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 oneβs 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 canβt tell it, you canβt 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.
Sometimes films ignore other points of view because it's simpler to tell the story that way, but the more genuine and sympathetic you are to different points of view and situations, the more real the story is.
Good design is a visual statement that maximizes the life goals of the people in a given culture (or, more realistically, the goals of a certain subset of people in the culture) that draws on a shared symbolic expression for the ordering of such goals.
We rode on the winds of the rising storm, We ran to the sounds of the thunder. We danced among the lightning bolts, and tore the world asunder.
Writing has... been to me like a bath from which I have risen feeling cleaner, healthier, and freer.
I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else.
I had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.
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