Film Courage: The question is, what stands
in most people’s way of achieving their dreams? It sounds simplistic…we can achieve
our dreams and there are a million books the subject. What do you think is actually the
block for most people? Dr. Ken Atchity: I’ve written a book called
Quit Your Day Job and Lead the Life of Your Dreams based on my own experience and that
of others. One of my favorite stories…I was on Dr.
Joyce Brothers television show years ago with a couple of other people and one of them who
was a man who was then in his 80’s and had just received his law degree from The University
of Chicago and he told her that he was standing in line for registration four years earlier
and one of the young people in line behind him said “Sir, are you sure you’re in
the right line?” And he said “And I turned around and I said what line should I be in?” And I thought that is America. That’s the
essence of America, you are in whatever line you want to be in this country and he fearlessly
walked up and stood in the line and got his law degree at the age of 86 or whatever he
was and to me what stands in people’s way is fear and their friends inflict it on them. So one of the chapters in my book has to do
with distinguishing between friends and friendly associates because when I left the academic
world I had a few friends and I had lots of friendly associates and I learned the difference
when I decided to leave because I retained a few friends but most everybody I did not
retain as friends because they thought I was absolutely crazy. They either thought that
that in kind of a benign way or they were just extremely angry that I was leaving a
tenured position. They thought that was completely ungrateful
and crazy. I can also say that they were fearful about it and I knew them well enough to know
that they were envious, they wished they could do it but they wouldn’t do it because they
were set in their ways and that’s one of the reasons I didn’t like tenure because
once you had tenure you didn’t have to publish anymore, you didn’t have to do anything
anymore. And of course if you were truly motivated that’s not going to stop you and there were
a few people who were unstoppable. But mostly they weren’t unstoppable and they just stopped
and to me that was a crime because I didn’t understand anything other than the merit system
as something that should rule an academy of ideas. So I think what makes people afraid is the
fear of being out on the street. You know it’s an image that I’ve had in the first
10 years of getting into a new world where I realized I wasn’t going to get a paycheck
every two weeks (regularly). You have that image if you were raised by
Depression-era parents. And you also have the other image of wolves at the door. I remember
that one because I found a quick way around it. Go to the door, open the door and if you
don’t see any wolves at the door then there are no wolves at the door. But it is an image
that pops into your mind in the middle of the night as does the homeless image and many
other things. But if you’re afraid of images then you shouldn’t be in the world of images. I mean that’s what I do, I create images
and develop images and turn them into movies so how can I let images that are in my brain
control my actions. You have to learn to overcome that. So I think people have to clearly understand
themselves and decide on who to listen to. If you truly are a friend and you love somebody
you encourage them to fulfill their dreams and I always did that to my students. I always
felt like you have a dream and you are afraid of accomplishing it. What if your dream is
the most important dream that ever came along in the human race and you don’t do anything
about it. It’s your dream and you do nothing about it. That’s a sacrilege. You had the
dream for a reason, it’s in your mind for a reason. Either God put it there or it was
borne in your mind from some other source, why are you going to do something about it?
“Well because I’m afraid that my father and mother would be really upset.” And so
I go “Well this is a hypothetical fear about something that hasn’t happened yet?” “Yes.”
“Then why not just do it and deal with the possibility that this may never happen at
all?” It’s a matter of knowing yourself. That’s
one of the things I used to talk about first in the book. I was raised on Greek philosophy
and when it said over the Oracle of Delphi was “Know Thyself.” That was the most
important piece of knowledge that Plato and Aristotle and Socrates taught and knowing
yourself means know you are going to be haunted by this dream if you don’t do it. I mean I had a partner who said once when
her movie was in trouble “Maybe this is one of those dreams that should never have
happened?” And I said “That is complete blasphemy! You say that now but later you
will see that it was some other voice talking to you other than your own voice because you
made this thing happen and you will be proud of that.” And simply fear is the number one impediment
for people going for their dreams and it’s fear and everyone knows the acronyms about
fear is things that haven’t happened yet, that may never happen (just like worry). And
we all do it, we all have fears, we all have worries. But overcoming your fear is what
valiant people do. It’s what people that you would like to be like do so why not do
it yourself and not have to live with the regret which is the big monster equal to fear
that you have to live with if you are sitting on that proverbial front porch in your rocking
chair thinking about the dreams that you had a didn’t do. To me that’s a terrible waste
of life to have that happen. Film Courage: Also, stripping away illusions.
