KIM TAI-SIK (director, co-writer, Driving With My Wife’s Lover)

Every moment might be a risk. For me the biggest risk was financing. The KOFIC (Korean Film Council, a government organization) promised to provide half of the production cost, and one of the Japanese companies promised to provide another half, which I believed, so I started shooting the film. However, due to financial difficulties of the Japanese company, I was able to get only half of the funds they promised. This caused some risks while making the film, and it finally brought a breakdown to the whole schedule. As a result, I am now in debt and facing a crisis of livelihood. In the midst of incessant crisis, I managed to finish making the film but faced another crisis in the process of editing. Due to insufficient scenes and schedules of actors/actresses while making the film, the postproduction was not easy. However, after five months of the pain and the crisis, the film could meet the world.

EVA MULVAD (co-director, Enemies of Happiness)

Farah, in the southwest of Afghanistan,
September 2005: These are days of apprehension, and apprehension creates distance. The nights become hostile. People reveal intentions they may or may not have. The enemy is abstract but feels real. The enemy could be everyone and no one. It is all in your head. Car lights shine on rifles. I yearn to leave this place.

The film Enemies of Happiness was made in spite of this apprehension: our apprehension for being in Afghanistan and Malalai Joya’s (the main character) apprehension for her own life as she was running for parliament. This film was made to tell another story from one of the world’s most talked-about regions: Afghanistan. The stories we hear from these war zones are always full of bombs, torture and terrorists. We wanted to tell a story full of hope.

How does the story we choose to tell affect our world? The great “mono-narrative” has to be broadened. We need more dimensions, more voices so that we can create our own opinions, our own sense of awareness about what is really happening in the world —especially when it comes to Islam.

It is not about villains who lurk outside awaiting us. The world is more than that — it is full of everyday people who fight everyday battles for their own and others right to life, dream and be happy. Muslims are not a monolithic villainous entity just like we in the West are not. We can understand each other. There are many who profit from making us think that we cannot. But in them we cannot believe. They create our apprehension for the world and each other, an apprehension that leads to distance. 

The greatest risk is to believe in that picture of the world.

JULIEN TEMPLE (director, JOE STRUMMER: THE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN)

I suppose the greatest risk I took with The Future Is Unwritten was making a film about a close friend. There are probably a million ways to make a film about someone’s life, and those choices become infinitely more difficult to make when you both love and admire your subject. You don’t want to “big him up” too much and make a fan movie, but equally you want to avoid overdoing the “putting down” part. Truly hard choices ensue.

But what the hell, who said it was meant to be easy? Cinema is all about taking risks, and so was Joe’s life. Just to make extra sure the risk factor was at the center of everything we did, we lit the whole thing with firelight and crossed our fingers it would come out all right.

STEPHEN BERRA (writer-director, The Good Life)

I knew going into The Good Life that I was risking my whole life as I knew it.

I’ve been a successful professional skateboarder for 15 years and have been supported by many, many young people who pay hard-earned money by way of temporary, menial jobs for products bearing my name on it. I’ve also been supported by the companies who make these products. So it was those two groups I was most concerned about, and those two groups I was risking my relationship with when I made the decision to make the movie. But it was a risk I had to take for a few reasons: movies are extremely hard to get made, so one needs to take the opportunity when it is presented; and even more than that, I really believed in The Good Life’s overall communication. Now that’s it’s finished, I still believe in it.

I have a great cast that did an unbelievable job. They were there, in the trenches, making no money, risking their time and reputation on me and my story, and this was something I was acutely aware of, sometimes at the cost of my sanity — it all really boiled down to me and whether or not I was going to be able to pull this off. Do I risk the investors’ money they could have sent their kids to college with? Do I risk Mark Webber hating me for having to be in every frame of this thing, not getting paid overtime and basically being my anchor in this experience? Do I risk my own reputation as a pro athlete and have kids across the world fling comments at me like, “You should have stuck to jumping down stairs!” Or do I risk movie people taking jabs at me like, “You should have stuck with your day job!”

