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Speaker 1
Difficult collaborators. We're talking today about working with people who are difficult. I've done it many times. And in fact, some people probably think that I'm a difficult collaborator. Maybe I am, but my stuff looks really good. So you're going to have to weigh as you go through your artistic journey, whether it's worth it for you to work with certain kinds of people, and when it's time to cut and run, when you just want to put up with it and just get through it and then, you know, maybe never talk to them again or not work with them again.
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Speaker 1
These are some of the options available to you for working with difficult collaborators, and I am going to give you some gossip on people that I've worked with. I won't name names, but I'll give you some examples of different kinds of situations that you might find yourself in, and how you might be able to find your way out of those challenging situations.
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Speaker 1
So if you can learn from my mistakes and my experience with ten years as a filmmaker, then I'm super happy to share.
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Speaker 1
So the first thing that I want to say about difficult collaborators is that.
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Speaker 1
Working with friends is not always a great idea. And if you check out
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Speaker 1
48 Laws of Power, you'll see that he actually cautions you not to work with friends. This is because I know it sounds like a great idea. Like, oh, you get along so well as friends, why wouldn't you get along at work? But there's a lot of reasons why it doesn't always translate.
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Speaker 1
And one of them being, that it's a completely different environment. You are under all sorts of different kinds of pressures at work and on a project than you are when you're just hanging out with somebody who's a friend and it can create a lot of strain on the relationship, that the relationship might simply not be built to hold that kind of stress and that kind of strain.
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Speaker 1
So don't assume that just because you get along really well as friends, that you're going to be great collaborators as well. Another thing too, that
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Speaker 1
happens with, bringing on friends to work on a project or teaming up with a friend is there's kind of this assumption that no one's going to screw each other over.
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Speaker 1
That's a completely invalid assumption.
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Speaker 1
You don't know that. I have seen so many times, not just on my projects, but, and friends projects where they all go in is really close, even best friends. And by the end of the project, there's lawyers involved and maybe even a lawsuit involved. So I know that sounds crazy, but it's also crazy to make film and television.
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Speaker 1
It really pushes you to your limit in terms of stress, and you're going to see people at their most stressed. You're going to see them when they're at the limit of their patience or at the limit of their physical energy, their mental energy and when you see people at their worst, you really get to know them. You probably haven't seen them at their worst before or not in this context anyway.
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Speaker 1
So I think that regardless of whether you're working with a friend or just somebody random that you were referred to, you're going to want to really paper your dynamic for this project. You're going to want to get a contract and that contract needs to be robust, and it needs to cover all of the contingencies and all of the eventualities about working with this person
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Speaker 1
so that you don't find yourself in a situation where there's it's not spelled out on paper, like what to do if you get to this certain problem and you have no plan and you're both feeling the strain of like emotional bonds and not wanting to maybe offend the other person, but
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Speaker 1
also feeling resentful because you have been potentially screwed over in this dynamic. So
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Speaker 1
I think
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Speaker 1
you're going to want a contract regardless of who you bring onto your projects and who you decide to work with. If you are working with friends that goes double. If you want to be friends at the end of this. So treat your friends like their business partners so that you can remain friends.
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Speaker 1
I've unfortunately lost a couple of friends over the years that I've worked with. Only a couple. I mean, for the most part, people want to work with me again. How do I know? Because they do come onto my projects again. But I feel sad about the friendships that I've lost. And, you know, some of them I probably could pursue to try and pull it back.
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Speaker 1
But, I don't know that I want to. I think
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Speaker 1
stress that we endured together sort of left a scar. And I'm fine to, you know, to just work with different people on the next one. There are certainly no shortage of talented, amazing artists out there.
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Speaker 1
and you see it up at the top, too, like, I still remember the story about World War Z, the zombie movie.
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Speaker 1
I love zombie movies. It's one of my favorite genres, but starred Brad Pitt and huge budget. I mean, if you saw it, it's like a global zombie movie.
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Speaker 1
And the behind the scenes gossip is that I think plan B was involved, that Brad Pitt's production company. So he was coming on as a producer and as a star. It's a very often a vehicle that stars will use to stuff made.
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Speaker 1
But
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Speaker 1
by the end of the film, Brad Pitt and the director were at such loggerheads and so, just unhappy with each other that they had to have somebody speak between them so they weren't even talking to each other.
