Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1544300
28 M PS E . O R G and offer one's take on the solution. But early in my career, I was afraid to speak my mind, even if it was a good idea. It still might have been a good idea, but I was afraid to raise my hand and be seen and say, "Hey, what about this?" and be found out to be the hack I thought I was. Do this long enough and you discover that one of the worst feelings in the world is to hold back your opinion and see someone else in the room say it for you and get credit for it. I lived like that for a long time. It's part of having creative anxiety. My wife, Ann, will tell you that even today, at 69 years old, it's just now starting to dissipate. I start every film with the blank page, I stare at it, and I say to her, "I don't know how I'm going to do this. I'm not up to it. I don't know why they think I can do this. I don't even know how to make these sounds." I still have these bouts of anxiety. Ann always steps up, in these moments, and says something like "You're Mark Mangini, you'll figure it out." She's always right. Something is changing. Last summer, I did a film with Werner Herzog. He asked me to work on his first narrative film in a while, Bucking Fastard, a drama that comes out this year. You would think, if you have read or heard Werner speak, that he's going to be tough, a perfectionist that might make life full of second guessing, working for a master … a filmmaker that knows exactly what he wants. And all of that is true, yet he handed me the film and said, "Okay, I'll see you in two months…" and we didn't talk about it. At all. What a boost of confidence that gave me. I had a grand time. I designed and edited all the sound FX myself. The mix went really well. Werner would comment often, saying, "Oh, Mark, that was beautiful" or "I love that sound that you did there." The positive feedback was an elixir. The anxiety really dissipated. Quit while I'm ahead? SSS: Oh yeah. We all have a fear. But some people never get past their fear. Some people let their fear end their achievements. It's a real hard path to follow, not knowing if you're going to succeed or not. And so out of fear, since you fear rejection, you just stop what you're doing. You don't face the rejection, right? Where it could have been an achievement, but you chose not to, because of fear of rejection. MM: I get plenty of rejection. In fact, I have to sometimes solicit it. Having a reputation and having won awards and stuff, I find that I get way too much deference because of it and I'm not getting the pushback that is normal and necessary in any collaborative environment. I didn't get smarter or more creative. My batting average on ideas is still the same as it was 40 years ago. The thing is, I believe in failure as a process. I embrace failure because I know failure leads to success. One can't get to success without it. No one hits it out of the park the first time. No film editor has a cut that hasn't changed a frame on the delivery of the first edit or the assembly. No sound editor shows up at the mix stage, and everybody loves everything. We must fail to get to the successes, which is the trial-and-error process. And so, in somebody's famous last words, "fail early, fail often." That is brilliant advice, because the sooner you get to failure, the sooner you get to success. So, start experimenting. You've got to get through it quickly. SSS: But what if those failures cost you the job? MM: Well, that's a bit tricky, isn't it? SSS: You've never lost a job, have you? MM: Almost … well, twice, sort of. The first time … I didn't lose a job; I was told I was being let go from a film I was already on. This was a film that was doing badly, horrible preview scores, so the studio fired the director, the editor, the composer, and me. They just cleaned house and hired a new crew. I was mad because not only did I think I didn't deserve to be fired, I heard who they were hiring in my stead, and it was somebody I didn't respect. I had been recording lots of new sounds, which most people didn't do in those days, I was designing interesting textures, and I thought my replacement was going to steal my sound effects and take credit for them. Anyway, I was so upset about it that I called the producer and said I wanted to have a conversation with her, and I wanted to stay on the film. She took my meeting, and I went to see her on the Mark Mangini and Daffy Gremlin.