Who Believed in You First?

0:04Christian Taylor:Hey everybody, Christian Taylor here. Unfortunately, there is no video this week. There was a huge storm in Wheaton, Illinois. We lost all power and internet for about four days. So today we are audio only. Last week I sat down with Joe Amodei. Joe has logged 45 years in film distribution, placed hundreds of documentaries with names like Super Size Me, Restrepo, Forks Over Knives, and now, for the first time, a film he directed himself, Cold War in Philly. And somewhere in that conversation, Joe shared something really deep that I've been processing ever since. With this new film of his, he didn't set out to direct anything. He actually set out to help a friend. And this friend was Morgan Spurlock, the director of Super Size Me, who had fallen on hard times. Listen to what he had to say.

0:51Joe Amodei:I made it a mission of mine to go try to find a project that Morgan could direct and I could produce.

0:57Christian Taylor:So Joe brings Morgan this hockey story he'd found, and Morgan looks at him and he says, "No, I don't want to do it. I want you to do it" And Joe says, "What are you talking about? I'm not a director." And Morgan says this.

1:12Joe Amodei:Yes, you are. And you know enough to make this film. And I will be there by your side to answer any questions you have while you're making it.

1:22Christian Taylor:Sadly, Morgan died not long after. Before Joe shot a single frame. And Joe made the film anyway. That's the part that stayed with me. Because I don't think it's really a story about a hockey game, a hockey team, or even a documentary. I think this is about something much deeper. Something that must happen in all our lives before we can accomplish anything really special, like the movie Joe made. I think sometimes someone has to believe in you before you can believe in yourself. And I want to talk about how much that belief actually matters.

1:57Christian Taylor:Something stands out in Joe's story. He was not short on skill, he had been in the entertainment industry for 45 years, he knew as much or more about how a documentary gets made than almost anyone. Yet he could not see himself as a director. It took Morgan saying it to him out loud. Now that's not a Joe problem. It's actually a human problem. Most of us cannot see things in ourselves that others see. We're too close to them. We know all our own doubts and our own fears by their first names. So the truths about us and the beliefs we must have in those truths might have to be seen from those outside us. And then, if we are lucky, those who see us clearly can help us accept and internalize the truths they see. So we can begin to believe in ourselves as they do.

2:49Christian Taylor:I knew this one from the inside. A few years ago I wanted to make a film called The Girl Who Wore Freedom, and I didn't think I was the one to make it. I went to a producer friend of mine, a woman named Sandy Gordon, and I asked her to produce it for me, to really take the reins, honestly, because I had no clue how to make a film. I was just an actress. And Sandy said to me basically the same thing Morgan told Joe. She said, "It's a great project. You should do it" I said "There's no way I can do this. I don't know anything about making a film" And she said, "Yeah you can, and I'll be by your side to help you all the way" And she was. I couldn't have made the film without her. But because she said that, I actually learned how to make a film. I didn't know I could do it.

3:34Christian Taylor:You know, this kind of thing actually shows up everywhere once you start to look for it. Tolkien, of all people, said he might never have finished The Lord of the Rings without his friend C.S. Lewis, not because of all of the great notes he gave him, but because Lewis believed in it. Tolkien wrote that Lewis was for a long time his only audience, and that only from Lewis did he ever get the idea that his and I love that he used this word, his "stuff," could be more than a private hobby.

4:01Christian Taylor:All we have come to know and love of Middle-earth And there's only one reason that it exists today, and that is that a friend kept saying, Keep going, I believe in this. It is good. There is even research on this idea, and it's not weak. A woman named Emmy Werner followed almost seven hundred children on the island of Kauai for forty years, many of them born into very hard circumstances. The single thing that most separated the ones who thrived was not money or talent or an easy road. It was having at least one steady adult who believed in them. One. That's the whole finding. One person is enough to change a life.

4:41Christian Taylor:I'm gonna lift the veil a little here and tell you where I first experienced this. Before I had any words for it. I was a theater kid and I was in a production of Man of La Mancha And I'm not gonna pretend I was the lead because that would be silly. I just had a small part. And this is true. I was Don Quixote's horse, but I was on that stage night after night, watching this story. And it's all about a man, Don Quixote, who looks at a woman the world has thrown away and insists on seeing her as noble. He calls her Dulcinea, and his refusal to stop seeing her as beautiful and worth fighting for is what finally allows her to believe it herself. I was maybe fifteen or sixteen standing in the wings in a horse costume, feeling a little like Aldonza myself, if I'm gonna be honest. And it impacted me tremendously.

5:37Christian Taylor:But the inspirational version of this story leaves one thing out. Believing only gets you to the starting line. It doesn't carry you the whole way through because somewhere in the middle of the hard things, you hit a wall and you want to quit. Joe hit it. His first film took two and a half years. Ask anyone who has finished a big thing and they'll tell you about the stretch where they were sure it was over. I hit mine at Christmas, 2018. We had finished shooting The Girl Who Wore Freedom, and then the bottom fell out. My production company was in real trouble and I was done. Not tired, but done. During the Christmas break, my son Hunter wanted to watch a movie with me. He wanted to watch La La Land, and I didn't want to, but I finally relented. And if you've seen it, it's about a young actress named Mia clawing through audition after audition, getting the door shut in her face. Well, I'd been that actress. I had lived many of those exact scenes. So I'm sitting there and I can feel this heat rising up from my gut and it just keeps building and builds right to the part where Mia just decides to give up and go home. And at that point I couldn't take it anymore. I just got up out of my chair, ran out of the room crying, and I couldn't really tell you why. I didn't have any words. I was just living through something.

