This Is A Robbery!

My wife and I are jumping on a train to the south coast tomorrow. It’s where we met on what’s now the Bognor Regis campus of Chichester University. I’m hoping we can gain entry to the Macklin bar and reminisce about when we first got together.

Under The Iron Bridge

One fateful night in October 1992 I willingly succumbed to her romantic overtures. My idea of flirting was to put Charlotte Sometimes by The Cure on the jukebox, but thankfully she was more direct. As proactive as always, and certainly emboldened by the student bar’s cheap white wine, she made her move. 

After thirty years of being a couple I’m still very grateful for that alcohol fuelled public display of affection. It seems to have panned out pretty well, although at the time the girl I’d been seeing for a whole week didn’t give her immediate approval. 

Just through the gaps of Charlotte’s and my first romantic clinch I caught glimpses of my brand new ex flame at the other end of the bar.

She was communicating her feelings about the current events in the Macklin with various expressive hand gestures. Ah, memories.

Jumping Someone Else's Train

We’re actually going to meet an old flatmate called Jon. Along with Cate, Lorna and Sean and a revolving door of bit part players, we lived together for three whole years.

Then I finished my degree, left sunny Bognor and somehow twenty eight years passed. Just like that.

I haven’t seen Jon in nearly three decades but I’m assuming he’s still a massive film fan. Certain things like that rarely change, and so I expect he’s still very much a movie aficionado. 

In A Terylene Shirt Tonight

He taught me lots about films and in particular how to watch them. All sorts of things like pointing out macguffins, predicting a meet cute or how filming from certain angles emphasised the meaning of a scene or traits of a character.  

Much of it resonated with the things I was learning in my English Literature degree like allegory and foreshadowing but there was lots I’d have learned nowhere else. 

One thing I began to really enjoy was watching single scenes from films. Jon would forward wind a video just to enjoy a ten minute scene and that was that. He watched film clips like I listened to singles or isolated album tracks, and for me it was an entirely new way of viewing.

You Never Can Tell

When Pulp Fiction came out Jon, like the whole film world, was completely bowled over. He was already a great admirer of Tarantino and for at least one party he insisted the theme was Reservoir Dogs.

I always thought that 'Reservoir Dogs' was Tarantino’s first film but I learned recently that he made one before that. And I don’t mean 'True Romance' or even 'Past Midnight'. Quentin Tarantino’s first film project was a black and white comedy that he starred in called 'My Best Friend’s Birthday'. He also directed, edited, co-wrote and co-produced the feature.

He spent three years making it and every dollar he earned in that time he put into the film. It was a real labour of love. Tarantino thought he was creating something amazing and that it would explode into the world and launch his career. 

But there was a problem. It was a terrible film.

What A Mess I've Made

He showed it to various people and the reaction was universal. It was a “horrible, embarrassing failure” and was never officially released.

One producer told him, “Quentin, what you need to do with this tape is, you need to wrap it in the bloodiest steak you can find, and you need to get a little boat, and you need to go out into the ocean and find the sharkiest waters you can find, and then drop this meat-covered tape into the ocean!”

Harsh!

Since then Tarantino has of course created many wonderful films and been widely recognised for his art. But he says “of all the accomplishments, the one I’m the most proud of is the two weeks after ‘My Best Friend’s Birthday’ failed.”

After that film, the project he’d poured his heart, soul and savings into for three years, he didn’t quit. He took stock, picked himself up and started again. 

“The fact that I had such a failure and that I didn’t give up is the number one thing in my life that I’m the most proud of.”

You're Not Beaten Yet

There are two things for this week’s Top Tips that I want to highlight from Tarantino’s experience and his response to failure.

Firstly, don’t give up. We’ve touched on responses to failure before with my favourite being the Gary Neville line “Failure is a bruise, not a tattoo.” Setbacks are temporary not permanent unless you decide so. Just because you experience failure doesn’t mean you are one.

Secondly, failure is a good teacher. But only if you choose to see it in that way. And very many times you do get a choice in the perspective you choose.

Failure is rarely an isolated experience. Somehow though we focus on just that one part - the bit that went wrong. There’s a danger that you assign too much importance to it and ignore all the wins that led up to it. I say this because it’s often the case that a failure comes at the very end of a huge run of successes. Let’s look at (surprise!) football.  

Eat My Goal

To lose a Champions League final a team has to first win repeatedly against the best teams in Europe. You only make your way to the final if you beat all other teams in the way. When a team loses the Champions League final their record could look like this: W, W, W, D, W, D, W, D, W, W, D, W, W, L.*

Not a single loss in the first thirteen games. Most of them were wins with just a sprinkling of draws.

If you want to reflect and recognise progress there’s a lot of good stuff to take a look at. That’s not just being fluffy. There’s really no logical reason to only focus on the one (admittedly important) part of the sequence that was a failure. 

It’s not a rational approach to do that. There’s clearly room for improvement, but it’s important to recognise it’s one part of a much bigger whole. You’re building on a very positive base, not starting completely from scratch.

Back To The Start 

Tarantino went back to the footage and rewatched it with a critical, practical eye. He noted that the final scene he’d filmed was of a much better quality compared to some of the earlier scenes. The difference was distinct and it made him consider his progress carefully and understand that he was improving over time.

He’d never had the opportunity to go to film school but recognised that students start off as beginners and become better as the course progresses. He decided that the experience of making 'My Best Friend’s Birthday' was his very own film school. An experience during which he gradually improved his skillset.

So that’s three things actually, isn’t it? Don’t give up, failure is a teacher and thirdly, how he chose to remember his experience. Actively choosing a positive perspective is a very powerful option. He reframed that failure into something that could be forever beneficial and he could use again and again.

This weekend, take a moment and think back to your greatest failure and how you chose, or maybe still choose, to respond to it.

What did it teach you?

How could you reframe it?

How could you use it beneficially in the future?

How could you film it Tarantino style?!