Let Anxiety Drive the Work, Not the Ego

Anxiety is a constant feeling on any film set. Whether it’s your first day or your hundredth, there’s always something simmering under the surface. You’re meeting new collaborators. You’re under time constraints. You’re working with unpredictable elements like light, weather, equipment, and people.

For a director, anxiety often manifests itself as the need to appear confident. For a makeup artist, it’s worrying about whether their work will hold under the lights. For an actor, it’s remembering lines, blocking, and navigating a scene’s emotional beats, sometimes all on the fly.

And yet, somehow, it all comes together. The moment the sound mixer calls “speed,” the 1st AC confirms the camera is set, and the director calls “action,” there's a collective breath. It’s messy. It’s beautiful. It works.

But sometimes, anxiety doesn’t fade. Sometimes, it feeds something more destructive: ego.

Years ago, I co-wrote and directed an ambitious short film, at least ambitious for me at the time. We were working on a soundstage with a full crew and a large cast. I had no idea what I was doing, but I did know this: the people around me believed in the project just as much as I did.

So, I trusted them.

They had the script. They had ideas. When they asked what I wanted, I kept it loose. Not only did they deliver, their input made the film better. Some of us were relatively green, but we leaned on each other. That project taught me that conviction and collaboration are more important than control. You have to trust your team. You have to trust the process.

Over time, I’ve seen what happens when that trust is missing. On some projects, anxiety over not fully grasping the vision can push someone toward control rather than collaboration. Instead of allowing the team to work through the material together, one person might try to take over entirely, rewriting or reshaping everything in a way that no longer aligns with the original intention.

This often leads to confusion. Characters become thin. The emotional throughline gets lost. What once felt grounded and layered becomes simplified or flat, sometimes played only for cheap laughs or spectacle. You can feel when something meaningful has been stripped away.

Visually, you can try to compensate, framing things with intention, pushing for dynamic blocking, bringing depth where possible, but when the core idea has been compromised, it becomes difficult to recover.

What unravels a film isn’t usually a lack of talent or effort. More often, it’s fear. Fear of being wrong. Fear of not being in control. That fear feeds ego, and when ego takes over, especially when mixed with inexperience, it can derail everything.

Let anxiety be fuel, but only for the work and never for ego.