When I was 15, my brother had a saying about me, “Sometimes right, sometimes wrong, never in doubt.”

I’m not sure it was a compliment…

There I am at 15...Not a doubt in my mind. (Or I'd never have taken this picture.)

However, it was a pretty good indicator that I was born to be a film director.  A director with a film in production makes, on average, 17 million decisions per day.  It’s a safe bet that he’s not going to be right on every one.  And that’s okay.  Being right a lot is overrated anyway—show me someone who’s right all the time and I’ll show you someone making safe choices based on avoiding past failures, someone who eliminates the possibility of being surprised by a wrong choice that somehow turns out right.  And that, my friends is the definition of genius—making the wrong choice turn out right.

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It's amazing what a good grip can build you.

I’m a big fan of U.S. film crews.  I consider Los Angeles and Seattle my home bases for production–that’s where I work most often and have the fattest contact files–but I work all over.  Often, I’ll head off to direct a project somewhere else and pick up a local crew.  Wherever I fly around the country, I find that film crew quality is pretty consistent.  Sure, you run the risk of a bad apple once in a while, but on the whole, the crews I work with have an amazing can-do attitude, plenty of experience, and are almost never fazed by having to do the impossible in too little time with insufficient resources.  (In fact, it’s expected.)  Need to build a bicycle mount for the camera from just a hi-hat, two grip arms and a gobo head?  A good key grip will make it happen in about ten minutes (five if the sun is setting).  I often compare indie film crews to Marines–both have that “improvise and overcome” ethic.

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For some reason, I get a lot of questions about filmmaking. One of my goals in setting up this web site is to answer some of those questions that keep coming up from different people.

So, please, ask!

Questions should be submitted as comments on this page or via the form below (I prefer comments).  This is going to be posted to the Internet, folks, so please only include information that you feel comfortable making public. Unfortunately, I won’t have a good answer to every question, but that probably won’t stop me from saying something. Questions about directing, filmmaking, independent film, distribution, and screenwriting will probably generate more useful response than other topics.

And please understand, I can’t/don’t/won’t read query letters, scripts, treatments, pitches. Trust me, it wouldn’t do you any good anyway.

Thanks for playing,

Douglas