The most helpful creative advice I’ve ever received

a reflection by Aaron Freed

When I was seventeen years old, George Lucas gave me the most helpful creative advice I’ve ever received.

I was initially hesitant to open with George Lucas’ name, and I want to be very clear: none of this should be attributed directly to him. As I’ve written before, the very act of thinking about a memory changes the memory. I’m paraphrasing a twenty-four-year-old memory that I’ve thought about more than almost any other memory of my adolescence, so I’m not sure how much my recollection accurately represents what he said, and how much is an extrapolation my mind has invented. My point is this: if any of these words are ever attributed directly to George Lucas, I’ll be very cross that someone has put words into his mouth. I’m at best loosely paraphrasing him; all quotations of this piece should thus be attributed either to “Aaron Freed, loosely paraphrasing George Lucas” or simply to me, depending on context.

Lucas gave me the advice during an informal group discussion at a convention in San Antonio where he was a featured speaker. Holistic medicine advocate Dr. Andrew Weil is the only other speaker I recall for certain. It was near the end of my senior year in high school, May 3 to May 6, 2001, shortly before The Phantom Menace came out. It’s hard to overstate how much people worshipped the ground Lucas walked on at that time – he directed American Graffiti! He created Star Wars and Indiana Jones! Read enough film criticism and you’ll encounter the phrase “auteur license”. I’m not sure anyone has ever had more of an auteur license than George Lucas did at that time, except perhaps post-Schindler’s List Steven Spielberg. But I digress.

Anyway, someone – I don’t think it was me, but this might be false modesty on my memory’s part – asked Lucas either what the most important filmmaking advice he’d ever received was, or what he felt was the most important advice he could give aspiring filmmakers. I recall him giving a roughly bipartite answer, but I’m only entirely confident about the first half of it. Regardless, his advice takes this form in my memory:

1. Watch as many films as you can get your hands on, from as many genres as you can, whether you think they’ll be good or not, whether you think you’ll like them or not.
2. Think critically about everything you watch. Ask questions like: What about the script works or doesn’t work, and why? What about the performances works or doesn’t work, and why? What about the cinematography works or doesn’t work, and why? What about the storyboarding works or doesn’t work, and why? What about the score works or doesn’t work, and why? What about the direction works or doesn’t work, and why? How would you fix the film’s perceived problems? What lessons can you learn for your own films?

I only briefly considered working on films, and even then, I never considered directing them, only writing them. But this advice is simple, logical, insightful, and easy to adapt to other creative disciplines, e.g.:

• Aspiring writers should read as many books as they can from as many different genres as they can and evaluate what does or does not work about them.
• Aspiring game creators should play as many games as they can from as many different genres as they can and evaluate what they do well or poorly, and why.
• Aspiring musicians and composers should listen to as much music as they can from as many different instruments and genres as they can, and evaluate why the performance, composition, arrangement, production, and lyrics work or don’t work.
• Aspiring user interface designers should evaluate why the user interfaces of programs and operating systems they use might be helpful or annoying to users, and how the latter can be fixed.

The bit about thinking critically is just as important as the bit about consuming media, which is the main reason I think it was part of Lucas’ advice. If he’d just told aspiring filmmakers to watch lots of films, I doubt it would’ve made such an impression on me – but maybe I’m giving my seventeen-year-old self too much credit, since it still would’ve been filmmaking advice from George Lucas!!!11

In any case, I did know how much I enjoyed music, so I resolved to listen to as much as I could, from as many different genres and countries as I could, and to think critically about what aspects of it worked or didn’t work for me, and why. And I did. Language didn’t matter. Genre only mattered a little bit, though for reasons of personal taste, I gravitated to records with complex musical structure and technically impressive performances, partly because I enjoyed them more, partly because I felt I could learn more from them.

A lot of people say playing a musical instrument is a use-it-or-lose-it skill like programming or drawing. Maybe it is for them, but for me, it’s more like speaking a foreign language. I have to practice to get back up to the level I used to play at, but I pick it up faster than I did the first time. I don’t know how much that’s because I started playing piano at age five, how much it’s because I type at ≈120 wpm (which is effectively playing the piano in all but outcome: both involve nothing more and nothing less than putting your fingers in the right place at the right time), and how much it’s because I’ve practiced active listening to music for some thirty years. Whatever the cause, the theory has never entirely left my head, even when I’ve taken breaks from performing or composing; in particular, I’ve never forgotten how to play a few specific pieces that made especially strong impacts on me.

I could go into a long spiel about media illiteracy, but I’ll restrict myself to a single example. I remember watching Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers for a “film and politics” class and being amazed that anyone ever missed its satire of fascism and the military-industrial complex (especially coming as it did from RoboCop and Total Recall’s director). Of course, it might’ve been easier to see some 10 years after the film’s release, but it’s one of the most unsubtle satires I’ve ever seen (and all the better for it). Its reception suggests a need for vastly better education in media literacy. Film, television, comics, manga, anime, even video games have developed languages as rich as those of traditional literature; if people are unable to read them, they’ll continue misreading media as badly as many people misread Starship Troopers.

A corollary of Lucas’ advice is that it pays to be aware of one’s own strengths and limitations as an artist. As I mentioned, everyone worshipped the ground Lucas walked on at the time. I think some of the prequel trilogy’s flaws (most notably, its awkward dialogue and several actors’ wooden performances) are direct consequences of that, and I may examine why in a follow-up to this piece. Regardless, I’m immeasurably thankful to him for his answer – I suspect I’d have had much less success in my creative endeavors without it.

As a final note, George Lucas is one of the warmest, friendliest, most modest people I’ve ever met⁽¹⁾ – he strikes me as having gotten into filmmaking not to stroke his own ego, but simply because he wanted to make great films. I find it kind of astonishing that people were apparently afraid to give him constructive criticism on his dialogue during the making of the prequel trilogy – especially since Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill did so all the time during the making of the original trilogy, and most of their suggestions made it into the films. He seems more concerned with making the best film he can than he is with presenting his original ideas exactly as he envisioned them. That said, I certainly wouldn’t want to get on his bad side.

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Endnotes

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