Meet John Gross

 

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful John Gross a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

John, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

Having dreams and goals is one thing, but achieving those goals always requires hard work. Life doesn’t always cooperate. Since I was ten years old, I’ve wanted to be a filmmaker. I expected that as long as I worked toward that goal, I would be able to achieve my dream.

I didn’t anticipate having to come to terms with my sexuality at an early age. I didn’t anticipate losing my mother and other loved ones as I began my journey. Overcoming my grief and being able to move on was only one obstacle along my path. My resilience originated from a need to move on from trauma and pain.

Resilience, for me, is being able to adapt when things don’t go my way. It’s being able to keep moving toward my goals despite a setback. The hardest virtue that I have had to struggle with is having the patience to realize that the really hard goals are going to take a lot of time.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

Since an early age, I’ve always wanted to be a filmmaker. I studied film production at Webster University in St. Louis, and I moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the movie business. I worked on a lot of independent films and finally became a producer at a production company that did marketing for big-budget movies. It seemed like a dream job, but I was dedicating my life to telling other people’s stories instead of my own.

I felt my goals and dreams were slipping away from me. I was severely depressed, and it was affecting every aspect of my life. My husband, Jason Shepard, asked me what we could do to get me out of my funk. I said, “I want to make a movie.”

His response was, “Let’s make movies.” Within a year, we developed a short film we had written together. We founded our company, Grossfilm LLC. We produced a short film and took it to film festivals around the world.

I just completed our first feature film, a documentary about haunted hotels in the Mojave Desert called HAUNTS BEFORE VEGAS. I shot, directed, and edited the film. My husband wrote and produced it. It’s the culmination of almost seven years of hard work and resiliance.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Three qualities that have been most impactful in my journey are patience, resiliance, and staying out of the results.

When you’re trying to climb a mountain, you can’t expect to reach the peak right away. Patience sometimes means recognizing that I’m not at the skill level that I need to be to achieve this particular goal right now. I have to remain teachable and develop certain skills over time to achieve certain goals.

Resiliance, for me, means working a little bit every day to push a project forward. It means recognizing my limitations and moving forward despite them. Taking on a feature-length film, or even a feature-length screenplay, can seem like an impossible amount of work. Taking them on a little bit at a time, eventually, those bits will add up to a finished project.

Most importantly, I have to remind myself to stay out of the results. I can only control the work that I do. I can’t control people’s opinions about it. I can’t control whether something will be a success or whether people will respond favorably to it.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

One book that has played an important role in my development as a filmmaker is “The Artist’s Way,” by Julia Cameron.

It has helped me to overcome my inner critic, that evil voice inside that says you’re not good enough. It helped me to realize that an artist’s journey is also a spiritual journey. It also helped dispel some myths I was clinging to about perfectionism.

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Image Credits

Jason Shepard

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