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Speaker 1
And Brad was the lead of this film. The director could not talk to him, and Brad would not talk to the director. And if someone translate between them and as a director, I can't imagine how much time and effort that adds to a production day to have to
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Speaker 1
go between somebody and your star. So anyway, it happens all the way up to the very top, where collaborators just don't get along or stop getting along.
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Speaker 1
yeah, I can tell you, I can tell you some stories and maybe it'll shed some light on, what to avoid in the future.
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Speaker 1
I know that,
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Speaker 1
you know, over the past ten years, I had all sorts of different collaborators, many of them great, and many of them still friends. And, you know, I love them dearly.
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Speaker 1
I can think of a couple times where I came in to direct something,
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Speaker 1
and
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Speaker 1
it wasn't my initial idea. And mostly where we got into trouble was in post, like the delineation of who was supposed to do what during production. It was a little more like straightforward. Me, the director, my job is to direct the movie and like, I'm very boundary about that.
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Speaker 1
You know, I'm not going to let somebody horn in on my my job as a director. I'm like super clear on what my job responsibilities are and how to do them. And yeah, just like not going to let someone directed for me. So I'm really boundary about that. But where why got into trouble on these couple of projects was then in the post-production.
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Speaker 1
We didn't super have as clear a plan in the contract of how to handle post, and I think on 1 or 2 of them, I gave away my final cut.
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Speaker 1
Now, really, no self-respecting director should do that. If you're the director, especially if you're not making a lot of money, it's your vision. You get to have final cut on the edit.
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Speaker 1
But at the indie level, some of these are like really passion projects for the person who came up with the original idea. So they don't want to give away final cut. So that's something that you should talk about and figure out
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Speaker 1
before you even write the script. In my opinion, like before you do any pre-production, you should just be really clear about
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Speaker 1
are we going to go about post?
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Speaker 1
Who's going to be in charge of it?
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Speaker 1
How are we going to delegate that work? Because also, another thing that I find as a director is that
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Speaker 1
a lot of times producers are great in production and then in post-production they vanish. And then I'm left like watching the film, I don't know, 250 times for the various tracks of edit color, sound, music, VFX and after a while like, I can't really see it anymore.
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Speaker 1
So I need producers who can watch it and stick around post not only to like, give notes on the different rounds of posts that we have, because I can't. After a while, I can't see or hear anymore. Like I've just seen it too much to to be able to to judge what it needs, but also to keep me motivated, to keep the director
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Speaker 1
thinking like, is this even worth moving forward?
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Speaker 1
have one project in particular where
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Speaker 1
we shot it in 2023. Here it is 2026. Three years later, I'm actually going to finish a new cut of it,
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Speaker 1
but all of the producers have vanished. I think there was like four and I can't get a hold of any of them anymore. So,
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Speaker 1
you want to be clear in that contract, how are we handling post?
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Speaker 1
Who's going to stick around for what,
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Speaker 1
who's responsible for what and who gets what creative say? It doesn't mean they're going to do what the contract says,
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Speaker 1
but it sure is helpful to have it written down somewhere and be able to point to a piece of paper and say, hey, legally, you're supposed to do this. You'd be surprised at how often just pointing to that piece of paper becomes really, really necessary.
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Speaker 1
And I'm even thinking of one time
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Speaker 1
in the past couple of years where
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Speaker 1
there was early on, there was
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Speaker 1
an outline generated by a creator that I was working with. I was a director, and I forgot about the outline. And a year and a half later, when we were finally making the film,
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Speaker 1
I needed to be reminded that they had generated the initial outline, which means they get some type of writing credit, and I completely forgot.
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Speaker 1
And I looked like a terrible jerk.
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Speaker 1
or just like dishonest or, you know, sketchy. I looked really bad for forgetting that they had generated the outline. No, it took them a while to, like, send me the outline because I forgot. And they they didn't feel that they had to send it to me to remind me.
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Speaker 1
But ultimately they were like, look, here it is. They wrote the outline. I was like, that's right. You did write the initial outline. I wrote the second outline, right? So
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Speaker 1
that's one example of like the more documentation you have of really everything, the better it's going to go for everybody.
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Speaker 1
Let's talk about rounds of scripts. So if you are writing the project as well and you know you've been hired like a work for hire and maybe it's an independent production, you want to be clear about how many rounds you're going to be delivering. And it's not bad to put a number on it.
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Speaker 1
You can go beyond that number if you want, but it's good to say, okay,
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Speaker 1
I'm going to deliver this maximum
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Speaker 1
amount of rounds on the script, and that's what I'm going to be paid for,
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Speaker 1
just so that you're not rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, you know, into eternity. And there's nothing you can do. Like, you're kind of a slave to the producers who are just making you do as many rounds as they want, or, you know, the director or whoever.
