Film Courage: Are there downsides to turning your passion into a business? Chris Gore, Founder/Owner
of FilmThreat/Author/Filmmaker: I would say the downside of turning your passion into a business
is any business failure feels like a reflection on you. I mean it really...sometimes it isn't
always the marketplace and whatnot. I feel for myself maybe some of the projects I did
might have been before their time. They were maybe a little ahead of their time and now
they're perhaps more popular because of market changes but yeah I mean the downside is also it's
a job that's never done. Turning that passion into a business is you're kind of always doing
business i mean i'm fortunate to have people in my life that will remind me like hey stop working
you know you need so so finding that balance i think is absolutely critical so that your passion
doesn't overwhelm every aspect of your life that there are times that you just turn off but yeah
there there are certainly downsides and you'll have to figure out like how to balance those
are you good with balance um i am terrible with balance so i tend to if i do something i do it
uh like over a hundred percent i can't like only do an okay job and then what would usually that
leads to for me is i take too long to do a project because i want to make it perfect so i once heard
the term perfliction which is a combination of the term perfect and affliction it's like um i
i want something to be so perfect i'll take too long to do it by the time i get it done it's not
it may have the opportunity um that it uh would have would have made it an interesting thing to
create that's that's gone in the past you know i mean you see that when it comes to the first
person to get a review out of a movie right it's not always the best written review um it used
to be back in the day that a movie would come out and then the reviews would come out and you'd read
really thoughtful essays and now there's like a pressure on film critics especially to turn out a
opinion or a take as they call it immediately and i don't know that your initial take is always
necessarily the right one we used to we used to you know ruminate on ideas that um films that were
thought-provoking they stirred in us and we would think about those ideas and it sometimes it takes
a little bit of distance away from having seen a film to process it and be able to explain it
and that's not happening today it's about who has the first take and the first opinions are out and
you'll even see things trend on social media the first thoughts on this movie that just came out
i mean if you don't watch um whatever the binge worry worthy show is at midnight when it comes out
it's spoiled for you in the morning at 8 00 am when you're reading social media
so i i i find that um i find that that can can create undue pressure and i think that
not always the first idea is not always the best idea um and i think it's important to
really think about things like that i don't i don't even know if some of the stuff the the um
the things coming out from studios even require that much of that much thought but i think that
i what i do miss is that conversation i mean i grew up reading pauline kale who i just loved um
i didn't always agree with her but what i loved is just how provocative her writing was
um and how thoughtful and how much i learned every time i read a review of hers was amazing
and i miss that kind of reverence for film criticism i don't even know it's really difficult
to find that these days it's certainly not those voices aren't the ones that are amplified that's
what i'll say why do you think that is uh because we consume pop culture too quickly
you know i mean netflix will drop a show on friday and everyone will have seen it by monday and then
what's the next thing um so that's why i think it's important to have a balanced media diet
but in addition to the balanced media diet you know how about a book then a movie then a podcast
not necessarily you know binging things constantly to where you know it almost ends up being a blur
right um so so i i missed the days of the thing that was important was the conversation
and we live in a dangerous time where you can have the wrong take on something and
that's kind of dangerous i i i like ideas that uh provoke my sensibilities you know um
i like some something a piece of art that will challenge me um i know that there's uh you know
i i feel that like there's a lot of um you know to me fiction fiction is all about um
uh being able to identify with whoever or whatever is on screen whether that person that i'm seeing
in this work of fiction whether it's a book movie television show whatever it is i don't need to
be that person i just need to identify with that person it may not be my same gender may not be the
same ethnicity or nationality as me and not speak the same language as i make not even be human
right but the point of all fiction is that we identify with the protagonist
and it doesn't have to match who i am in fact i prefer that it usually doesn't
i mean i remember being mocked when i was younger whenever i play video games i always chose female
characters i don't know why i think i just like to look at the female form in a video game
but i always chose the female characters um i i tend to i'm playing right now the video game i'm
playing and obsessed with and it's been um wrongly uh i think mocked for a lot of its technical
issues is the game cyberpunk 2077 which i think is a brilliant brilliant game it really immerses you
in this you know open world adventure game um and i'm playing as a female version of a
character and i i think it's i think it's amazing i think that there's um
i i think i think we learn by identifying with someone who who doesn't match my my exact
circumstances i think a lot of this comes from my mother um when i was younger and i would just
see whatever mainstream stuff was at the movie theater i lived bicycle distance to a movie
theater where i grew up in royal oak michigan and i would ride my bike to the berkeley theater
or the main theater um or the americana theater which was a further bike ride but i would i would
i would go see movies and she would tell me don't just go see movies that are at the mall theater
go to the art house she encouraged me to go to the maple theater which was where their art house
theater was and i saw films that had subtitles you know i mean i grew up watching a lot of
touhou monster movies right and and you know japanese television shows so i had this you know
by the time i was like in my late teens early 20s i'd seen a lot of foreign films and a lot
of a lot of just different types of movies across the board not just your traditional
big mainstream movies like your star wars and your alien and and you know disney cartoons and whatnot
so back to having a balanced media diet and i think that's important and i think it's important
and i think i think i know when a writer's been successful when someone that
i would not have ever had that experience where i can just be totally with that person
um experiencing the world through their eyes and i'm i don't look like that person i think that is
really powerful to be able to create a character protagonist that anyone can identify with
so i think that's important to keep in
mind
you