{"id":1501,"date":"2022-03-03T11:01:03","date_gmt":"2022-03-03T17:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coryedwards.com\/?p=1501"},"modified":"2022-03-03T11:11:31","modified_gmt":"2022-03-03T17:11:31","slug":"the-cost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/coryedwards.com\/?p=1501","title":{"rendered":"The Cost"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Craig-filming\"<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>I’ll admit, when I’m at a social event and someone asks, “What do you do for a living?” I enjoy giving my answer. Because it’s one of the most unexpected and cool answers: “I make movies.” But\u00a0there are a lot of strange reactions after that. The longer I have a conversation with anyone outside of the business, the more I realize that people with “regular jobs” or steady careers don’t\u00a0really understand a creature like me. They can’t really wrap their mind around the tumultuous, high-risk, gypsy life that\u00a0I and my family have had to navigate. For such a sexy career title, it’s one of the least sexy lives you can lead. And if I can drill a little deeper, I think people who love to create as a hobby are VERY different than people who create\u00a0as a career. Lots of us are creative. Lots of us dabble in the arts. But to someone\u00a0in real estate, retail sales or finance,\u00a0I seem like\u00a0someone raised by wolves. At least that’s the impression that I get.<\/p>\n

Anyone who works a 9 to 5 job is baffled by the life of someone in the arts. And rightly so — it’s an industry that doesn’t make a lot of sense on paper. Most of it involves high risk gambles over long periods of time. The investments\u00a0made are investments in time, effort and focus, not\u00a0dollars. Those investments are not built on any stats, but on instinct and subjective ideas. And the sacrifices required to make any popular\u00a0art form are not comfortable or convenient. My family has had to move several times in the past five years, God bless them. Sometimes we have to plan our vacations around when my project will start or end… or finally get funding. The shifting sands of my life have forced those I love to be very flexible, to live or go to school somewhere they didn’t plan on. I will always be grateful for that. Some days I work 18 hours, or I fly to Vancouver with one day’s notice.\u00a0Other days I just do a lot of laundry and stare at my laptop in pajamas. And to many people, that seems… ridiculous. How can that be a “job?”<\/p>\n

I’ll admit, sometimes I\u00a0become jealous of those with consistent, financially stable careers. There are careers where a certain amount of training, certification and longevity are predictably rewarded. There is no “feast and famine,” only steady growth and a controllable outcome. The details of my crazy day-to-day existence can be downright laughable.\u00a0But I want to ask those\u00a0consistent, stable people, “Did you like Free Guy<\/em>?” Because that was a script that got rejected for years, a movie that was delayed a year due to the pandemic, and starring a guy who failed at being a leading man for about ten years.<\/p>\n

Do you love Harry Potter?\u00a0Because that empire of content all came from a book\u00a0written by a single mom at a coffee shop while she was deep in debt. It was\u00a0misunderstood and rejected by most of the major publishers.<\/p>\n

Do you like Queen? U2? You like listening to Radiohead\u00a0or Lady Gaga on the way to work? Well those artists\u00a0all lived like circus people<\/em> to\u00a0make that music. They slept in their cars, they leveraged all their savings, they were ostracized by family, they suffered failures for a long time to generate the art you enjoy on your Spotify playlist. Many of them sweated the details for years in their garage, with nobody cheering them on or understanding what they were trying to do.\u00a0I’ll always remember my brother telling me about a documentary that followed Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. In it, he’s getting up at\u00a05 am every morning to drive 30 minutes across the freezing English countryside to a little cottage studio, every morning, over and over, to get the next album right. Nothing sexy about that. And\u00a0this was after<\/em> he’d become a world famous rockstar.\"Thom<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I’ll also never forget a recent photo of Steven Spielberg on a set, lying on the ground with a lens, trying to find his shot. The man is a timeless icon and 75 YEARS OLD,\u00a0but he is still making the early call time, sweating the details, lying on the ground. His\u00a0years of risk have been paid back 1000 times, but he still wants to pay the cost of what the\u00a0next piece of art requires.\"Spielberg<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>The artists we love became iconic at a cost. They were driven by an itch they couldn’t scratch — something intangible that demanded foolish risks. That is not easy for everyone to understand. And it’s a cost that is hard to quantify, or put into words. If you’re an artist and driven to create, I can’t tell you how long it’s going to take. I can’t tell you if what you’re making will be successful. And contrary to what any producer\u00a0may tell you, there is no way to predict the\u00a0box office or return on investment,\u00a0no matter how big or micro the budget is.\u00a0Creatives are in the business of\u00a0mining intangibles, unearthing strange and unpredictable stuff that rides on the emotional reactions of strangers. The cost is long and hard and unpredictable.<\/p>\n

That’s why you’ve got to love it. You’ve got to be so driven by your creative\u00a0vision that you can\u00a0SEE\u00a0it as reality. Most of the time, no one else\u00a0will see it but you. You may experience failure over and over and people in those stable jobs will say, “It’s not worth it, I told you so.” And then they’ll go listen to another song by Radiohead.<\/p>\n

The painful truth is that great art comes from great suffering. And in the film business, even attaining some kind of modest success is a “long game.” It is not for the meek. But that is the cost.<\/p>\n

I write this not to scare young creatives, but to prepare them. Gird your loins! Armor up! And take a break if you need to. Learn your craft as a hobby before throwing your life savings at it. Those around you may\u00a0never understand the cost. But if\u00a0YOU do, and you still love it, you should keep going.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ll admit, when I’m at a social event and someone asks, “What do you do for a living?” I enjoy giving my answer. Because it’s one of the most unexpected and cool answers: “I make movies.” But\u00a0there are a lot of strange reactions after that. The longer I have a conversation with anyone outside of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/coryedwards.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1501"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/coryedwards.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/coryedwards.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/coryedwards.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/coryedwards.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1501"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/coryedwards.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1596,"href":"http:\/\/coryedwards.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1501\/revisions\/1596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/coryedwards.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/coryedwards.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/coryedwards.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}