Week Five
July 20 - July 22, 2026
This week was a short one, because I left for holiday. Phase one of the reset is more or less complete, and I noticed that the sensation of beginning something new is very similar to the experience of recovering from addiction.
20.07.26
Today is the first day of the school summer holidays. It’s a challenge to maintain my routine, including the morning walk, around the demands of childcare and juggling schedules. Everything has to be negotiated a little bit more. It does mean that I get access to a lie-in, and don’t have to snap out of bed on the school clock, but that’s not something I really want to take advantage of anyway. I do like to rise early and make sure that I get my walk done and my photo taken; maintaining a stable rhythm is more challenging when the kids are around.
I hosted a family birthday party over the weekend, so I was on the barbecue most of Sunday, before sitting down in the evening to watch the World Cup final - Spain emerged victorious, which was excellent news.
It recalled for me the scene in Heat in which Al Pacino asks Robert De Niro, “So you never wanted a regular type life?” De Niro replies, “What’s that? Barbecues and ball games?” Pacino smiles, “Yeah”.
I remember watching that scene when I was fifteen years old, and thinking, “Yeah - who wants the regular type life?” At this stage of life, I fucking love barbecues and ball games.
One thing that this project has highlighted to me, though, is the difficulty of having to do too much. I’m the only person, other than my music collaborator, working on this film, and it’s too much work, basically. It means that I can’t do more than one thing at a time, when ideally the project needs to advance on multiple fronts. As I’ve been pulled back onto chasing archive, everything else is suspended, which makes the process desultory and excessively time-consuming.
This is a problem that accompanies the asset of being multi-skilled. I always prided myself on having multiple skills, and being able to produce, write, direct, edit, and work on several films simultaneously. I was (am) able to complete a feature film project up to and including being able to author the manufacturing master for the commercial DVD. And it’s a huge cost saver - whereas other productions paid a producer, writer, director, and editor to all simultaneously be engaged on the project, with two, sometimes three people in the edit suite every day during post-production, with me, there was always just one. The escalating day-rate bills for all of those people never materialised.
But the flip side is that doing it all yourself can become exhausting and manufacture a false economy as things take longer and deadlines extend. There’s also a danger that it can compromise the quality of the work. A single, coherent vision can improve the quality of the work, but not having another source of creative input, and having to rush or cut corners as the time becomes squeezed can weigh on quality.
I’m trying to keep these lessons in mind as I move towards new commercial activity. The most successful people that I’ve worked with, and the most successful projects that I’ve done, have all systematised the workload and delegated effectively to others; even if that means spending more money than you necessarily have to. Paying someone else for something that you can do yourself may save time and money in the long run, even though it may have a greater up-front cost.
I always felt that we failed to get that balance right at my former company. We often calculated that it was quicker for us, the company directors, to do the work ourselves, rather than train, and delegate to, others. But I think that ethic prevented us from establishing proper systems, part of which is accepting that maybe the job is not going to be done as well as you think it would be done if you did it yourself.
It’s needs must for this project, but going forward I’m conscious that I will have to do things differently. As I make this film, I am trying to think about process as a solo operator, and how I can learn and establish processes that I develop from here. That’s going to be a part of my decision-making around what I do next: I have to be able to set up systems and processes, fail fast, and be able to delegate as quickly as possible. I’m asking those questions as the film progresses: what am I doing that could be delegated? What am I doing that could be set up as a process or system? Accomplishing systems for revenue will allow me to focus my own energies on my core creative work. When I look back over the past twenty-five years, I can see that I would have had much greater space for my own creativity had I been more consistent about designing and maintaining good systems for everything else.
21.07.26
It’s taken a solid week, but we’re entering the endgame in this huge archive run. I’ve shaken pretty much every tree, and anything that’s left up there and yet to fall out is hanging by a thread. Whatever’s left should arrive over the next few days or so.
A principle that I’ve long known, but have had occasion to reacquaint myself with, is that you need to be assertive to get anything done. I put in a load of these requests back in April, and there’s been a large measure of slow-walking and avoidance, I suspect this is a tactic designed to weed out the people who are not that serious, or who won’t follow up, and the requests can then be quietly dropped.
As soon as I started being pushy and quoting the legal statutes and these agencies’ responsibilities, they started delivering - straight away, overnight. So that’s something to remember: if you want to get things done, you need to be a bit pushy, throw your weight around a little bit.
