A brief tells you what the client thinks they want. A good director reads it for what they actually want. Those are rarely the same document.
When a project comes in, we ask three things before we ask anything else:
- What is the film actually for? Not the deliverable — the function. A founder story for a fund pitch and a founder story for a recruiting page are not the same film, even if the brief swears they are.
- What does the client love that they can't articulate? People reference what they already know. The job is to listen for the references under the references.
- Can we be honest with each other about what's hard? The answer to this is almost always yes, but the question filters out the projects where the answer would have been no.
If those three questions land somewhere we recognize, we say yes. If they don't, we say no, fast. Saying no fast is a kindness — to them and to us.
The films we end up making are the ones where we couldn't imagine someone else making them. That's the bar.