My Biggest Lesson: Tom Whitehead

I started out as a runner on student films and freebies and never found anything better or more fun to do with my life. I freelanced for a long time and got to see a lot of the world, and I’m a firm believer in the adage that the best Producers always look like they aren’t really doing anything. I joined Bang TV full time “about ten years ago” when it became clear that if I didn’t go full time I’d lose about 60% of my freelancing work. Jeremy McWilliams and I have been firm friends ever since. 

For a good few years I worked freelance in production and spent time at lots of different companies. Each had their own style, their own mantras and they all talked like there was absolutely only one way to do production; their way. After a while I could see the commonalities, hard won by bitter experience. Some things just worked, and some didn’t.

If the office had a fridge full of champagne, or incense sticks and a feng-shui consultant, that was down to the personal style of the owner/MD, but everywhere I went the call sheets seemed to be laid out in the same way, as did the storyboards, PPM decks and budgets.  

I’d always wanted to be a producer (I mean, who wouldn’t, right?), and was lucky enough to have enough positive role models to counterbalance the many, many who might reasonably have put me off the industry for life.

One in particular, an industry legend I’ll call ‘Simon' left  me with a piece of wisdom that had a profound effect on how I approach the relentless ‘excitements’ of production. During a particularly lively afternoon of setbacks and shithousery we were both snarling and muttering and he said “The important thing to remember is that nobody gives a fuck about your problems.” 

I’ll admit it’s not exactly Confucian, but it does get to the heart of the matter of production and I was lucky enough to realise it straight away. 

Production is all ‘problems’ and problem solving, whether it’s champagne tastes on beer budgets, the wrong kind of lilies in the helicopter, or finding out the DOP you’ve been trying to book all week is on very much the wrong kind of register. 

The people that you are working for, whether it's a production company, an agency or direct to a client, have problems of their own and have delegated only some of them to you. All they are interested in is better solutions than they could have come up with themselves. So don’t be complaining about the things you’ve been asked to do. Make everyone else’s life easier.

Over the years I also learned that there’s an important point of emphasis that really does get to the heart of being a successful producer from a business point of view. If “nobody gives a fuck about YOUR problems”  then it’s vital to know which ones are yours and yours alone, and which ones still belong to the overall process, or to other people in the food chain, which they are just hoping that you will solve for them.

Ultimately as a producer you are expected to be able to solve everybody’s problems at some point. Knowing at any stage which issues you already own, and which need to be fairly distributed to get a swift outcome is key. Is that your shit sandwich to grin and eat all alone? Or are you slicing it up and sharing it out evenly?  Is someone anxiously waiting to hear if you have a solution for them, or have they forgotten about it already already, and are now happily wondering where to go for dinner.