My best friend fear!

Courage does not exist without fear. Fear is actually good. It is needed in life. The mark of a character is not to eliminate fear, but to face it. How you face it defines you.

Fear is much more of a player in filmmaking. It is a highly subjective field, it has a lot of ambiguity and there is no rule book. It is like wild wild west! For example, you get a thought about a story. It might start from a character, a moral value, a visual, a sound byte. For Boni (my current film) the thought was I need a story that can be shot in a small budget and that can get a Hero excited. Honestly that is how it started. At that point, you have no idea as to how it will shape up. You don’t know if that can conjure up enough meat to make a story, characters, songs, fights, fun and entertainment. And the journey of writing could take a year. There is a lot of fear here.

The key thing is you have to train with fear. Imagine Fear is your trainer/ gym partner. He is not your opponent. He better be your friend. He is a friend who has a different point of view. He is there not to stop you but he is there to inform you, help you train, become stronger and finally act. This process is defined as courage. I think in our society fear is treated as negative. I believe that fear is an opportunity for growth. It is a great catalyst to help us take leaps of faith.

Fear is also dependent on information/ knowledge. The more information you have about a process/ job/ the less the fear. So, information reduces fear. But, a lot of magic in life happens when you act on something where you do not have the needed information. The more information you try to get or wait for, the magic tends to diminish. The general tendency is to kill fear with information/ knowledge or stick to what is available. This is also what is prevalent with society and in systems, including the film world.

The reason why anything new takes time or a radically different approach is because, the general system in place will always take an approach to minimize fear. Minimizing fear means taking choices that have more information available to you. This means that you will slowly fall more and more into areas that are tried and tested. Which is why you will take a “different” that is “new” and force it into an existing paradigm. So, at the end it looks like what already exists. Somewhere here if you have made broad stroke decisions that are “different”, then your difference will survive. If your “difference” is in the details then you are SOL (shit out of luck)!

So, in your journeys of life, marriage, friendships, creative endeavors, you need people who are willing to operate in the same space of fear as you. Then you are on the threshold of creating magic!

This reminds of a quote of Martin Luther King. I am badly paraphrasing it here. “We as humans are not afraid of what we cannot do, we are actually afraid of the magic we can do”

We grapple and try to minimize the ambiguity and in the process shrink the world we live, the world we explore, the world we can create.

When you make a film, fear cannot be your trainer, an acquaintance or a friend. It has to be your best friend. Wait, when you wanna live life to the max, fear has to be your best friend!