These things, they kept me up at night while shooting and editing. They tortured me. I thought, If I don’t make this thing come out right, my life as I’ve known it is over. But I had to take the risk. I had to. And after I did, I realized everything seems to be a risk in some way or another for everyone involved with filmmaking, from Tom Cruise down to people like myself making small movies. I guess the key is taking the proper steps to minimize the risk, and to that I guess there are only two things I can say: get a good cast and crew, and kill yourself to make it happen. It’s worth it.

JAMES C. STROUSE (writer-director, Grace Is Gone)

I’d say just trying to make a movie in the first place is a big risk.  It takes a lot of time and effort and requires so many people to work very hard for, at least in indie film, little money. You really want that to count for something at the end of the day. So I think that’s a risk everyone who has a film at the festival has taken. But the biggest risk I took that’s specific to my own film was casting two girls with almost no acting experience as co-leads with John Cusack. I auditioned tons of young actresses. But the girls I ended up casting (Shélan O’Keefe and Gracie Bednarczyk) had never done anything on camera before. I was really anxious about that. Looking back I’m really glad I didn’t cast for “experience” because it gave us the opportunity to figure out how to create the performances together. And the girls didn’t have any baggage or bad habits because it was all so completely new to them.

CRAIG ZOBEL (director-co-writer, The Great World of Sound)

The Great World of Sound is about “song sharking” — a scam in the music industry where dubious record producers audition musical acts and then convince the musicians to hand over money by promising to make them famous. In the scenes showing the scam, I was eager to capture that feeling you get when dealing with people working high-pressure commission jobs, such as car salesmen. To achieve this frank, uncomfortable feeling, I decided to shoot the music audition scenes with real musicians in as natural and unscripted a way as possible. So, the biggest risk that confronted me was attempting to shoot these scenes with real people and hidden cameras.

The initial risk was just making sure my collaborators would be on the same page as me about what I was trying to do during these hidden camera sequences: “You mean like a documentary.” “Well, no, not really,” “Oh. Like a mockumentary, then?” “Um, no. Definitely not a mockumentary. More like a reality show, I guess. But, it should still feel like a feature. I want it to be as seamless as possible when we go in and out of the traditional narrative.”

But as we started production, I realized that I’d presented myself with even bigger issues. What if I don’t get what I need, in terms of plot? What if it’s just a bunch of weird scenes that don’t further the story? What if the actors have trouble improvising once they are in a room with these real people?

I wasn’t really worried about the actors’ talents because I already very much loved and admired them. But then again, I was asking them to play rather antagonistic roles opposite people who didn’t yet know they were also in a movie. It was highly erratic and sometimes volatile — at one point there were a couple of big, angry heavy metal dudes who could’ve actually hurt lead actors Pat Healy and Kene Holliday if they’d wanted.

All independent films are definitely unpredictable, but shooting these sequences was some sort of high water mark of unpredictability. Adam Stone, our d.p., eventually stopped bothering to even discuss the movie in film terms. He just referred to it as “our weird social experiment.” But for me, the risks paid off. Our weird social experiment taught all of us much more about the world we were trying to comment on. And we had more fun than I could have ever imagined.

IRENE TAYLOR BROSKY (writer-director, Hear and Now)

The biggest risk was and continues to be that I’ll disappoint my family. My film is about them, and there wasn’t a week that went by in the last two years of making it that I haven’t had a petrified moment of “Will I finish this? And what will I ultimately have to say?” 

There’s no big secret I’m telling my audience, but still...I am ‘outing’ my mother and my father. I show their vulnerabilities, and I say things in the film that I’ve never told them directly.   

I’m also creating a historical record that will forever affect the way people perceive my parents. My grandchildren will ask, “Who were your parents?” Presumably, this is what I will have to show them. 

The risk of getting it all wrong has motivated me all along to get it right.

