Keanu spent 8 hours a day for months doing one thing. You can bet your bottom dollar that the director, Stahelski, didn't do that; and that if he had, the movie wouldn't have been a success.
I think the proper recognition here is that there are different kinds of work. In order to scale past a single person, there needs to be coordination work; the work of coordination necessarily means that someone throws a ball to you, you ponder it briefly, and then toss it to someone else. The deep, full-throttled, do-only-one-thing kind of work that Keanu did was made possible by the juggle-dozens-of-obligations work that Stahelski and the other support staff did. Division of labor: Stahelski juggled the balls so that Keanu could focus.
I think where this breaks down is where managers don't realize these different kinds of work. They must juggle lots of balls; this kind of juggling is necessary for scale; and usually people who do well as managers actually like the juggling at some level. So they naturally project that onto the people working for them. Whereas the ideal manager will recognize that their primary job is to juggle balls so that their stars can do a completely different kind of work than they do.
Keanu wasn't producing anything - it was entirely skills acquisition. If anything, it was so the production could move faster, reducing takes, reducing the use of CGI or special camera work using a stunt double in his place, etc, ultimately creating a better, more believable product.
Of course credit to Keanu for having the focus/drive to do this. He gets alot of flack for being a mediocre actor, but like Tom Cruise he is a fantastic action star. He IS Neo, he IS John Wick.
He's improved a lot and is much better these days about selecting roles that play to his strengths, but yeah, Keanu is an example of someone with limited dramatic range. I'd point primarily to a handful of his early 90's roles.
'Much Ado About Nothing' and 'Bram Stoker's Dracula' in particular come to mind. He's just not a good fit for those roles. Seeing him act opposite Gary Oldman or Denzel or Branagh is tough to watch.
Rumor is brandall10 is old enough to remember the clusterf*k situation of Dracula in real time (https://bit.ly/3JlCppX). And other dramatic turns when paired against acting heavyweights like in the Devil's Advocate.
Acting is a craft. Criticism is healthy. As an actor he lacks dramatic range. This is hardly a controversial opinion, to put it lightly. He had some turns that showed promise (The Gift, some smaller films in his early career), but ultimately, that's not his forte. He is a star behind some iconic roles that best suit his talents. And is by all accounts a lovely human being. It's fine to celebrate that and call it what it is.
Finally, brandall10 likewise thinks kubancyk is a swell guy and encourages him to not take criticism of someone he's a fan of personally, even if they are an FBI agent that knows kung fu.
Ah, got it. I honestly wasn't trying to take a jab, I thought it was common knowledge he just isn't considered a good actor, but then again that could be because of my age bracket. I certainly could have worded it better though.
Cal does actually address this in his book “Deep Work”; unfortunately in this blog post he takes a fairly myopic view, perhaps just to reiterate the value of deep work, for those for whom it makes sense.
In the book, he has a section “what about Jack Dorsey” where he explains that the role of folks like a CEO is to make lots of small decisions fairly quickly, and therefore they’re constantly interrupt-driven. But most people get interrupted more than necessary and do focus work less than they could
Also, I have the impression that movie making is a fairly cascade-like process. You pitch a movie, you make the movie, you deliver the movie. There are stories of extreme change in requirements, but they seem rare.
Meanwhile in IT, you pitch a movie, you find that the movie is solving the wrong problem, or doesn't have market fit, or the requirements were wrong, you adjust, repeat this a thousand times, and in the end you deliver a comic book with a qr code that links to a web series on YouTube.
I believe that's more to do with your relative knowledge of either industry. Movie-making is a much more dynamic business than software making: scripts can vary dramatically depending on who's attached to the project at each time, on the cutting room after first viewings, directors can get replaced midway through shooting, etc etc etc. It's madness.
Exactly. And this is true for a lot of industries. Developers seem to have the impression that only software is a bit "messy", but that's because we're looking from the inside.
People wonder why large construction projects are often delayed. Well, it's often for the same reason it happens with large software projects.
You're 100% right. This it's the exact same reason why the writers strike affect something that I theory should have not effect as the shooting or editing of a movie.
In my experience media production only follows the waterfall model in paper or a really small projects, in practice it's like a chaotic version of Scrum/kanban with no standard that changes from production to production.
That depends a lot on the movie. Apocalypse Now is sort of an extreme example of this: large parts of the movie (including the ending) were completely rewritten during filming, some scenes were completely improvised, the lead was recast from Harvey Keitel to Martin Sheen after they did about a week of shooting, an entire massive on-location set was relocated after being built because the director wanted it to be right on the river (and the original set was also destroyed in a typhoon), another set which was destroyed in the same typhoon was used as-is because Coppola liked how it looked, and the helicopters they were renting from the Philippine military occasionally flew off set in the middle of a filming day to fight an ongoing insurgency elsewhere in the country.
Sure, if you are independently wealthy you can do whatever you want, including slow focused work on a topic for months.
But in Reeves case it wasn't that. It's that the slow focused work was the work he was assigned or expected to do. He didn't just do it because he was rich, he got paid for it, as part of his preparation for playing John Wick - same way actors have to bulk up, diet, learn some skills like piano playing etc before a movie.
Plus, the post's point isn't that "Reeves worked like that, why don't we all?", as if putting the onus on the individual. Yeah, "Because our boss doesn't want it, and we're not rich and can't afford to lose the job" would be the answer to that.
But Cal's point is more about "this is a good way of working, why isn't there more of it", including why it isn't being more of what employers set the working environment up for and demand (in which case you wouldn't need to be rich to be able to do it, you'd just be doing your job).
He got the job in no small part because he'd demonstrated he was able to do that in his preparation for The Matrix, his breakout role as a potential martial arts action movie star.
In that case it was more of a gamble, as the movie might have failed.
With The Matrix though, part of the film preproduction was an extended training program not just with Keanu but with Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, and Hugo Weaving. Keanu was the star but the expectation was that they’d be able to train all the actors to a pretty high level. The main difference with Keanu is that you don’t necessarily want to rely on him to deliver a lot of lines; he can do it, but he’s much more of a kinesthetic, non-verbal actor at heart.
> But Cal's point is more about "this is a good way of working, why isn't there more of it"
There is some, though often half hearted. Employees are often sent to conferences with a mission to learn about "new thing X" or consultants are brought into train the team about trend Y. Encouraging structured training is a real super power. I've seen it make the different with things like "sales enablement" for GTM or effective onboarding programs for certain companies. These are oftern cargo-culted , but when down well are very impactful.
I think the proper recognition here is that there are different kinds of work. In order to scale past a single person, there needs to be coordination work; the work of coordination necessarily means that someone throws a ball to you, you ponder it briefly, and then toss it to someone else. The deep, full-throttled, do-only-one-thing kind of work that Keanu did was made possible by the juggle-dozens-of-obligations work that Stahelski and the other support staff did. Division of labor: Stahelski juggled the balls so that Keanu could focus.
I think where this breaks down is where managers don't realize these different kinds of work. They must juggle lots of balls; this kind of juggling is necessary for scale; and usually people who do well as managers actually like the juggling at some level. So they naturally project that onto the people working for them. Whereas the ideal manager will recognize that their primary job is to juggle balls so that their stars can do a completely different kind of work than they do.