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Don’t Take Rejection Personally

Page 2 of 3 “A little short on quirkiness” Phil Caracas, Jesus Christ Vampire HunterThe launch in Toronto of Canadian Raindance in April 2006 drew 200 industry heavyweights and 27 aspiring Canadian directors and screenwriters who practiced pitching ideas to Grove and other judges in one-minute time slots. “My God, they were good, compared to Europe,” he says, adding that while they were a little short on quirkiness, they were long on commercial sensibility. Reject rejection His role, and that of Raindance, he says, is to take the mystery out of the business and to convince first-time filmmakers that that they, too, can succeed if they go about it correctly. Don’t take it personally. Just power through. He has identified three reasons why aspiring filmmakers fail. The first is that they lack confidence. The film industry, he says, likes it that way. “They want to make you believe that they want new talent,” he says. “They don’t. They hate new talent. They create all this mystique and shake your confidence and make you give up and stack shelves at Loblaws.” He advises people to reject rejection. “Don’t take it personally. Just power through.” The second is that a would-be filmmaker will self-destruct in ways known only to the individual filmmaker. “The human species is the only species with its own patented, foolproof way of self-destruction,” he says. The third is procrastination. “People in the film industry never say no,” he says. That means they can leave a prospective filmmaker hanging for months or years on end. Instead, he says, the strategy is to make not the film you want but the film you can. Continued... << Previous Page - Next Page >>

 

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