Jane Fonda knows better than most that it helps to have allies.
“It really helps when you’re not alone,” the Oscar-winning legend told me last year on Rushfield Lunch. Fonda was among those out front first on the dangers of the Warner Bros. sale and has spent decades pairing her career with activism, speaking out on free speech and the risk of complacency in the Trump era.
“I have come under ferocious attacks since I became an activist. I know what attacks feel like,” she told me. “Except I’ve never been alone. I’ve always been part of a movement. And that’s the answer. It’s also the answer to despair.”
Yesterday, I collected some of the best advice I’ve heard on Rushfield Lunch from Lena Dunham, Marc Platt and others. A theme emerged: Know when to say no, keep knocking and don’t let the business decide your worth.
Today brings another lesson: Stop trying so hard to resemble everybody else. Be original. Make it personal. And, as one of my guests puts it below, stop worrying so much about being cool.
RZA: Musician & Filmmaker
My story with Wu-Tang’s RZA goes back to my first-ever press junket, an experience that taught me early that preparation matters — but so does being ready for what happens next.
It’s a message that’s applicable, RZA told me, to his experience with filmmaking itself.
“If I could give you an analogy: When you’re making an album, maybe you’ve got 10-12 people. Making a film, you need an orchestra,” he told me earlier this year. “You need hundreds of people to deliver a good quality film. To be a director, you have to have a lot of your brain operating at the same time. I approach it even knowing my lenses and my ISO (film speed, or its sensitivity to light). My brain has always been that way.”
And amid all that machinery, his advice is to make sure you’re still recognizable as yourself: “Try to be original. Even if you get a box of jelly beans, the one that you may remember the most is the black one. And it’s not because it tastes the worst, really, right? But something about that black jelly bean, you remember it more.”
Winnie Holzman: Writer
Few writers have moved between forms as gracefully or with as much success as Winnie Holzman. The New York-born writer has produced distinctive work across television, Broadway and the big screen. Her series My So-Called Life will go down as the perfect encapsulation of Gen X’s coming of age and one of the great dramas of TV history. She took on an altogether different coming-of-age story when she adapted Wicked to the stage and, more recently, wrote the screenplays to both of its film adaptations.
Her advice is particularly useful for the periods when the industry is not validating you, or you’re not getting the big jobs: “There’s always a point to being creative in your own life, no matter what. You had the joy of creating it. You took the power and the excitement and the joy, and you created something out of love. And that’s more important than anything.”
Craig Brewer: Director
Craig Brewer is one of our great storytellers with a body of work that, since his Sundance hit Hustle & Flow in 2005, has focused on humanity and empathy. His recent Song Sung Blue might be the best example of that yet, a movie I’d recommend to anyone about an ordinary Milwaukee couple — played by best actress nominee Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman — who experience highs and lows as Neil Diamond tribute artists.
For Brewer, the movie’s story of aspiration hit particularly close to home: “Perhaps it’s because I got into filmmaking and experienced that American dream in a very unique way.”
His advice — don’t make the movie you think someone wants. Make the one that reveals where you’re going: “I just try to tell people — to the best of their ability, even if it’s a smaller movie — to really do something that’s personal to yourself and that is a calling card for what you really want to be. Look at Spike Lee’s early films or Martin Scorsese’s early films or Christopher Nolan’s Following — you see a road map to where they were going.”
James Ellroy: Author
Of the many novelists who have made Los Angeles an essential character in their work, perhaps none in contemporary times has embodied the city more fully than James Ellroy.
“I’m just really a dipshit kid who loved to read with a God-given talent,” he told me — and his advice was similarly clear-eyed and deceptively simple.
His advice for becoming a writer: “Write the kind of books that you love to read, but you think nobody else is writing. Don’t write short stories. Don’t serve that apprenticeship. The first thing I wrote was a novel, and I sold it. I’ve never liked short stories.”
Penny Lane: Documentarian
The filmmaker Penny Lane will never be accused of being too cool, and she’s just fine with that.
“I feel tyrannized by the idea of being cool. The idea of being cool is the least creatively conducive concern you could have,” she told me.
Her films have followed that philosophy, whether she’s examining a smooth jazz phenom in Listening to Kenny G or children’s music in Happy and You Know It (both part of the HBO documentary film series Music Box created by Bill Simmons).
“I started making films in a nonprofit job, helping 5-year-olds learn how to use video cameras,” she said. “I feel like I’m constantly having to put myself in the mindset of a little kid who’s just picked up a camera for the first time because that’s the only place I can be creative. It’s tough to try to do things and worry about whether people will like them, think they’re cool or find them award-worthy. It’s a type of self-consciousness that is crushing.”
Her advice for becoming a filmmaker: “Watch really lo-fi movies that were made with nothing more than someone with passion and determination, and with a dream. If that’s not the attitude you have, then nothing will happen at all.“