And did I get the story right?  I’ll show the film to mom and dad, and let you know. 

XIAOLU GUO (director-co-writer, HOW IS YOUR FISH TODAY?)

It’s a creative risk. It’s like the whole film crew took drugs and nobody can tell what is reality and what is fiction. We used documentary methods to approach a fictionalized reality but the story was completely based on a real character who played himself in the film. This film is about a Chinese writer’s inner journey in a chaotic reality, and the writer- -— who is a real person — is also the best friend of the film crew. This risk created an unpredictable and no-one-knows-what-tomorrow-will-be-like kind of filming situation. The most exciting filming experience we had so far.

GEORGE RATLIFF (director-co-writer, Joshua)

The biggest risk I took was when I pressed to have the first day of production be the most difficult day of the shoot. It was a silly idea that was designed to set a precedent of doing good work fast that would allow me to make the complex movie I had in mind within an extremely short schedule. But the idea did have the downside of potentially devastating crew morale (if not tanking the production entirely). The good news about my plan was that we would all know whether our movie had any promise at all after only one day.

I even went so far as to take a page out of Sydney Lumet’s book and declared we were “moving on” after only one take of a scene on that first day. The idea was to give the crew and the cast the impression that you’re just crazy enough to work without a safety net so they had better make every take count. It worked, but I never dared do it again.

JASON KOHN (director, Manda Bala (Send A Bullet))

I hadn’t yet tried writing out any of the production war stories, but while making Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), there were at least a few times when my personal safety (and that of the crew) was at risk.  I think it kind of goes with the territory when you interview corrupt and violent politicians and homicidal kidnappers in developing countries like Brazil.  The most dramatic story was during my interview with the kidnapper “Magrinho,” a man who has killed as well as tortured many of his victims. I found him through a family friend in São Paulo (another long story in itself), and when he agreed to be interviewed, he had already threatened that if anyone were to identify him through this interview, he was going to kill the family of my contact friend who put us in touch. Since it was already somewhat risky and tense just being in his house, the situation became increasingly scary when the police arrived at his front door and Magrinho told us all to stand still and not make a sound. In the closed circuit security system Magrinho had set up in his favella I saw the police were armed and walking right outside the front door. There was a long standoff as the police circled the house and Magrinho stood, loaded gun in hand and ready to exchange fire had the police decided to enter.  There was no film in the camera, I thought we were going to die and then the police decided to leave as they were hoping to pick him up on the street and extort him for money. The story is slightly longer but that’s most of the good stuff.  Anyway, I hope that’s what you were looking for.  

BILLY LUTHER (director, Miss Navajo)

MISS NAVAJO is about a young woman competing in a beauty pageant, and I chose to follow a quiet, shy, introverted contestant: in other words the complete opposite of what you might expect to see either in a film about a beauty pageant or even in a documentary, because we rarely, if ever, see characters like her in film. We usually see the loud and crazy ones. And so all along everyone — from my executive producers to ITVS and even my crew — were wondering if I had made the right choice. And even I began to wonder myself. It was only in the edit room that I could see that actually I had made the right choice; Crystal unfolds as a unique and strong character who really becomes a woman in the course of the film, which is what the film is all about. So, sometimes you have to go with your gut even if it’s the exact opposite of what everyone else thinks — even you!

DAN STURMAN & BILL GUTTENTAG (co-writers-directors, Nanking)

We wanted to come up with an innovative approach to telling a historical story — and in doing so, we took some risks in how the drama in the film would unfold. Our idea was to create a stage reading for the film featuring actors reading from the letters and journals of our actual characters, none of whom are still alive. The words our actors speak are real and pack enormous drama. The stage reading was then woven into the fabric of the film, which also includes interviews with Chinese survivors, Japanese soldiers, and historical footage. Our fear was that the stage reading, featuring actors on a soundstage, wouldn’t cut with everything else, making for an incoherent mess...our hope is that we have found an innovative way to tell an extremely powerful story.

