We recently connected with Madison Lin and have shared our conversation below.
Madison, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?
The best way to try to stay creative and beyond that, the best thing I can do for my personal growth, is to challenge my perception of myself. When I was fifteen, I had to sign up for a philosophy class because I was late to fill out my forms and subsequently, the philosophy course was the only class that fit my schedule. I had absolutely zero interest in taking the class and the teacher was a notorious hard-ass, so all summer, I had knots in my stomach. And the day before classes started, I told myself that this was happening whether I liked it or not, so the best thing I could do to set myself up to be happier, was to come to the class with an open mind and focus on what I would get out of the class, instead of focusing on why I thought it would suck. I told myself “You don’t have to like it, you just have to give it an honest shot”. And crazily enough, that ended up being one of my favorite classes ever. And the teacher, who I was so worried about being a hard-ass, was one of the best professors I’ve ever had. He was kind, and challenged me, and not only did I end up taking every other class he ever offered, but he wrote all of my college recommendation letters. To this day, I consider him a mentor and a friend.
So my big takeaway from that class was “I think I know myself so well, but maybe I don’t, and maybe there’s a lot to be learned here.” I found that idea really exciting. So every four months, I pushed myself to sign up for something I thought I wouldn’t like. I took an art history class since I’ve always had a hard time focusing at museums, I have done a trapeze arts class since I hate heights, I joined a college marching band because I’d never been a huge sports person, and I’ve done tons more beyond that.
Thanks to this practice I’ve fallen in love with subjects I never planned on learning, I’ve done things I never thought I could do, and met people I wouldn’t have come in contact with otherwise. On one level, yes, that keeps you creative but to me, more importantly, it makes you happy. It broadens and deepens your vision of the world and yourself.
I’m not saying they’re all going to be winners, there will be some things that don’t take, but overall for anyone looking to have a life filled with things they love, I highly recommend turning to the things you don’t want to and don’t have to do to.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I love film because I think it’s potentially the most collaborative art out there. A director’s job is to gather a bunch of talented people who aren’t just aligned with the vision of the project but are clearly going to elevate it because you cannot do this alone. It’s too big. You are dealing with writing, cinematography, acting, sound design, scoring, mixing, color grading, editing, and so much more. There are too many different disciplines at play, you cannot be the master of all of them, and that’s why you build out these great teams. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
As a director, you want to lean into the second part of that as hard as you can. The way I see it, your job as a director is to work with artists who are going to push you to evolve the vision of the movie. Your job is also this balancing act of figuring out when the vision of the film needs to change, and when you need to dig your heels in to keep it cohesive and true to the original concept. And to be honest, the thing that’s more important than both of those is making sure that it feels like everyone has a seat at the table. The truth of being a director is that you are bringing on people who, ninety percent of the time, know more about their field than you do, and they have a ridiculous amount of not just expertise but creative inspiration to offer, so you have to listen to them. If you don’t, you’re doing a disservice to the movie.
And sorry, I’ll try to wrap this up but I could truly talk about this all day, but that’s another thing I love about film – a great idea can come from anyone on the crew. It’s like the movie Ratatouille, and I want to lean on the distinction they make at the end of that movie because it’s an important one, they say “Not everyone can cook but a great cook can come from anywhere”. Not all the ideas are going to knock your socks off, but good ones can come from anywhere and I think great directors lean on good ideas and strong artists within the crew.
My most recent film, Red, was a perfect lesson in that. I wrote the first draft of the script back in 2020, during the pandemic, and between then and now, it’s been through so much change. As I took it through production, there were so many artists I was working with, a lot of whom were close friends of mine, and they challenged me in this way that I felt elevated the final product beyond anything I could have drummed up myself. It felt like there was this very natural and clear evolution. For example, when we started, it was going to be an animation. When I talked to one of my friends who was the animator we’d hired to work on it, he pointed out that it’s critical that the medium honors the content. Outside of a specific scene, there wasn’t anything that made this an animated film in its DNA. You look at shows like BoJack Horseman where it had to be animated because the live-action version of that would have been nightmare fuel. Or Bao, the Pixar short. Both of those needed their medium to be animation. This didn’t fit that bill and my friend totally called me on it. It was only an animation because we were in a pandemic and we couldn’t run live-action sets. So I did a pass of it with the producers that was live-action and it didn’t totally work either – you could see it was written to be an animation so it was playing really young and a little campy when we were swinging for more of a coming-of-age, YA feel. I came back to my animator friend and told him the dilemma and he asked if I’d considered doing a live-action with animated scenes. That didn’t feel quite right but it was 100% in the right direction so we kept talking and landed on the idea of having live-action plates with animated overlays.
