Spend your own money.

I’ve heard only fools spend their own money to write and direct their own movies. Well, I’m a fool who controls all creative, financial, business and spiritual rights to the little movie I wrote and directed. Of course, I have a great day job as a novelist, poet, short story writer, journalist and guest lecturer, so I can afford to spend lots of my own money. So maybe aspiring writer/directors should establish themselves in other lucrative careers, and then make movies. Imagine a new wave of dentist/directors and stockbroker/screenwriters rather than waiter/directors and telemarketer/screenwriters. Imagine filmmakers who have one other set of viable job skills!

Keep it cheap.

If you’re going to spend your own money, or anybody else’s money, then perhaps you don’t need 1,000 extras for that crowd scene. Perhaps that car chase can be a foot race. Perhaps the actors can wear their own clothes for wardrobe. Perhaps you only need one producer, who can also cook, drive, direct traffic and carry gear. I found it most helpful when I made the on-set producers turn off their damn cell phones. For the next film, I’m going to allow only one cell phone on set. I just decided that as I wrote it, so I’m learning to improvise.

Hire more women.

We all know that movies are mostly made by boys, and when 10 or more boys gather together, there’s either going to be a football game or a war, and neither of those things is good for human beings. I’m not romanticizing women. I just prefer female bullshit to male bullshit. Above all else, since the creation of art is like the creation of babies, I figure every film set should be equally male and female. In fact, there should be at least four or five people who themselves are equally male and female. Hire the androgynous!

Aristotle was not a Spokane Indian.

We’ve all been trained to make movies in three-act structures, as if Aristotle could have somehow predicted how artistically conservative all of these liberal filmmakers were going to become. “Resolution! There must be resolution!” Fuck resolutions, fuck closure, fuck the idea of story arc. Embrace the incomplete, embrace ambiguity, and embrace the magical and painful randomness of life.

Don’t work so hard.

There’s absolutely no reason why anybody should work 18 hours a day, six days a week for months to make something as inconsequential as a movie. There’s no reason why filmmakers should have to choose their jobs over their friends and families. For our next film, we’re going to work eight-hour days, four days a week, weekends off, with half-days on Wednesdays. During editing, we’ll work Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for no more than 10 hours a day. I’m a family-friendly writer/director!

Smart people are more interesting than dumb people are.

I read a few hundred books every year. My fictional characters should also sound like they read a few hundred books every year. There are more intelligent Indians in the two movies I helped make than in all of the other movies about Indians ever made. Of course, intelligent human beings are capable of making very stupid decisions, and that’s where most of the fun comes in.

Art is kinetic.

The following are all good things: the ecstatic and disdainful reviews; the enraptured and bored audiences; the fans and the enemies; the skeptics and the faithful; the thumbs up and down; the million dollar distribution deal and the “interesting movie, but it’s not for us”; the puzzled, confused, enlightened and challenged; the review in Variety and the review in your Archives: Issue #44 town newspaper; the other filmmakers who think they could have done it better, and the other filmmakers who truly could have done it better, and the other filmmakers who have certainly done it better, and the filmmakers who will never do it better; when Ally Sheedy gives you a hug and kiss for making a movie about Indians; when Harvey Weinstein ignores you for making another movie about Indians; when Indians love you and hate you for making a movie about Indians; and so on and so on. Trust me. The whole damn universe of response to your art, to your tiny little creation, is a beautiful, amazing thing.