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Speaker 1
So you want to kind of boundary the amount of rewrites that you promise of yourself.
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Speaker 1
You can also
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Speaker 1
as the
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Speaker 1
writer director or, you know, if you if you're a producer on the project, too, depending on what your role is
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Speaker 1
on the project, you can insist on having a say in the writing.
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Speaker 1
So for the most part, I don't take on films or shows anymore unless I can do what's called a director's pass.
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Speaker 1
And this is, pass on the script that's close to the final draft. So we're getting close to production, where I, as the director, can go through and do a quality check on the script and maybe brush some things up, clarify some jokes, you know, make sure that the characters are
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Speaker 1
developing in the way that I need them to in order to get to the final product that I have in mind.
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Speaker 1
And if they don't want me to do a director's pass, I'm like, why? Why wouldn't you want, like, a better version of your film? These changes can be negotiable. But yeah, I think that if someone doesn't want to let me do a director's pass
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Speaker 1
on their project, I. I kind of see that as a red flag. Unless they're really paying me.
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Speaker 1
If they're if they're paying me enough, then I will do whatever they say. But I haven't gotten access to those kind of jobs yet.
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Speaker 1
I can think of one example
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Speaker 1
where
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Speaker 1
I was working on this comedic project and comedy. The writing is really important because you have to get the jokes in, and I worked with them at length on the script to improve it.
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Speaker 1
By the time I was done with it, I think I had done five drafts of like writing and rewriting with her alone, and it was actually like, pretty funny. By the time I was done. And then she was like, I just want to do one more pass on it before we go into pre-production
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Speaker 1
she's like, I just want to tweak a couple things.
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Speaker 1
And I remember she took a nine page script and made it a 14 page script, so she increased
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Speaker 1
that by more than 50% in length. And
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Speaker 1
the jokes got lengthened and like there was a lot more air. It wasn't as tight. There was some weird stuff in it after that.
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Speaker 1
So I was like, okay, for this tiny budget amount, to add five pages and for you to not understand that that's a huge problem for a production like this just isn't this isn't going to work. Plus you just casually, like overnight rewrote almost everything that I had done over the past five drafts. So yeah, at that point I just walked away.
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Speaker 1
We had a contract we had put in writing, like I was obligated to direct this thing for her, and she was obligated to move forward with me. But we were both like, we don't really want to work with each other anymore. She didn't like what I was doing. I didn't like what she did. So even though we had a contract, we're like, great, goodbye.
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Speaker 1
We're just going to go our separate ways and never speak of it again.
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Speaker 1
I wish her well. I hope she shot it and hope it was good and funny. And, you know, with comedy too, like you could find something on the day that is completely not in the script. That is much better than what is in the script, just because that's the magic that the actors bring on the set on that day.
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Speaker 1
So who knows, maybe that happened in like, my stinky old script was totally unnecessary. I don't know, but in this case, I would call them a difficult collaborator, and she would probably call me the same.
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Speaker 1
that's it brings up a good point, though, what to do when someone is in violation of their contract. Well, that can look a lot of different ways.
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Speaker 1
I don't think you want to go to court. Going to court is not fun. It's very stressful. It's expensive. Most lawyers cost a lot of money. Some cost a lot of money. And it just takes up a lot of mental bandwidth and emotional bandwidth. It's like you end up losing so much money because of the lost time to go to court.
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Speaker 1
So I want to avoid court if at all possible. I've never been to court. I don't want to start now. Although I think it when to reach a certain amount of success, it's inevitable because people think you have money, so they want to sue you anyway. If someone violates your contract, there's a couple of things that you can do.
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Speaker 1
First of all, you can just politely and kindly tell them
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Speaker 1
that? What is happening is not what's in the contract, and sometimes they just need to be reminded of that. Like don't go straight to the red,
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Speaker 1
just politely remind them that
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Speaker 1
as per the contract,
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Speaker 1
you need to follow a certain, you know, protocol.
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Speaker 1
As per the contract, you're going to you're supposed to do things a certain way. That's not how they're getting done right now. So they need to change their behavior so that the contract is honored.
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Speaker 1
So that's step number one.
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Speaker 1
If they ignore you or if they disrespect you when you try to bring that to their attention,
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Speaker 1
the next step is to get a friend who is a lawyer or get your lawyer, or have some sort of legal counsel, on the email chain, and you can just say, hey, I'm following up on this.