The final film is a cross-pollination of the two – it’s mostly live-action but it has animation over the live-action plates and I think it came out fantastic. And I wouldn’t have been able to figure that out if I didn’t have a creative team who challenged the reasoning behind some of my creative choices and helped me elevate the vision of the film. This project, Red, was a huge labor of love and it’s such perfect proof to me that if you want to go far, go together.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I think if you’re going to focus on developing three qualities to try and guide your career, especially as a young filmmaker, I’d say focus on determination, trust, and optimism. I know that makes me sound like a total hippie but those are by far the things that have served me best in this industry. See because, for specific skills or areas of knowledge, I could tell you “Go learn the basics of cinematography and editing” and sure, those are useful, but they don’t mean much if you’re not excited about what you’re doing. Knowing how to cut on Avid doesn’t do anything for you if you haven’t had the inspiration to shoot anything in the past year.
I think determination is cultivated by feeling however you need to feel about rejection, and then taking another swing at whatever you were trying for. You’re going to hear a lot of “no”s. When we get rejected, we all hear things like “let it roll off your back” or “brush it off”, and for some things, you’ll be able to do that. But for other things, that’s way harder to do because it was important to you and rejection hurts. So when it hurts, take a second, feel it – feel upset, rejected, angry, whatever it is. Then do something about it like call your friend or your mom, God knows I do. And when you’re done, get up and try again.
That’s something I honestly forget sometimes, especially because I’m early in my career. I get rejected from a grant, a film festival, or a fellowship, and I think “I’m not good enough”. I remember when I got rejected from this grant and I emailed the person running it to say thanks for the opportunity for the first time, I tacked on “What could I do better when I apply next year?”. And she got back to me and told me I had a great application but it felt a little abstract and that I should spend the next year trying to find something that really spoke to me, that felt really personal. So the next year I did, I wrote about my family, and I won the grant. You’re allowed to try again, “no” right now doesn’t mean “no” forever.
I think trust is cultivated by having people around you who you know are cheering you on. People in entertainment talk a lot about trusting the process, but that’s pretty abstract. I have trouble throwing my arms up and surrendering to the all-mighty process. But the people in my life, I know them. I trust them. It’s much more concrete and it’s easier for me to put my trust in people. Everyone I love, who I’m close to, I know they’re in my corner and I’m in theirs.
And optimism I think is cultivated from doing things that bring you joy. My friend in college told me “You can’t pour from an empty cup” and he’s right. So you have to go out and find things that refill your cup. Things that very actively give you energy and joy.
We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
It’s always better to lean into growing in the areas you don’t know. My mom always says “If you’re the smartest person in the room, leave and find a new one”. There are always new people you can be learning from. Always new situations that can challenge you. There is so much out there worth exploring, go chase that.
And to be honest, sometimes it’s fun to be bad at stuff. The joy lies in the trying. That’s how I felt about a lot of the things I tried in the experiment I mentioned earlier, where I go try things I might not like. For example, I don’t think I was a particularly good trapeze artist. I remember one time I threw a trick where I almost dislocated both my shoulders.
We always had to climb this forty-foot ladder to the platform we jumped from with the trapeze bar. My legs would shake the entire time I was climbing. One day, I was making my way up to the platform, one quakey step at a time, and I just kept thinking “Yeah, I knew I hated heights.” I was so nervous I was having trouble seeing straight by the time I’d finally made my way to the platform and I wrapped my hands around the trapeze bar. When you’re throwing tricks, there’s someone on the floor who can see the person throwing the trick and the person who will catch, so they make the call on when you jump. They yell “pip” and when you hear it you have to jump because if you don’t, the other person can’t catch you. So I’m standing up there shaking and I hear “pip!” and my stomach just fills with dread. But because I had to, I stepped off the platform. And I tried to throw the trick but I was too nervous to let go of the bar, it was like my hands were glued on. So there I am, hanging forty feet above the ground, contorted in this awkward position because my nervous hands won’t let go. From the ground other people were shouting “Let go! Let go!” and I was scared because all I kept thinking was “I can’t.” All this chaos is ensuing and I’m still swinging back and forth at full speed in the air. I figure I’m never going to get down if I can’t calm down, so on the swing back to the platform, I closed my eyes, and tried to focus. I took a deep breath and thought “Breathe in, breathe out, move forward”. I opened my eyes and swung back towards the catcher and this time I let go. And he doesn’t catch me because honestly the way I set him up with that jump, it was kind of impossible. But I’m falling and I feel what to this day, is one of the greatest rushes of joy I’ve felt.
It was free falling. And it was me doing this thing I thought moments before was legitimately impossible. And it took nine more tries but I finally threw the trick. That first time was still one of the best feelings though because that was frankly the hardest I’d had to try.
Once I was more used to falling, it wasn’t so scary, it didn’t take as much out of me but that first one took real effort. And so it’s my favorite. Because I gave it the most. I’m such a believer the joy is in trying. So focus on that, go chase that.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.enigmafilms.co/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/madisonlin.35mm/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/madison.lin.96/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/madison-lin-46b641123/
- Twitter: @Water_Mel_Lin
Image Credits
Annie Swenson
