The minute you start the process of deciding to make a film and you're communicating that vision to anyone, you're in the process of selling. If you don't understand that, you're not in show business. You're just not.
Interpretation
Creating a film involves both artistic vision and the ability to sell that vision to others.
This quote highlights the dual nature of filmmaking, where the creative process begins simultaneously with the need to communicate and sell that vision to others. Peter Guber emphasizes that understanding the selling aspect is essential for anyone involved in the film industry, as it directly connects oneβs artistry to the broader commercial landscape of show business.
In practice
In a film industry seminar discussing the importance of marketing films.
Beside every great success are the seeds of enormous failure. In every failure, there's the opportunity seeds of great success. They're not miles apart. So if they're that close together, and if you're really working, you're always gonna have that likelihood that something's not going to work.
Stories aren't the icing on the cake; they are the cake!
In any situation that calls for you to persuade, convince or manage someone or a group of people to do something, the ability to tell a purposeful story will be your secret sauce. Telling to win through purposeful stories is situation, industry, gender, demographic, and psychographic-agnostic. It's an all-purpose, everyone wins tool.
Today everyone, whether they know it or not, is in the emotional transportation business. More and more, success is won by creating compelling stories that have the power to move people to action. Simply put, if you canβt tell it, you canβt sell it.
Telling purposeful stories is interactive. It's not a monolog. Ultimately, purposeful tellers must surrender control of their stories, creating a gap for the listener(s) to willingly cross in order to take ownership. Only when the listener(s) own the tellers' story and make it theirs, will they virally market it.
Miss the audience's heart as a filmmaker, and the only wallet that gets hit will be your own. That's because the heart is always the first target in story telling.
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun
Interesting thing, these fellows never seem to get the idea of perspective-' The Bursar thought, or received the thought: that's because perspective is a lie. If I know a pond is round then why should I draw it oval? I will draw it round because round is true. Why should my brush lie to you just because my eye lies to me?
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
To express what is the most moral, healthful and beautiful in art this is the mission of the dancer, and to this I dedicate my life.
Yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.
My eyes make pictures when they are shut.
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