I Said No Twice Before I Said Yes
A note before you start. This one comes with a song called “Two Words,” written as a companion to the essay. Listen first and let it set the room, or read first and let the song land after. Either order works. Both are short.
When I asked who wanted to work in the film business someday, I expected a forest of hands. Twenty-Five teenagers, the first morning of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Teen Film Camp, all of them there because they applied to be. This had to be a room full of future directors and editors and cinematographers.
Two hands went up.
These were fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen-year-olds. Beautifully bouncy, gloriously distracted, the kind of room where confidence shows up and disappears on a ten-minute cycle. You can’t lecture a group like that. You have to show them something they can feel.
And the thing I most needed them to feel had nothing to do with a camera. In a few days, they would be making films in crews of three and four. Four teenagers, four people each privately sure their idea is the one that should win. Whether that crew makes one good film or four half-films nobody finishes comes down to something smaller than talent. It comes down to how they answer each other.
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The Circle
So we didn’t start with gear. We stood in a circle outside, and one at a time we tapped the shoulder of the person beside us, held their eyes, and said three words. “I’ve got your back.” Then we threw an imaginary ball around the circle until a banana and a frog joined it and the whole thing fell apart laughing. Both were the same lesson, wearing different clothes. Pay attention to the person across from you, or you drop the frog. Presence first.
No But, Yes But, Yes And
Back inside, I gave them three ways to answer a pitch. No but. Yes but. Yes and. Then I asked a team leader to stand up and pitch me the movie his crew was about to make.
He got a sentence in and I no-butted him. It’s been done, I said. The budget won’t cover it. The lead should be older. Every door shut before he reached it, and he slowed, then stopped, the way you do when you realize the person across from you was only waiting for a gap to say no.
I told him to start over, and this time I was generous. I nodded, I smiled, I yes-butted him. Yes, that’s interesting, but what if the ending changed? Yes, I love that, but the lead should really be older. By the third soft agreement, his idea wasn’t his anymore. I’d agreed with every word and walked off with the whole thing. That one is worse because it looks like collaboration while doing the same damage, and it’s the one that runs most of the meetings I’ve ever sat in.
Then I told him to pitch me one more time, and I said yes and. He gave me a kid who finds something. I said yes, and the thing he finds is alive. He came back fast, yes, and it’s been waiting for him. Yes, I said, and it knows his name. And he was off, both of us building the same thing in the air between us, the idea getting bigger every time it changed hands. He didn’t stop when he ran out of pitch. I had to tell him we were done.
He sat back down buoyant. You could see it on him from across the room, that lit-up thing a kid does when something he made got bigger instead of getting taken. I asked the room what was different about the three. They knew. Same pitch, same kid. The only thing that changed was the two words I chose to meet him with.
No-but kills a room fast, and everyone watches it happen. The slow killer is yes-but, dressed up as agreement. Yes-and is the only one of the three that leaves people with more than they walked in carrying.
That is the whole game on a set. No-but kills a room fast, and everyone watches it happen. The slow killer is yes-but, dressed up as agreement, which is exactly why it survives in rooms where no-but would get you thrown out. And yes-and is the only one of the three that leaves people with more than they walked in carrying. Being nice has nothing to do with it. Yes-and keeps an idea alive long enough to find out what it wants to be.
Everything I put them through that morning was improv, the same games I play on a stage on the weekends. Yes-and is its first rule. It turns out to be the first rule of any room where people are trying to make one thing together.
Intention
Once an idea is alive, you can ask the harder question, so I asked it. How do you want people to feel when they walk out of your film? That one landed like a foreign language. They’d been thinking about the shot and the gear and the cool idea, which is to say they’d been thinking about themselves. Almost none of them had pictured the person on the other end of the work. Yes-and is what carries a crew across that gap, because you can’t build toward a stranger’s feeling while you’re still guarding your own pitch.
Five Days
The clock on them was brutal. Five days to make a five-minute film, shot on iPhones, cut on laptops, every crew teaching itself to direct, light, cast, edit, and produce all at once, the whole thing due in front of their parents on Friday night. Under that kind of compression, talent is not what saves you. The crews that finish are the ones who can answer each other with yes-and. The ones stuck in no-but and yes-but spend five days defending pitches and screen a mess on Friday, if they screen anything at all.
The Back of the Book
Then I turned the intention inward. I gave them one quiet minute and a single instruction. Write down how you want to feel at the end of this week. Keep it private, in the back of the book where nobody will see it. And when the week gets hard, when you are stressed or sure your film is falling apart, open the book and read your own words back to yourself. I know that one works. I have watched it work on me for years.
Write down how you want to feel at the end of the week. When it gets hard, open the book and read your own words back to yourself.
Their films screened for their parents last Friday night, five days after almost none of them would raise a hand for a job in the credits. The films matter to me less than what got written in the back of those books, and what happened to the kid who felt yes-and work on him in front of everyone. That is the lesson I hope outlasts the week and the month and most of what they think they came here to learn. It is why I make the drive up to the Whittier Ranch every year.
Listen to “Two Words [https://suno.com/s/asGl74bQlICDdE2X]” on Suno
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