Two hours over a car that never moved

People think the hard part of making a movie is the shooting. Lights, camera, somebody yelling action. That part is work, but it isn't where you get hurt. Where you get hurt is the morning you show up and find out nobody decided something that had to be decided.

I've been on that set. Everyone was there. Cast ready, crew ready, camera built, the light doing exactly what we wanted. And we stood there for two hours arguing about which car the character drives.

It sounds small. It's a car. But the car is in the shot, and the shot is in the story, and once it's on film you live with it forever. So the conversation went around and around. This one looks too new. That one doesn't match the scene before it. Whose car is this one anyway, and did anybody ask if we could use it?

On a small production you're paying people by the day, or worse, they're working for nothing because they believe in the project. Either way, every hour you waste is an hour you took from them. You don't get it back. The light moves. The location has a time limit. Somebody has to leave for their real job.

What I took from it

Every one of those questions had an answer, and every answer could have been settled weeks earlier at a table with a script and a cup of coffee. That's what pre-production is. It isn't paperwork. It's deciding things while it's still cheap to decide them.

Now I go through a script looking for every object that matters. Every car, every prop, every piece of wardrobe that shows up in more than one scene. I make the call before anybody is standing on a street corner waiting on me.

I think that's true outside of film too. Most of the hours men lose at work aren't lost to hard problems. They're lost to small decisions nobody wanted to own. Somebody has to own them. Better it's you, and better it's early.