Directing a First Feature & Preparing to Punch Through the Boards
A practical strategy of invention & ambition to conjure your own Archetypal Board of Directors for your own Big Project™.
Ten years ago, I was about to get fired.
The startup I had been working for was scaling back and my services as a freelance arts writer weren’t essential anymore.
But before the CEO could say “Unfortunately, we have to cut your beat” I pre-empted the point of his call:
“What’s our current marketing strategy? I have a few ideas.”
Long story short, we booked a meeting for the next day and I pitched a multi-part marketing plan that I would happily execute for the team.
Technically, I was indeed fired as the freelance arts writer. Then, re-hired as a marketing strategist, and later, a podcast producer, and community engagement coordinator.
I’m not sure what came over me when I pitched him, except the fact I literally had nothing else to lose. My marketing Bambi legs were still wobbly, but I pitched like I was David Ogilvy himself.
It was almost as if I was running my thoughts through a character’s voice instead of my own. I wasn’t bullshitting, but rather presenting my ideas with more confidence than 2015 Courtney actually felt.
After we settled on the new working arrangement, my still-boss laughed and said, “I’m gonna use you as a case study for how not to get fired.”
That conversation didn’t just keep me employed, but it also strengthened the trust between my boss and me, and reified my play-acted confidence into something I actually started feeling for real.
It can be healthy to pretend.
Goals! Gotta have ‘em!
I never feel it first.
Feeling confident or feeling brave or feeling wise or feeling funny or feeling capable is a consequence, not a condition.
I’ve only ever gotten to those feelings by way of action.
It seems obvious to write, but “seeing the future you want” is something a lot of folks (including me) forget to do. We let life fling us into the next thing without really considering where we want to be headed in the first place.
Part of this has to do with Autopilot Settings:
We reduce our imagination to see only what’s directly in front of us.
We limit our possibilities to the obvious instead of the original.
We believe we’re at the behest of Life and its attending tedium.
And to be fair, often we are indeed at Life’s behest! But even so, we still can (and imho should) conjure the kind of world we want to inhabit in our mind’s eye.
Because... how else will we make it so?
And now to contradict myself: Goals don’t work!
Ready for a Firehose of Nuance1?!
Goals are reductive and leave out stuff like serendipity and coincidence and fate. Which, for what it’s worth, is the only way my career has ever really leapt forward. So while having a general direction is necessary, giving outsized respect to written-in-stone GOALS leaves a lot on the table.
Instead of going after the goals I can’t control: “Hope they sit me next to Meryl when this film hits!”
I tune into what I can control: “If I were a director who could handle being at the helm of a Meryl Streep film, what would I do next?”
Reductive goals hope for one specific outcome.
Expansive goals open a million possibilities.
Nice words, but how exactly, Court?
Everyone has their own technique, but I tend to believe perception largely influences reality, so I
Tune into a perception that’s better than my current one. A perception of life that is bigger, bolder, grander, wiser, more ambitious, more creative, more courageous.
Then I inhabit that perception like a character. Or, for the Campbell fans out there, an archetype.
It’s not that I’m pretending to be someone else, but rather I’m asking myself what would someone with THESE qualities do in THIS situation?2
From there, I decide which moves to make as if I had their gumption, spirit, vigor, intelligence, charm, cleverness.
When I want to quantum leap3, I find this approach works every time.
Directing a first feature is a quantum leap
As my daughter falls asleep each night, and I lay there with her until she’s deep into her dreams, I perseverate:
What do I need to do differently with the feature than I did with my short or my series?
What kind of approach will not just get this thing done, but make it feel alive in the way good art feels alive?
What headspace will this require of me? What toughness? What pliability?
Who is the kind of person who can direct something ambitious and enlivening and unafraid and new?
Who is the kind of person who can relentlessly deliver it to the world over multiple years as it builds into a body of work?
ENTER: MY ARCHETYPAL BOARD OF DIRECTORS
I came up with four archetypes (characters from movies, of course!) who can handle all of these questions and more.
Embodying these archetypes — asking how would THESE folks handle THESE questions — as I make this film, will hopefully do two things:
Get this film made the way I want to make it
Give me practice inculcating their qualities and making them my own
These archetypes hold four perceptions of life I believe will help get my work over the finish line in the big, ambitious way I’m envisioning inside my skull. But, and I have no idea if this is relatable to other folks or not BUT, I also want every project to grind me into a diamond. And making something as complicated as a film, in as tough of a climate as this economy, is a metric ton of friction.
I want it to test me.4 I aim to come out changed by the end of all this.
It’s a strategy of invention and ambition.
What follows are the details.
The Archetypal Board of Directors, or, How I’m Inventing Myself for a First Feature
1. THE AMBITIOUS ARTIST | Geoffrey Tennant
You know how The Office is comfort-watching for a lot of people? They’ll watch it again and again because it just makes them feel good when life is decidedly not feeling good? For me, that’s Slings and Arrows.
The main character Geoffrey Tennant (played by Paul Gross) has always felt like a kindred spirit to me. He’s an outsider and constantly misunderstood. But his drive to do the play, to move the audience up out of their seats, to feel something alive and vibrant even though eventually it all turns to dust and might not matter anyway, all of these compulsions feel acutely relatable.
Geoffrey Tennant is the Moon of my Sun-Moon-Rising. But he’s a bit more courageous and failure tolerant than I am.
He cares so much about the work and not so much about the fact no one cares as much as him. He wishes they would. But he doesn’t need them to.
