Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…I have to say that thing is freaking… I didn’t get in it’s way basically would help. And people say that, “Don’t get in your own way.” This is a little bit easier to understand. It’s like keep the pipe clear. Don’t block it with your ego. Don’t say you’re going to be shocked, but don’t ever say, “Oh, shit how do I do that? I don’t know if I can do that.” You didn’t do it to begin with. Accept that it just came through you and try to get back into that head space, especially when you go to make a second film or a third film or follow up a success. That’s when artists get really crippled because sometimes they start tiptoeing around as an artist going like, “Oh shit, now it’s my second film. My first one did really well. They might not like my second one so much.” That’s not the head space you were in when you made the first one. You weren’t hesitant like that. You’re just… So try to keep that very naive and that’s why I say commit to a body of work. I know a lot of filmmakers get stuck on their second one and then go further because they get crippled by the success of the first one and they start asking, “Oh shit, how did I do that? How can I do that again?” And you get deeper and deeper in a hole you can’t get out of. I think you’ve spoken about that filmmakers, especially early on in their journey, critics and the audience can destroy them, meaning it creates too much of a burden, too much, just wear them down to where they’re almost scared to be creative. Can you just speak to that how to ignore the critic? I’ll tell you something that my best advice ever got early on, I was so fortunate, from an unlikely place because he’s such, he sounded like Clint Eastwood when he said it, it was funny when you said that. But I got, I did Desperado and had Antonio Banderas, I brought Antonio to be in it from Europe, big action movie. And so Spielberg saw it and he said, “Hey, I want you to do Zorro with Antonio.” So we’re working on it for a while, I was working on the pre-production, got to work with Spielberg doing that. It ended up stalling because there was two studios involved and Amblin was moving or it was some weird thing where, but I got to work with him for about five months and I started getting really nervous because it’s like, oh shit, you start thinking about, even movies of his that people would say, “Oh, Temple of Doom is not as good as Raiders.” Have you seen Temple of Doom? I would kill to fucking do that movie. If I can make Zorro as good as that one, the one that people said, it’s like people don’t know how good they had it with that guy. But I started thinking, I even said, “Man, I just rewatched Temple of Doom last night. I don’t know how I’m going to do the Zorro movie. I’ve just never done anything like that.” You start getting afraid because you go, the second thing he said, “Oh Rob, you’re going to do fine.” But then I started thinking, this guy, at that time, you may not know the era, but this was like mid-nineties, he was making the biggest, best movies of all and people would shit all over this guy. They would throw so much, they were so jealous. Press, audience, everyone was just hits at them, just throwing rocks at him for everything.…

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