MATTHEW SAVILLE (writer-director, Noise)

One of the many great attractions of filmmaking is that it is, by definition an exercise in risk taking.

For me, the greatest risks were taken during the development of the film. During this time we ignored good, solid, watertight advice from intelligent, experienced people who had only our best interests at heart. They simply wanted to help us get the money to make the film. Nevertheless, we ignored them and cast relative unknowns and retained the melancholic ending. We didn’t reduce the projected budget by agreeing to shoot on videotape. We retained the dialogue, despite the fact that it was riddled with Australian colloquialisms.

Because of this, it took eight years to finance the film. But on that long, narrow path, we came upon bold, considerate, uncompromising people with a passion for the medium and its possibilities. They helped us along our way, and gave us the courage to trust our own instincts. I feel fortunate to count them as my friends and trusted colleagues.

Their names fill the end credits of the film.

ROD LURIE (director–co-writer, RESURRECTING THE CHAMP)

Sam Jackson has a rule when he takes on a movie. I didn’t know about it before we hired him to star in Resurrecting the Champ, but retrospectively, it should have been obvious. Here is what it is: he changes his look for every movie that he is in. Think about it. He’s bald in the Star Wars films, he has that Frederick Douglass thing going in Unbreakable, the Afro in Pulp Fiction and so on. He has a makeup wizard named Allan A. Apone and a hair/wig specialist in Robert Stevenson, and they get together before each film and kind of figure out what to do with the new character they have been presented with.

Now, I am not sure you can call this a directorial risk, but there is a certain amount of trust that you have to hand over when you hire Sam.

I had been involved with this film off and on for almost eight years. When the project was at its most nascent stage, another actor, who at the time was also serving as a producer on the film, was going to play the role of the Champ. This actor was quite a bit older than Sam and brought his own reputation and bearing to the project. (I don’t mean to be coy by not mentioning names — just polite.) In other words, I had imagined this other fellow in the role for so long that it was difficult to dislodge him from my mind.

Now, here comes Sam. With his own ideas of how the character should be presented.

The look that Sam came up with was at odds with everything I had ever imagined. That included a full head of hair in dreadlocks. That included a road map of scars on his face. That included a voice that was high pitched and scratchy. That included a layering of wardrobe that included long robes. That included a kind of middle ground between a shuffle and a jog.

It’s not like I didn’t have any say in what he was creating. Sam showed me what he was doing step by step. It was just that, well, I trusted him more than I trusted myself. Sam is such a meticulous preparer that I assumed that he would quickly know this character better than I did. So even if something seemed extreme to me, I settled into the faith that Sam Jackson would get it right. As usual. I suppose this is how John Schlesinger felt with Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy or how Zemeckis felt with Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump.

Of course, the end result is what it is: a brilliant Sam Jackson performance that obliterates his iconography. It’s really all you can ask for.

ANTHONY HOPKINS (writer-director, Slipstream)

Everything is a risk, and a challenge, but you can’t get caught up in worrying about all that stuff!

GREGG ARAKI (director, Smiley Face)

After the amazing critical and public reception of my last film, Mysterious Skin, I suppose it could be viewed by some as risky to defy expectation and make a stoner comedy. I loved Mysterious Skin so much and am so proud of that movie, but after doing something so dark and serious, I was really looking to do something completely different. A totally new creative challenge.

Much like Scott Heim’s novel, Mysterious Skin, I first read Dylan Haggerty’s script for Smiley Face years ago, and it really stuck with me – only instead of making me cry it made me laugh out loud. I fell in love with the characters and the writing, and it told a unique, original story with such spirit that I really wanted to bring it to the screen. Smiley may be 180 degrees opposite in tone from Mysterious Skin, but it’s a movie that I feel no less passionate and excited about. I’ve always been one to follow my gut instinct and I knew that I had to make this film. No matter what.