6:49Christian Taylor:And my son got up and came after me and he put his arms around me and he just started saying, It's okay, mom, you're okay. You're not going to fail. And it wasn't until that moment I understood what he meant. You're going to get it done. You will finish this film. It's going to be amazing. I didn't even know that's what was going on inside of me, but he did. And he didn't say it once. He kept saying it until I stopped sobbing. Until I could walk back in and finish the movie. And that movie, La La Land, became the thing that helped me write the script. I wrote the whole script with that soundtrack. playing on a loop, and it's a World War II documentary.

7:31Christian Taylor:Look at the shape of that. I am the mother. I'm supposed to be the one who believes in him. And at the moment it counted most, it went the other way. My kid believed in me. He had no resume for that, no track record, no standing to make that promise. He saw his mom at the end of her rope and he told her the truth as he saw it, over and over until she believed it too. That part, the over and over part, Is what I had missed for a long time. I used to think belief was a moment. Somebody says the big thing once and off you go. That's not it. The people who got me through my father, my mother, my theater mentor Neil Akins, my husband Jeremy, all four of my sons, they did not believe in me just one time. They have believed in me every time. Usually right at the moment I was trying to quit. Belief that takes root in others is not a one-time pronouncement. It's a thing that needs repeating.

8:34Christian Taylor:Joe's film carries this too, and I loved finding it. The Flyers, the team in the film, the Philadelphia Flyers, the Broad Street Bullies, they beat the Soviet Red Army in 1976, a team nobody thought they could touch. and when the players explain how, they don't talk about talent. One of them says plainly, "It was Freddy's system and we believed in Freddy." Freddy is Fred Shero their coach. His gift was not a chalkboard. It was when he got a room full of grown men to believe in each other, and to keep believing when they were scared, and it was hard. It's the same thing on that yellow sign in Ted Lasso, one of my all-time favorite series. You know the sign, the one Ted tapes over the locker room door that's all crooked. "BELIEVE" in big block letters. People love that sign because it's a little silly and it works. And the reason it works is that it's up there every single day. It's not a speech. It's a reminder they walk under on the way to do the hard things.

9:34Christian Taylor:Here's the part that is so ironic to me. What does it cost the people who did the believing? Morgan did not fund Joe's film. He just said three words. "Yes, you are." Sandy did not shoot my film. She told me the truth about myself. Hunter was a kid on a couch. None of them spent very much at all, and it changed entire outcomes. That's the strange math of belief. It is close to the cheapest thing you can give a person, yet one of the most powerful. A few honest words aimed right at the right moment. And it does something I cannot fully explain. It outlives the person who gives it. Tragically, Morgan was gone before Joe ever started his film. And his belief made the film anyway. Joe put two tributes at the very end of his film, one to his daughter and one to Morgan. He told me simply, "I miss him a lot." And sometimes the believer does not leave. Sometimes they stay and they walk the whole way with you, the way Sandy did and does every day with me. Joe's film ends on a line from Coach Shero a line he really did write on a chalkboard before the biggest game of their lives. "Win today and we'll walk together forever." That's the whole thing right there. The people who believe in us, whether they stay for the credits or not, they walk with us long after the moment is over.

11:14Christian Taylor:So if you're still walking with me in this podcast, I want to leave you with two things to actually do, Because I do not want this to be only just a nice feeling podcast. The first is to remember, somewhere behind you there is a person who saw something in you before you did. A Sandy, a Morgan. Maybe it's a teacher, a coach, a parent, a friend? It is possible that you've forgotten them. Or you've forgotten what they said because life got loud. But go find that memory. And when you've got it, ask the harder question Is there something that you've been doubting about yourself lately? Something you have quietly started to quit? If so, try to recall the belief they had in you, because their belief in you was real. It still is, and you are allowed to go back and pick it up and let it carry you forward. It's not too late. The second is to become that person for somebody else. And the good news is that it's cheap, but it pays big dividends. You already know this because you know what it did for you. You don't need money or a title or the perfect words. You just need to see one person clearly and tell them the one true thing you see in them. That's it. Tell them, and then, because this is the part we forget, tell them again next week when they are doubting, and the week after when they are wavering once again. There's an old song from the 80s by Bette Midler called Wind Beneath My Wings. It's about the person nobody sees, the one standing behind you, whose belief is the reason you got off the ground. Every one of us has had one, and every one of us can be one. usually for the price of a sentence.

13:03Christian Taylor:Before I let you go, if one person came to mind while you're listening, somebody who believed in you, or somebody who needs you to believe in them, text them this episode. It only takes a minute. And if you enjoyed the show, follow us wherever you're listening so the next one finds you. And if you want to go deeper with us, there's a community over on Patreon. Details are in the show notes. Somebody has to believe in you before you can believe in yourself. It's how Joe made his film, it's how I made mine. It's how a kid at Christmas talked his mother back into her own life. It's the cheapest, quietest, most powerful thing we can do for each other. So go remember when someone believed in you and go believe in someone else. I'm Christian Taylor. This has been Documentary First: The Deep Dive and I'll see you next time.