We talk to a lot of talented filmmakers at Musicbed, but not all of them win Oscars. And we all know that you can be a world-class filmmaker and not take home the golden statue—Spike Lee, Alfred Hitchcock, Sidney Lumet, are a few great examples. In other words, not all great filmmakers have won Oscars. But, we can probably agree on something else: All Oscar-winners are great filmmakers.
When we asked Robert Legato about his success rate at achieving the impossible, he didn’t immediately answer the question. He’d never thought about it. This is the man responsible for the visual effects in films like Apollo 13, Titanic, Avatar, and The Jungle Book. A man fluent in the impossible. And yet overcoming it had rarely occurred to him. It’s the exact mind-set, we soon realized, that makes Robert Legato Robert Legato.
Deciding to not make a film is hard. We’re living in the golden age of people making films — thanks to new technology and an increasingly low barrier to entry — and so often the ball starts rolling before we ask ourselves if we should roll it in the first place. In a craft that ultimately amounts to a series of impactful decisions, the first hard decision is whether or not to commit to your film at all. There is nothing worse than getting to the middle of a project, only to realize you’ve been making the wrong film.