That is not the way I generally like to behave. I’d prefer it if people responded in a timely and accommodating fashion to polite requests. Sometimes they will, and some individuals have been great, but quite often they think that if they ignore me, I’ll go away. And in those instances you have to wade in with your size twelves.
Anyway, it’s all coming together at a good time. I’m off on a family holiday with the kids soon; I’ll hopefully come back to a clean slate, everything sitting ready for me to begin again. I’m feeling positive about it.
22.07.26
I’ve been wrapping up on my epic archive and materials run before departing for a short holiday, and it looks like mission accomplished. I’m about 90% there with everything I wanted to achieve, and the full record of what I need for the project is taking shape.
I corresponded yesterday with a leading human rights lawyer, very well-known internationally, who has done work in the area which the film is about. I learned that he’s putting together a project to catalogue some old human rights related cases, where there’s still more to be investigated and where there may have been miscarriages of justice. I found that very interesting - it may be something that I look at off the back of this project.
I’ve really been putting the hours in recently, starting early and working into the nights. It feels like I’ve been working more intensively than I have done for several years. I’ve always worked fairly intensively, but it’s ramped up over recent weeks, and I find the hours go past without me really knowing where they’ve gone. I’m enthusiastic and excited by the work I’m doing, and, yes, a little bit apprehensive at the same time, but that is a sea change from the preoccupation which I have had over the past number of years, and the dogged sensation that I needed to escape.
A chunk of my day was dedicated to thinking about, fantasising about, escape. It’s an amazing sensation to feel that preoccupation lift, feel myself restored to being engaged in my work, back in the world. And thinking optimistically about the future. The escape obsession used to manifest itself in all sorts of strange and subtle ways - I used to routinely track the lottery, for example, “if I could just get a lottery win, then everything could change”. That kind of crazy utopian thinking, when I didn’t need a lottery win, all I needed to do, as I’ve written before, is to say “no” in order to say “yes” to the alternatives.
I spent most of my life as a heavy smoker. I gave up over a decade ago, and it was something I thought I would never do, no-one who knew me thought that I would ever do; it was so intimately tied to my identity - that’s what I did, I smoked. It was only after I stopped smoking that I understood how much of my life smoking consumed, and I don’t mean physically, as in the damage that it does to your health, or even the act of smoking, I mean the mental energy that was dedicated to smoking. Smoking was such a pervasive part of my life and unconscious, which would seep into my conscious thought throughout the day. Anytime I went out, anywhere – to a party, the pub, a barbeque – right before leaving the house my thoughts would run, in a state of heightened anxiety:
“Do I have enough cigarettes? If not, I need to take a route that passes a shop where I can buy cigarettes. Do I have cash to buy cigarettes? If not, I need to go past an ATM, and then past the shop to buy cigarettes. Do I have a lighter? Let me check. No, I don’t. Let me hunt for a lighter. Okay, I’ve got the lighter. But what’s the lighter like on fuel? It might run out. You can never have one lighter. Let me have a backup lighter. Have I got two lighters? Let me check both are working.”
That would be a ritual before I did anything. And then I would smoke all the way to the tube station, and when I exited the tube at the other end.
Same thing if I was flying:
“How much time do I have to smoke before I get on the plane? I’m going to Los Angeles, twelve hours on the plane. I’m gonna need to smoke heavily before that. Where can I smoke in the airport? Do they have smoking areas in the airport? Do I have to be outside of the airport? How long have I got to be outside of the airport before I need to go through security, realistically, how late can I leave it? I’ve just landed - where’s the baggage reclaim? Is there a smoking area before I get to the baggage reclaim? Can I have a cigarette straight away when I get off the plane? Or do I have to wait for the baggage first?”
The smoking noise was constant. But I only really became conscious of it once it lifted, once I’d stopped smoking. That was when I realised that, Jesus, I have all of this headspace back that was being squatted in by tobacco.
That’s the sensation that I’ve started to notice over the past week or so, it’s a form of recovery from addiction. My headspace has returned, my enthusiasm has returned, and I have the time to think about and enjoy what I’m doing, because this preoccupation with escape has vanished. It’s a remarkable thing. It shows you that you can’t be half-stuck, you need to commit wholly to change before you will experience the effects of that change.
In any case, the project is in a good place, and I depart on holiday for an interval. Seaverses will resume, for my readership of three guys, all of whom I appreciate - thank you, guys - upon my return.