The Great Acting Blog: “True Collaborators”

The Great Acting Blog: “True Collaborators”

It is said that there is only a certain number of people who we can collaborate with successfully, and that that number is not high. The number of people we can collaborate with successfully is finite. Therefore, we need to be able to correctly identify the right people and cherish them. Working with the wrong people can diminish the quality of our output, create a debilitating self-doubt and force us to become hypocrites.

For me, turning up on time is not enough. That’s a given rather than a virtue. Being reliably professional too is a fundamental, nobody should be praised for this, it should be the norm. And I wouldn’t want to collaborate with anyone who treats their work as “just a job” – this attitude can be dispiriting and cause our work to fray at the edges.

It’s all about the people. The best ones to work with love what they do, they are obsessed by it, continually looking to improve and innovate, always searching for excellence. They are dedicated and focussed on the work at hand. They are little interested in their own status, and are only ambitious in terms of their artistic choices. This kind of person is rare indeed, but when we do find them, they often energise us and inspire us to do our best work, smashing through our previous self-imposed limitations in the process.

True collaborators are rare.

Is it possible then, to turn someone into a true collaborator? To instil in them our own approach and values? After all, we can keep pushing someone  but if they don’t care enough or are not interested enough or not ambitious enough, then surely there is little we can do – they will merely remain anchored in their comfort zone.

So the best thing is to find true collaborators.

The next best thing is to find people with the potential to be a true collaborator, and then create a process for ensuring that that potential is fulfilled.

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