The Hill To Die On: Believing In Your Idea
I love good and healthy collaboration. There is something about working with people whom you admire and seeing something that was once just an "oh, this could be a thing" turn into a film through blood, sweat, tears, and a medley of ideas. I want everything I work on to feel like making a movie with my friends back in high school. It's boring to have the "producer-writer-director-cinematographer-insert above the line job here" all be under the same person (unless you have to). The only thing more boring than that is not making the movie at all.
Movies are collages of perspectives on how we view life and the films we love. So, with that said, this article is about defending your idea. It's about the hill you're willing to die on, the thing you can see in your head that you know gives the movie its soul, and that others are having trouble seeing. It's about that gut feeling that keeps the flame and excitement alive.
Just a side note: this article contains spoilers for both Barbarian and Young Frankenstein.
Sometimes defending your idea isn’t as drastic as the structure of what you’ve written. Sometimes it’s smaller. A name, or a song, or a scene. I grew up watching Young Frankenstein. Directed by Mel Brooks and written by both Brooks and Gene Wilder, It’s my dad’s favorite movie and it’s one of my all time favorites. If you’ve seen it, chances are your favorite scene is the Puttin On The Ritz scene.
Sometimes bringing up your ideas is tough. And defending those ideas? It’s like trying to convince a group of cats to take a group photo. Here are some tips that have helped me in the ideation phase.
First and foremost, be prepared! You gotta know your ideas inside and out so that you can answer any questions that come your way with confidence and ease. Also, it's super important to be clear and concise. Use simple, straightforward language and visuals to ensure that your ideas are easily understood and taken seriously. Don't forget to let your passion shine through when presenting your ideas. If you're enthusiastic and communicate why you believe in your concepts, others will be more likely to get excited about them too. It's always a good idea to anticipate objections as well. Be proactive about addressing potential challenges and limitations of your ideas. That way, you can show that you've thought everything through and have a solid plan in place. And lastly (and probably the most important and the hardest) be open to feedback. Be willing to revise based on constructive criticism, but also know what hill to die on. Knowing what hill to die on may be hard to decipher. You don’t want every word of feedback to be the hill, after all you need to do what’s best for the story and your collaborators only want to do what’s best for the story as well. For me, that hill to die on is a gut feeling. It’s when you’ve looked at every other possible way to write or film the moment, but it’s this one that keeps you up at night..
For the love of movies,
Jonathan Austin
I love horror movies. I tried to deny it for a long time because I didn’t want to be seen as “the horror guy” because I love a good story over any particular genre. One of my favorite movies last year was Zach Cregger’s rental nightmare turned creature feature, Barbarian. Why? Because it was a breath of fresh air in the horror genre. Not just because it took what is becoming a very overplayed subgenre of horror (person rents a place to stay and DUN DUN DUN!!!!! The listing is NOT as advertised!) but because it didn’t play by story structure rules. Cregger clearly knows the rules of story structure and totally put it on its head. If you’ve seen the film (and if you haven’t this is the last spoiler warning) you know the first act ends with our heroine realizing that all the red flags from the ever creepy Bill Skarsgard were actually just him being a nice guy and that there is a long and creepy passage way under the house with a giant woman living inside. The film then transitions into the second act with a hard cut onto Justin Long driving down the Pacific Highway as he learns he’s being fired from his TV show for sexual assault allegations.
When Zach Cregger was pitching Barbarian this is the moment producers told him that you can’t just follow two people with one certain tone and then completely make the movie something different halfway through. They also said you can’t follow a character who is being charged with sexual assault for the remainder of the movie (to be fair I probably would of had the same note.) He was told that these two things didn’t work and to be able to get the movie made he would have to rewrite it. But Cregger stuck to his guns. He decided that this was the hill to die on because he knew that these were the two things that made the story work. He was absolutely right. Without that hard cut and tone change, the story probably would have lost momentum and been the same as any other countless horror movies we’ve seen time and time again. If we didn’t follow Justin Long’s character it wouldn’t have made for the heroines victory all that victorious. Cregger knew this and he refused to change it. So he kept pitching until he found the producers who saw the same vision. And with a 4 million dollar budget making 45 million and being considered the best horror of 2022, this was the right hill to die on.
It’s arguably the film's most iconic scene and it almost never happened. When Wilder was outlining the plot points he knew he had to write a scene where Dr. Frankenstein (or Fronkenstein if you were to ask the Doctor how it’s pronounced) introduces The Monster to the public. Frankenstein had to show that the Monster was not like the one previously made by his grandfather. So Wilder wrote this scene where Dr. Frankenstein and The Monster do a song and dance to Puttin On The Ritz.
At this moment in time Brooks and Wilder had worked with each other on The Producers and Blazing Saddles, so they had a good working relationship and knew each other pretty well. Brooks was confused as to why Wilder wanted to put in this scene that seemed way too silly. So he approached Wilder and told him they were taking the scene out of the film. Wilder refused t. Brooks pushed on the matter that it needed to be taken out, but still Wilder wouldn’t budge. This was the hill that Wilder was willing to die on. He saw something in the scene that his co-writer and director simply couldn’t. Due to their mutual respect and history together, Brooks knew that if Wilder was going to be so adamant about the scene, it was because it was something he believed wholeheartedly, and in that alone there is the value of taking a chance.