Can you talk about knowing thyself and being comfortable enough to know that if you have
to stand by yourself for awhile because you’ve lost the illusion of some of the friendships
or peer group that you thought was going to be there with you, if for whatever reason
socially they’ve gone the other way, know that this is okay as well. Dr. Atchity: That’s a very good point because
I think as you get older you realize that you cannot govern your life by what other
people think. And I live on the 11th floor and I look out on the millions of lights in
Los Angeles and it’s a great comfort to think that there are a few lights out there
that love me. There are maybe fewer that hate me but there are millions that have no idea
that I exist. That’s comfortable and that’s kind of the cosmic view of life when you think
about it. You are just one tiny piece of the massive cosmos that is going about its massive
mechanism on its own without any need for you to consult with it and for you to be worried
about what some person somewhere else thinks about you is a complete waste of your energy
in every way. Your job is to do what your dreams tell you to do and to do it with all
of your might the way the cosmos does and what other people are saying and thinking
and doing first of all because most of them are not spending any time thinking about you
at all and could care less what you do or don’t do. Most of them are thinking only
about themselves, so that’s a natural condition and why should you be any different? If you
have a dream, just do it. And if you’re the crazy painter that has
been turning out paintings in the garage and everyone thinks you’re a crackpot but then
they learn that you sold one of your paintings for a million dollars and now it’s going
to be in The Louvre, suddenly they go “I always knew that gal was a genius. She really
had talent from the very beginning.” People change instantly (which shows how much value
their opinion really has). That’s why I think you’ve got to really
listen to yourself and not listen to everybody else. And you can tell your true friends because
the ones who support you in doing that are your true friends and if the person who is
not supporting you…I’ve had several clients in my career whose spouses did not support
them and my advice is divorce your spouse, I’m sorry. I take this seriously. This is
a profession, this is a vocation. And if someone close to you is tell you don’t do it, it’s
selfish, you’ve got to get someone else close to you who will encourage you. Because all of the monumental great things
in life are done by people who I think go for it and who are not afraid in taking a
chance and who are therefore support by a few true friends or loved ones who tell them
to do it. Many examples from my own life but when I
decided to leave the tenured position my daughter was a junior at Columbia University and one
thing that would be jeopardized was her senior year at Columbia. And I brought her up to
Montreal where I was shooting a movie and we had a long talk about it off set. And she
said “Dad you absolutely have to do this. You have to do it. Don’t worry about that.”
And of course that problem got solved and didn’t end up being a problem but it was
a concern but she had no concern for it and that’s how I know who my true friends are.
And that’s how you would know too if you decide you want to do something. Listen carefully
to what the people around you say. Because when people are telling you no they are expressing
their own fears. And some of it may be goodhearted, they are afraid that the things they fear
may happen to you. But if you’re willing to take the risk, don’t let them influence
you because they’re not taking the risk unless they depend on you and then you have
to figure that out. I did certain things when I left that career
to make sure that those who depended on me would not end up being left without resources
so I did what I had to do to make sure that happened and then once I did that my conscience
was clear and I was able to embrace it fully with all of the risks that it entailed. And
no regrets even though there were some very dark times and there are always ups and downs
in a business like this one and in a career that is bereft of security. The other side of the coin is that as much
as security is an illusion, rejection is also an illusion because you can take as many chances
as you want. I constantly hear people tell me (even on the phone this morning) “You
only get one shot.” (That was a distributor telling me we only get one shot). And I thought
“Well okay, maybe that is true for you but I get as many shots as I want to take.”
And Hollywood, first of all it doesn’t exist, what is Hollywood? It’s just a concept.
But in reality the business that I’m in all you have to do is tell somebody I’ve
got a great new story and they are all ears immediately. They don’t care that it’s
been ten years since you’ve talked to them. You spend a a few seconds in chit chat and
then they want to hear the story. So you can take as many chances as you want
to take unless your own psychology disallows that because it wants you to get depressed
and spend…go into a coma of unhappiness and take rejection seriously, etc. I just
don’t have time. One of my essays is called The Waiting Room
and it’s about what you do while you are waiting for an answer on a creative project.
Well you don’t wait, you do something else. You make another creative project, you get
it going. And if you keep doing that, every project has it’s own clock, you can’t
do much to control that clock but you can be doing another project. And soon enough
you have projects all around you that are in various states of ripeness and they will
happen in their own time and your biggest problem will be what if two of them happen
at the same time. I always say “Don’t worry about that.” You don’t want to have
the problem of nothing happening. So no, you don’t wait at all and I think
a lot of writers torture themselves because they wait you know they send off a manuscript
hypothetically into snail mail. No one does that anymore but they send it off and then
they wait for an answer. Why would they wait for an answer? That’s a complete waste of
time. Instead you instantly work on something else and that way when something comes from
the first thing, you’re just surprised and you deal with it immediately without wasting
any kind of psychological energy on it. You just…if it’s a rejection…you just take
it and you move on. And if it somebody offering you a deal then you consider the deal. But writers feel like they have to spend an
additional 90% of their time fretting over it all, analyzing it, soul searching over
it and you do that when you’re younger and it’s fine to do some of it because you may
get a lot of creativity out of it. But once you’ve gone through it and tortured yourself
to your own satisfaction, you don’t have to do that all of the time, you can just go
back to work. Ray Bradbury used to say that “Get back
to work. It will get rid of all those moods you’re having.” And I always thought that
was the most brilliant advice. Work is the solution.
