People ask fairly often how we decide who to bring on for a project, especially department heads. It’s less about the résumé than you’d think.
Trust comes first. We want people we genuinely have a good working rhythm with, people who’ll tell us the truth about what’s realistic on a given day instead of just nodding along. Right behind that is mindset over experience. Given the choice between someone slightly less seasoned who shows up wanting to problem-solve and someone more experienced who’s difficult to work with, we’ll take the first person every time. Which leads to a policy we’re pretty firm about: no assholes. One person with a bad attitude on set has an outsized effect on everyone around them. It tanks the mood, and a crew in a bad mood solves fewer problems and takes fewer creative swings. Skill still absolutely matters, it’s just not the only thing we’re weighing. And finally, bigger isn’t automatically better. There’s a right-sized crew for every project, and sometimes moving faster means adding people, and sometimes it means trimming the group down so decisions happen quicker.
We’re also lucky to be based where we are. San Diego has a genuinely great production community, and outside of the occasional cranky grip, we can’t remember the last time we worked with someone who didn’t bring a good attitude to the job.
One thing worth addressing here, since it comes up constantly these days: AI. We use it here and there, mostly for early treatment work, and it has its place. But it’s not a replacement for the kind of collaboration a real crew brings. If you’ve ever asked an AI tool whether something you wrote is good, you already know the problem: it tells you yes almost every time. That is exactly what you don’t want on a production. You hire skilled, experienced people specifically because they have a point of view of their own and will push back when something isn’t working. Losing that collaborative back and forth, in the name of moving faster, ends up costing you more than it saves.
