on us to reach beyond the confines of the institutions that traditionally produce art and find new ways to get it to the people.
Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
Master technique, so that technique NEVER prevents you from dancing.
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