He also speaks to a ghost, which I obviously love.
2. THE ELECTRIFYING TEACHER | John Keating
Whom amongst us has not wanted to be in John Keating’s class? I, for one, could spend an entire career talking about the Transcendentalists (evidence here). But that’s not why I want to embody Keating.
It’s this scene:
Look at Robin Williams’ face at 2:36 as he beholds Ethan Hawke. This is how I feel when watching genius actors. In every one of my projects so far, I’ve simply had the good fortune of working with some of the smartest, most profound and present actors I’ve ever met, and so I find myself in awe. But with a feature, I’ve got to give those geniuses something to work with that’s deeply worthy of their skill, something chewy and rich. They deserve that.
John Keating fills the room with possibility. He has a twinkle in his eye. He enters the room and no one knows what he might do, but they trust him implicitly.
He sees what’s possible within each person before they see it themselves. And then he elegantly exits and allows them to bloom larger than they could if he stayed in the frame and took credit.
He beholds. That’s a powerful gift to give someone else.
3. THE RELENTLESS ADVOCATE | Erin Brokovich
Personally, a first feature will be demanding, but a first feature isn’t the only thing I’ll be trying to do. If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve heard about the NonDē 50 Films Project, so you know I believe in collective action. But let me be clear, I don’t want collective action only so I can make my body of work, I want collective action so we can build a better film ecosystem for everyone — one that’s sustainable and generative and fair.
Who better to channel for a task like that than Brokovich herself? Or, at least, Julia Roberts’ rendition of Brokovich in this clip:
In the film, Erin Brokovich does not suffer fools. She’s unimpressed by privilege. She is not interested in weaseling into the system and making a spot for herself. Rugged individualism is a snake oil fantasy as far as she’s concerned.
She literally wants safe water for working class folks. Basic things for real people. Dignity for all.
She fights with flair, without ever abandoning herself. God she’s good.
4. THE SHREWD REBEL | Amy March
I know Amy March isn’t the typical character you might expect me to pull from LIttle Women. Jo, after all, is the bright-eyed, future-oriented, progressive writer.
But in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation, I loved Amy (eventually). Because she alchemized petulance into shrewdness. She was clear-eyed about how economics worked:
I see Amy as a rebel because generally everyone else around her only sees two paths: strike out to be an artist and be free, or marry rich. She takes a third way. She will marry rich, and she may have to give up her art, but she still intends to be free.
She understands the rules of the game, and she is shrewd about how she plays her hand.
This line — “I want to be great or I want to be nothing” — oof.
Another one that rattles me with its familiarity. I know how deep that feeling goes, and yet here, Amy, does not let it shake her. It’s why she’s so discerning. She sees the limits around her and wants to be realistic and cunning about them.
I think it’s her discernment that allows her to find a third and fourth and fifth path, ones beyond “middling talent” or Fred Vaughan.
She is nobody’s little girl. She sees the world as it is, not as people would like her to see it.
Using Archetypes to Punch Through the Boards
If you’re still with me, let’s keep going.
Again: archetypes are a way of noticing how a character might respond to a situation, removing the Self from it for a beat, and realizing which new doors that archetype opened for you.
What does this have to do with a first feature?
Well, as I mentioned before, it’s a quantum leap to go from never having directed a feature film to having directed one. It’s a cellular shift, I’m sure of it.
And archetypes can help make that shift quicker and with less effort.
As a director, I know zillions of questions come up during the process. And while I usually have a gut instinct, for those moments when questions arise that I’ve never had to answer before, sending them through the lens of one of my chosen archetypes is an elegant (and frankly, fun) way to figure out what I want to do.
If I’m stumped, stepping into the identity of Geoffrey Tennant will give me one answer and Erin Brokovich might give me another.
Seeing the world through multiple lenses will clarify my own.
It’s a trick, you see.
When I use archetypal filters, paradoxically, it allows my real voice to surface without the baggage of “first feature” and its pressurized meaning.
My husband calls all this “punching through the boards” — mustering the courage, focusing on the vision, and then throwing everything you’ve got to go beyond the goal.
I’m not saying archetype embodiment is THE way to punch through the boards, but it is one way.
I’ve studied archetypes for about a decade, so here are some of my favorite resources if you’re new to the concept:
The OG of archetypes, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces
Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers
Carolyn Myss’ ARCHETYPES: Who Are You?
Myss’ website with a list of over 70 archetypes here
The Jungian Life Podcast (search archetype & you’ll find some good eps)
Here are two ways you could get started with this.
Go through the the list of 70 archetypes above and read through them one by one. Whichever handful feel powerful to you, pull them out, examine them, and analyze why they struck you. Then, to more deeply get into their skin, find a character who embodies them like I’ve shown you above. And see what other qualities rise to the surface.
Start with film or book characters you admire in some way. Choose the characters you’d want to emulate, and then reverse it. Go to the list of archetypes, read through them, and see which archetype most closely aligns with the character.
We’re never just one archetype.
In fact, we’re all of the archetypes all the time to varying degrees.
But choosing ~which one to embody when~ is a skill. It requires vision and self-awareness.
And again, it’s fun.
Practical Applications of How to Embody the ARTIST, TEACHER, ADVOCATE, & REBEL through the Stages of Production
I hope this gives you a good place to start. Even just the question “What would a person LIKE THIS do in this situation?” can 10x the return on your process5.
If you want more specific and practical applications of this process, I’m using my personal life/goals as an example, below the paywall.