I talked to Ela Thier this week on Keep Going, and she said something early on that told me exactly where the conversation was headed. Filmmakers, she said, know a lot about failure. That sounded like a joke, but not really. It was more like a basic fact of the trade.
Thier is a writer, director, and the founding director of the Independent Film School, which now has something like 65,000 members. The strange part is how it began. She could not get a job. She applied for a dog-walking job and did not get that either. So she did what a lot of people do when the normal routes close up. She made her own opening. She announced that she was starting a screenwriting class. Two people signed up. One of them wanted a discount. So she made the first class free, twenty people showed up, eight stayed for the full course, and the thing took on a life of its own.
That story sounds neat when you tell it fast, but what I liked about her version is that she does not pretend she had some polished strategy from the start. She was trying things. She was paying attention. She was making changes. Now people would call it a lead magnet and act like it was all part of a system, but back then it was just common sense. Let people see what you can do. Let them decide if they want more.
There is a lesson in that which has nothing to do with film school and everything to do with work. A lot of people wait for permission, or for the market to confirm them before they begin. Thier did the opposite. She put something in the world, saw what happened, and kept moving. That is a better way to build almost anything.
The phrase she kept coming back to was “follow the fun,” which could sound soft if it came from somebody less serious. From her it did not. She meant it as a discipline. She meant that when the work stops feeling alive, you should pay attention, even if the safer move is to keep grinding in the same format. She said she has changed things at the school in ways that cost her students and forced her to rebuild. The biggest break came when she moved from in-person teaching to online teaching. Most of the old students vanished. She had to start over. But the move let the school grow in a way it never could have otherwise.
That is the hard part of following what feels alive. It is not comfort. It is risk. Adults forget that. Kids do not need to be taught how to enjoy making things. They do it by default. Then school, work, status, and all the usual junk come in and flatten that instinct into a set of measurements. Thier’s point was that the chase for success and fear of failure can pull you away from the work that actually matters to you. For artists that is deadly. It is probably bad for everyone else too.
She was also blunt about money, which I appreciated. When I asked how an artist makes enough to survive, she did not romanticize it. She said you get a job. That was her answer. Being an artist, in her telling, is a labor of love, not a reliable business model. If some money comes from the art, good. But counting on that is like building your life around a winning lottery ticket. Better to separate the two goals. One is keeping the lights on. The other is making the work you need to make. Once you jam those together, you often fail at both.
That answer matters because too much advice around creativity is built on fantasy. We tell people to monetize their passion, build their brand, scale their gifts, and all the rest of it. Most of the time that just means turning the thing you love into another machine for stress. Thier has a more useful view. Protect the work first. Protect your ability to do it. Get honest about the economics. Then keep going.
At the same time, she does not draw a hard line between art and business. She said that when she moved the school online and had to learn marketing, course-building, team management, and sales, she found that process deeply creative too. She treated it like making something, not like taking a day job away from her real work. That is probably why she got through it. She was not just doing admin. She was building a structure that could hold the rest of her life up.
Still, there was a cost. For a few years, she had to put filmmaking aside and put her energy into the school. That tradeoff was not theoretical. It took real time away from the work she most wanted to do. But the payoff came later. The school made it possible for her to direct another film, one starring J.K. Simmons, which she is releasing this year. That is the kind of delayed return most people hate because it takes too long and gives you no guarantee. It is also, very often, the only kind that counts.
One of the strongest parts of the conversation came when she talked about her film Tomorrow Ever After. By her account it did everything an independent filmmaker could ask once audiences actually saw it. It got standing ovations. It won awards. It had a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score during its run. And yet it still could not get proper distribution. She told me about meeting with an executive at Sony Pictures Classics who said they loved the film and could not buy it. It was not at Sundance. It had no known actors. They could not sell it.
That, she said, was when she became a grownup.
It is a hard line, but an honest one. She realized that if you want to beat the game, sometimes you have to pretend to play it. So the next films got built with financeable actors attached. That was not the death of her principles. It was an adjustment to reality. There is a difference. Artists hate that distinction because it feels like compromise, and sometimes it is. But there is also a point where refusing the rules just means nobody sees the work. That can become its own kind of vanity.
I asked her why she stays in New York when it is expensive and hard and increasingly absurd in all the normal ways. Her answer had nothing to do with career. It was about people. Family in Brooklyn. Her nephew. The relationships that make a life feel real. She said those are the safest investment we have. I think she is right. A lot of people make decisions about where to live or what to build based on some abstract idea of winning. Thier’s view is more grounded than that. Stay near the people who make you yourself.
By the end of the interview it was clear that her school is not some side project that got out of hand. It is part of the same body of work. She cares about her students. She would like to coach all of them herself, but the thing is too large now, so she coaches the coaches and keeps the system going that way. She also argues, correctly I think, that her students are better served when she keeps making films. If she stopped doing the work, her advice would go stale.
She has a book coming out in May called How to Fail as an Artist: My Best Tips, which is the exact kind of title I like because it does not pretend the road is clean. She described it as a memoir, but also as a pep talk for artists who have given up, or are about to, which probably means most artists at one point or another.
That is what this whole conversation was really about. Not failure as branding. Not failure as a cute origin story. Failure as the weather you work in if you care about making something real. Thier’s answer is not to deny that. It is to build a life sturdy enough to keep working anyway, keep teaching anyway, keep making films anyway, and keep some part of the whole thing joyful enough that you do not turn into a dead machine while doing it.
