What We Can Learn from Italian Filmmakers

Successful learning depends on strong partnerships, mainly between an adult learning leader and a group of young learners.

Last fall, the Harvard Business Review posted an article titled “What Makes Creative Partnerships Work”.

The article states,

“In the most exceptional careers, it is often not all that lonely at the top: For the extraordinarily successful, a partner or small, longstanding team is often an integral part of their success. This is especially true of project-focused endeavors such as creating movies, where the creative person needs a partner to take care of the production side of the endeavor.”

“Excellence of any kind often involves some mysterious alchemy, but our research suggests that there are distinct patterns to a successful symbiotic relationship during a project, which often is the building block for a more long-term partnership.”

“In our research, which combined a review and qualitative interviews about symbiotic professional relationships in movies with a quantitative study of 235 movies made by 105 Italian directors and 65 producers, we found that four factors tend to be good predictors of success:

A Common Vision that Overrides Personal Ambitions

“’The fundamental thing is that the director and the producer have the same vision and, above all, the same intent: that is to make the best film possible,’ Nicola Giuliano, the Oscar-winning producer of the movie The Great Beauty, told us in an interview. Particularly with a young director, this vision may extend beyond the project at hand. ‘We are working not only on your film, but we are also working on building your career,’ he added.”

Distinct Roles

“Giuliano sees the producer, whose job is to handle the business details of making a movie, as playing a distinct and subordinate role to that of the director. ‘Without the genius, the very good producer cannot realize a beautiful film. It is always good (for the producer) to be down to earth – knowing what your role is, doing it with dedication, consider yourself lucky to do the work you love, which is a total privilege,’ he said. Paolo Sorrentino, director of The Great Beauty, say Giuliano defends him from the outside world, helping to filter its demands on Sorrentino.”

Familial Closeness

“Another quality shared by the most successful symbiotic careers, perhaps particularly in creative industries, is that the pair often becomes the nucleus of a larger family of employees. For example, El Deseo (The Desire), the production company of Spanish film maker Pedro Almodovar and his producer brother Agustin Almodovar is a close-knit group, bound by shared devotion to Pedro’s artistic vision and a deep level of trust among all members of the team. A strong symbiotic relationship between the director and producer sets an example for other team members, creating the trust that’s critical in achieving the collaboration necessary to overcome the challenges that inevitably arise during the long move-making process.”

More Than One Reputation on the Line

“Teams where both producer and director are well known enjoy important reputational advantages. Our analysis of the Italian film industry between 2010 and 2014 suggests partnerships where both have strong reputations are more successful in attracting support than partnerships where only one has a strong reputation.”

“The more we reflected on the importance of these symbiotic producer-director relationships, the more we began to think that similar relationships are probably important in other project-based ventures as well. Whether the project involves designing a chair, a car, or a vaccine, a strong partnership can serve to mitigate the risks of failure in similar ways.”

“Whether in movies or another field, the essential quality of a successful symbiotic relationship might be summed up in one term Giuliano sued a lot in our interview: sponda dialettica – a colloquial term that means the individuals serve as strong sounding boards for each other. Giuliano used it to describe a willingness to stay engaged with each other and with the project over time, despite many ups and downs.”

“’We all work for the same goal: to make the best film possible,’ Giuliano said. ‘I am ready to stay even 10 days locked in an editing room to fight with a director to defend a certain choice, but the director who works with me knows very well that in the end, if there is no agreement on a certain choice, I give the last word to the director because I don’t believe that the producer should decide on the final cut (i.e., the final edited version of the movie),’ he said. ‘I believe in dialogue.’”

It shouldn’t be surprising, when it comes to learning, that the director is the young learner and the producer is the adult learning leader. For deep learning to happen, both the young learner and the adult learning leader must commit to a common vision (a learning plan) that overrides personal ambitions. For young learners to become smarter and stronger, distinct roles must be established and maintained. The relationship between the adult learning leader, the young learner, and the young learner’s family must be a close one, unlike many of the assigned relationships found in traditional school, created through class lists and class schedules. Finally, for deep learning to occur, there must be a reputational priority placed on both the young learner and their adult learning leader. In other words, struggle is owned by both, and success is celebrated by both.

Common vision, distinct roles, familial closeness, and reputational unity all depend on dialogue, where the young learner and the adult learning leader both approach the learning plan in a spirit of collegiality and success.

Til tomorrow. SVB