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Speaker 1
My lawyer's on the chain. Or such and such legal counsel is on the chain. I really don't want to have to escalate this. So, you know, just reminding you that this is not what the contract states. If you're a crew, there's certain labor unions that I think you can contact. I mean, definitely if you're in the union, you can go that route.
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Speaker 1
If it's a SAG production, you can complain to SAG if it's like actor related.
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Speaker 1
yeah, you can complain to certain labor boards within your city or state, about certain organizations, like if they're not paying you, for example. And you can also take to social media a lot of directors, producers, production companies, studios, they're really scared of getting bad press and getting bad,
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Speaker 1
shout outs on social media and getting flamed.
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Speaker 1
So, you know, just like anything else, like frickin Delta or Airbnb or H&R block or whatever, you have a bad experience. Like you can go on social media and say, hey, this person I don't know hasn't paid me in nine months for the work that I did and I'd really like to be paid. Has does anyone have any advice or has anyone had experience working with them that can work?
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Speaker 1
So that's like a social pressure campaign.
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Speaker 1
There was one thing that happened recently where, an editor who I really, really like and I considered a friend,
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Speaker 1
I decided to after he did a couple of rounds with a project, I decided to hire a new editor. And, you know, the editors just weren't getting into festivals. So,
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Speaker 1
which I was so disappointed by.
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Speaker 1
Like, I didn't blame him. I actually blamed myself for not being able to guide the edit better. But anyway, when he found out that I was going to hire a new editor, he
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Speaker 1
I believe he got upset. I don't know, because I just stopped responding to my emails and my my texts, which was really unlike him. But after like 3 or 4 months of me consistently asking him to return the hard drives with the film on it, and these were not cheap hard drives.
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Speaker 1
He was not responding. I finally did the lawyer thing with the email, and then I also said, I'm going to need the hard drives back, or I'm going to file a police report on Monday.
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Speaker 1
And he wrote back, I think within the hour. So,
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Speaker 1
yeah, that's just it's just a tough situation, you know, it's like we're not really paid enough
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Speaker 1
to for any of these conversations, like an indie film. Like no one's really getting paid that much, so you end up putting your heart into it because that's all that you're getting out of.
00;21;04;14 - 00;21;25;26
Speaker 1
It is like your connection to the material and your connection to your collaborators. And that's why these difficult collaborators, like they hit so hard sometimes with indie film, because it's like, that's all you have is a connection. You're making like ten bucks a day, if that, you know, on some of these things, as a creative. So.
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Speaker 1
It can be really tough when these kinds of relationships go south.
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Speaker 1
And in a way, a lot of times at the higher levels, it's like you're paid so much that you end up just viewing it as a job. You're not so concerned with the relational dynamics. It's like you're paid to not care, you're paid to do your job and not care. But yeah, at the indie film level, that is just usually not the case.
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Speaker 1
So you end up with like less pay, more stress, more conflict, and, you know, sometimes a film that isn't even done because of some of the issues that I, that I've spoken about, many indie projects are never completed. And that was part of why I pushed forward that that one that had the it needed the new edit because I was like, damn, if I'm going to be one of those directors that has an unfinished film sitting in the can that's never seen the light of day, and it's because I am too scared to have one conversation, one hard, granted, hard, scary conversation.
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Speaker 1
But really, I'm going to let this film die because I'm not willing to have a hard conversation. No.
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Speaker 1
And now I'm super happy with the new editor. So anyway, I hope these examples are helpful to you. And inspiring. Not too scary. And if any of this was helpful to you, I would love to hear from you. We get a lot of listeners to the show and a lot of downloads, but rarely do I get people DMing me being like, hey, you know, I took your advice on this thing and it worked.
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Speaker 1
So I don't know if any of this works for you guys. I want to hear from you. DM me. I'm at there on Instagram
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Speaker 1
You can DM the team as well at Club Vermilion on Instagram and we're on YouTube as well on my page. Misha there. But yeah, these are some of the difficult collaborators that I worked with over the years.
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Speaker 1
And I hope that you never have to deal with anything like this. Your path forward, be clear and full of perfect collaboration. Always see you next week.
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Speaker 1
The Vermillion Podcast is sponsored by Vermillion, a home for artists. We offer classes, coaching and community for creatives and innovators in the arts. If you're ready to find your voice and build the life of your dreams, we are here to support you every step of the way. Check out Club vermillion.com and schedule a free call today.
