Taste is your strategy
When I was at the Storytelling Summit at the Tribeca Film Festival in June I attended an incredible panel entitled Taste Is Your Strategy. This really reminded me that as an artist, our unique voices, our taste, is part of our artistry and it's what's going to get us noticed. Somebody like David Lynch was never going to fit into the mold. Meanwhile, he's one of my favorite filmmakers. Quentin Tarantino definitely broke through into the mainstream, but he too has got a very specific style and a very specific taste in his filmmaking. I think a lot of the best filmmakers, at least the ones that I love, have a very specific aesthetic and a specific style like Hitchcock, Wes Anderson, Lars Von Trier, Guillermo del Toro, Baz Luhrmann, Sofia Coppola, Tim Burton and Sean Baker, to name a few.
Similarly, during the NY Loves Comedy panel Tina Fey’s advice was to “write what you think is funny, not what you think somebody else will think is funny” - like what a network or studio or decision makers, or gatekeepers are going to think is funny. Write the things that resonate with you, and it goes beyond comedy. I think in general, her message was ‘be authentic to yourself as an artist and to your own creative voice’. When we try to guess what the industry or the audience want and we stifle our creative artistry, everything gets kind of blah because we're trying to please other people and everybody starts trying to make the same thing to follow a trend or what’s ‘hot’. That’s why there’s so much of the same content being produced, the same stories or franchises remade over and over and for the most part they’re not more exciting or inventive than the originals.
This discussion was a great reminder that if you're trying to be everything to everyone, you're kind of nothing to nobody. It reminded me that I have a very specific taste in the types of films I like and the types of films I want to create and write, and they don't necessarily fit into the mainstream, and that's okay. It's our authentic uniqueness that makes us gems as artists. So mine that and stay true to that. We all have to stay true to our work; maybe you’ll find your way, maybe you won't, but at least you’ll be creating the body of work that is something you're proud of and something that you feel resonates with you and the audience you're trying to reach.
A few years back I connected with a producer looking for projects. She and I had a great meeting and hit it off. I signed the release her company required before sending the script over and then nothing, I followed up a couple of times, nothing. Then a couple months later I ran into her at an industry pitch event; eight artists each had about 10 minutes to pitch their projects to a group of invited industry, the guests voted and the project with the most votes was given a grant to kick start their production. At the reception following, we chatted for a bit (she vaguely remembered me). I never mentioned my script. We discussed the projects that were pitched and which ones we liked/voted for. WOW! We had completely different tastes! She was not the right fit for me or any of my projects. It wasn’t personal, it was about my writing being good enough, it simply came down to taste and there was no alignment in terms of the types of projects we wanted to work on. This was a huge ah-ha moment for me and a good lesson about finding producers and collaborators who share my taste. This goes beyond genre, like I would never send a rom-com to a company that exclusively does horror, but even within the genre taste plays a huge factor.
So, that is the takeaway, taste is your strategy. More specifically, YOUR TASTE is your strategy.