I Hadn't Directed a Film in 30 Years. I Said Yes Anyway
This summer, I was asked to direct a short film, written by and starring a young woman with whom I had just performed in Chekhov's Three Sisters. And because I am in my era of saying yes to any creative project that comes my way, I well, I said yes.
And then the panic set in. It had been over 30 years since I last directed a film, and that was a self-penned student film with a crew of four and a cast of three. This one had three producers, a director of photography, an assistant director, a gaffer (lighting and electrics), a script supervisor, a sound mixer/boom operator, a focus puller (assisting the DoP), a set designer/dresser, and a costume supervisor, as well as a cast of six. To add to my panic, they had hired equipment worth more than £86000.
Now, I was a last minute hire - the previous director had dropped out - and so my preparation time was about a month. A month when I was working my day job plus rehearsing the Chekhov. The overwhelm was starting to take hold. I had to take a deep breath and take a leaf out of my own coaching process - Vision, Courage, Action.
So, VISION. What did I actually want this film to look and feel like?
The film is about two sisters - one 18 and one 15 - who have built a warm, glowing world for themselves out of old sheets and fairy lights. Why? Because their troubled mother is incapable of providing them with any warmth. The crunch point comes when the eighteen year-old is asked to make a choice no one her age should have to make.
Straight away, I knew I didn't want this to be a film where you watch bad things happen to someone and feel sorry for her. That's the easy version, and it's also the boring one. What I wanted, my actual vision, was for the audience to feel the specific, unglamorous exhaustion of being the one who copes. Not a breakdown. Not a dramatic collapse. Just the quiet tiredness of always being the adult in the room before you're ready to be one.
And I wanted them to leave with something to carry, not just a feeling to shake off on the walk home. I wanted them to walk away thinking less about what was done to my main character, and more about what she chose to do anyway, with her eyes open, knowing exactly what it would cost her.
Once I could say that, everything else got easier to decide. Every shot, every lighting choice, every note I gave an actor, I could ask: does this serve that? If it didn't, it was mere noise.
That's the thing about vision that I don't think people say enough: it's not a nice-to-have before you start. It's the tool you use to make every single decision after you start. Without it, a month of prep with a 12-person crew and £86,000 of kit is just 12 people and a lot of very expensive ways to panic.
COURAGE is a strange word to use for something that, on paper, looks like enthusiasm. Nobody watching me say yes to this project would have called it brave. But courage was never about the yes. It was about everything that came after it; the four weeks of preparation where I had to keep showing up to a version of myself that felt, most days, entirely unqualified for the job.
Here's what nobody tells you about fear at this stage of a project: it doesn't go away once you've said yes. If anything, it gets louder, because now it's real. I'd lie in bed running the numbers - thirty years since I last called "action" on anything, and that was three friends and a borrowed camera, not a twelve-person crew and eighty-six thousand pounds of kit I didn't know how to operate. I thought about pulling out. More than once. I told myself it would be the responsible thing to do; far better to step back now than to be the reason this young woman's film fell apart.
But I'd been coaching people through this exact moment for years, and I recognised it the second it showed up in my own chest. That voice that sounds so reasonable, so protective, telling you to shrink back to the size you already know you can manage isn't wisdom. It's just fear wearing wisdom's clothes. The people I work with hear it constantly: the almost-perfect excuse not to start the business, not to apply, not to make the thing. It always sounds sensible. It's never actually about capability. It's about the discomfort of being a beginner again in public, at an age when we're supposed to have already arrived somewhere.
So I did what I'd tell any client to do. I separated the fear from the facts. The fear said: you don't belong in this room. The facts said: I had a clear vision for this film, and I knew how to direct actors Everything else - the technical language, the crew roles, the sheer scale of it - was learnable in the time I had, if I let myself be a beginner at the parts I hadn't done before while trusting the parts I had. Courage, it turns out, isn't the absence of that fear. It's deciding the vision matters more than the discomfort of not yet being fully ready for it.
And, ACTION. This is the part people expect to be the hardest, but in some ways it was the simplest, because once I actually started, there was no more room for the fear to talk. There was just the next thing that needed doing.
And there was a lot of next things. I had a month, a day job, and Chekhov rehearsals three evenings a week, so I did what I now tell every client to do when the scale of something threatens to swallow them whole: I broke it down until it stopped being one impossible thing and became a series of very doable ones. Learn what a focus puller actually does, so I could talk to mine like I understood the job. Sit with the script until I knew, scene by scene, what every character wanted. Draw out, panel by panel, exactly where every person - actor and crew alike - would stand in the hardest scene we'd shoot, so that on the day, nobody would have to find their footing in the middle of an emotional scene.
None of that felt like courage while I was doing it. It felt like homework. But that's the secret nobody tells you about action: it doesn't feel brave from the inside. It just feels like the next small, specific thing. Courage gets you to start. Vision tells you what to do once you have. Action is just showing up for that, one unglamorous decision at a time, until the unglamorous decisions add up to a film.
We shot it. It's not perfect - nothing prepped in a month, and shot in five days, ever is. But it looks and feels like what I set out to make, because I never once had to guess what my vision was. I already knew.
If there's one thing I'd want you to take from this, it's that the missing piece you're searching for - the thing you can feel but haven't named yet - won't arrive as a finished idea while you're standing still. Mine didn't. It showed up in the process of doing the thing badly, nervously, one decision at a time, just one month after I said the yes that terrified me. Vision, courage, action isn't a sequence you complete once and move past. It's a loop. You'll go round it again on the next thing, and probably feel just as unqualified as I did this time. That doesn't mean you're not ready. It means you're about to find out what you're made of.