The director of ‘San Andreas’ and ‘Rampage’ shares his advice on making it as a director.
Over the years, Brad Peyton has tried his hand in a variety of genres. Starting out with the short film Evelyn: The Cutest Evil Dead Girl, which made it to the Toronto International Film Festival, he went on to create the claymation series What It’s Like to Be Alone. Since then, he’s tackled projects as large as the sequel Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, the disaster movie San Andreas, and the video game adaptation Rampage, all of which star Dwayne Johnson.
Now that he’s had box office success and is a major player in Hollywood, Peyton is looked to for advice from those hoping to break into the industry. Below we’ve collected some of his best tips for success.
Follow Your Passion
In a 2015 Reddit AMA, Peyton was asked specifically for directing advice. He gave these simple words of wisdom for any creator to live by:
“My best advice in creating anything is to follow your passion. Then you can follow your gut, and your gut / instincts rarely lie.”
Brad Peyton directs Dwayne Johnson on the set of ‘Journey 2’ (Warner Bros.)
Face the Unknown
Directing is something that must be done out in public, in collaboration with others. In a Director’s Roundtable in 2015 (watch below), Peyton emphasized this aspect of the job, advising aspiring filmmakers to embrace the social requirements of being a director:
“The challenge with being a director as opposed to a painter or a writer, even though I’ve done both of those things too, is that you can do those by yourself. As a director, you have to face the fear of the unknown and test yourself, kind of in public, with a bunch of other people in order to achieve it.”
Prioritize Your Film
Being a filmmaker involves more than just going to work every day. Often, normal work hours stretch into long days and nights, and devoting your entire life to the project while it’s being made is not unheard of, as Peyton told the Just Shoot It podcast in 2018:
“The only hang up I have is that sometimes it takes me longer to digest other people’s ideas than my own. And I’m super aware of that so I go in ahead of time. I’ve adjusted all my behavior to factor into how I operate. At the end of the day, I think the people who care about making films, they put everything second to film. Like to me, that’s the sign of a good filmmaker, is that everything is second. Everything…everything goes out the window, except for the movie and it’s almost like an uncontrollable thing.”
What We Learned
Whether or not you aspire to be a high-concept filmmaker who works with large-scale sets and special effects, the same rules of filmmaking apply. Focus on creating a story that resonates with audiences and fully devote yourself to the project at hand.
If your sets are stunning but your characters lack development, you’ll lose your viewers once they leave the theater, if not in the first few minutes of the film. As a first-time filmmaker especially, it’s easy to be overly ambitious, but directing involves understanding what you can and cannot accomplish with the allotted time and budget you have.
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