Recently I’ve been negotiating a contract with a producer based on another continent. It has been an illuminating process in ways I hadn’t anticipated. There is a time difference, of course, and a language barrier, but there are also a set of cultural assumptions I have had to learn to navigate.
Like too many contracts these days, the negotiation is being conducted over email and, like too many contracts, it is driven by a looming deadline: rehearsals begin imminently.
Our exchanges begin just before 11pm my time, at the very end of my working day when I am often tired or, depending on how the UK office day has gone, frequently irritable. At the other end of the thread, the producer is reading my notes at sunrise, at the very beginning of their day. Both of us are responding quickly, perhaps too quickly, keen to keep the conversation moving forward, anxious to resolve issues while we still have momentum. Or, to be honest, while I’m still awake.
But email flattens everything. Neither of us can hear the other’s tone, or be reassured by facial expressions. Tone and expression matter in both our cultures but they function differently in each. The UK is a ‘low-context’ culture: we value directness, precision and logic, particularly in written negotiation. The producer comes from a ‘high-context’ culture where meaning is carried obliquely, valuing subtlety and indirectness. I am negotiating the language of a contract while the producer is negotiating the shape of a relationship. Our progress is slow and not without tension.
It reminds me a little of the game of Telephone we used to play as children. A message is whispered to one child who whispers it to the next, and on, and on. Inevitably the message emerges at the end of the chain, distorted and changed. Not intentionally, not maliciously, but meaning shifts as it moves.
Our industry often seems like a game of Telephone. We use a shared language, words that are easily understood and yet, depending on who is using them and who is receiving them, the intention can be radically different. Take the word ‘deadline’ for example. To the industry, deadline might simply mean a specific date on which to expect a draft while to the creative, deadline is a constraint on their creativity, a pressure that can limit and destabilise their working process.
Between the two structures of creative and industry, a misunderstanding can be structurally disruptive. Despite a shared vocabulary, words intended to bring the two worlds together can had the opposite effect. Divergent interpretations may send them down paths that do not lead to the same destination.
Creativity is often driven by instinct. It is fluid, elusive, ephemeral even. But when creativity is expected to function within an industry it must be channeled into a form. What was instinctual must now be interrogated and evidenced. Pressure becomes the driver of change.
The two partners, creative and industry, began the adventure with one language spoken across two worlds; now they find themselves speaking two languages in one room.
At the heart of all creativity sits, in my experience, a desire to be seen and heard, to tell stories that mean something, transcending culture and language. This is what drives all work, all conversations, all negotiations. That desire is what fuels collaboration but it is possible to want the same outcome while approaching it from different structures. The relationship between creativity and industry is symbiotic: they exist independently but they mutually benefit and shape each other. Communication is rarely the problem, comprehension is.
We often confuse communication with transparency, with a romanticised idea that absolute alignment is the foundation of a good relationship. In creative work, alignment can, as often as not, be damaging. Creativity responds to tension because art must withstand interrogation and criticism. It emerges not just from nurturing but from pressure. Similarly we must not move too far in the other direction and conflate tension with resistance. We should reject the idea that either the creative or the industry approach are inherently superior and instead focus on building environments in which both can thrive. Neither should ‘lose’, but neither should win, either.
I am always struck by the velocity which can imbue work when tension is properly held. Metamorphosis lies at the heart of creativity as it is the process from which the most compelling work emerges. Taking a risk can lead to unexpected discoveries. Again, language diverges here: when they speak of taking risks, the creative may mean expressive danger or the possibility of failure in pursuit of something new. When the industry speaks of risk, it can mean exposure: financial, reputational, logistical. The creative may think of risk as breaking into the unknown, the industry might see it as something to be explored but managed. The word is shared but the meaning is not. We can, if we choose, create conditions in which risk feels permissible to both but this can only be achieved by moving beyond both total transparency and reflexive resistance.
There is, I think, a misalignment between how the two worlds of creative and industry work with each other. Essentially both are driven by the foundational belief that Talent Is The Most Important Element. Talent is the quality we like to talk about most because it feels democratic. I think we are all born with talent and how we develop that talent is what matters. Talent is evenly distributed but opportunity is not which is why talent is far more palatable to talk about. However talent, on its own, rarely moves anything forward for very long. What moves careers forward is staying power: the ability to continue long enough for evidence to accumulate.
We are encouraged to believe the industry is pro-active, that it sees potential and rewards it. The more difficult truth is that the industry is frequently more re-active. Progress is built on precedent, what comes next arises directly from what came before. This is not to discount the fable of success, yes, it can, and does (albeit rarely) happen overnight to a chosen one, but a creative career cannot be built on a Hollywood fairytale. The industry romanticises the language of discovery but it operates in the logic of confirmation.
If you think this sounds cynical, you may be right but I prefer to think of it as survival logic. I have often heard respected, well-established creatives remark, “I wasn’t the most talented of my peers, I was just the last one standing”. When you can reframe talent as the underpinning longevity of a career rather than the driver, something subtle shifts. It doesn’t make the industry any kinder but it does recalibrate expectation and recalibration, although painful, is different from betrayal.
It has been more than a decade since I transitioned from actor to agent and in those years I have come to recognise how painful mistranslation can be. Nowhere is this clearer than in the gap between the languages of aspiration and mechanism. Aspiration is the language of possibility, the structure we use to motivate and inspire ourselves and others. It is generous and hopeful. Aspiration is ambition, the ultimate expression of talent when encouraged to dream without inhibition. Mechanism, by contrast, is stricter and much more rigid. Mechanism is procedural, the set of processes though which decisions are actually made, its values are evidence and continuity. It does not trade in possibility but enforces what is already proven.
Aspirational encouragement is easily mistranslated as procedural assurance. For example “we loved your audition,” is fed back in good faith but may be interpreted as “we intend to cast you”. On the other hand, mechanistic decisions, “it wasn’t the right fit,” can be experienced as personal judgement. In those moments disappointment can hit like betrayal because expectation was asked in one language but answered in another.
Words do not carry fixed meanings; they acquire meaning within systems of use. As work passes between the worlds of creative and industry the same language begins to behave differently. Bringing the two together and holding them steady is an ethical, as well as an interpretive act. The task is to maintain balance, to be the bridge, the translator.
I said earlier that pressure is the driver of change. With this in mind the we can understand the translator as the manager of that pressure. On any project competing demands accumulate while the development of work progresses: the translator becomes both interpreter and ambassador. While bridging those worlds they must employ discernment, selecting what passes through, what is softened, what must be rephrased. Their role is not to judge, but to mediate. It is a role that must be both protective and sensitive, requiring care and consideration for all sides.
The aim is not compromise, but composition. Compromise asks each side to give something up, while composition asks how the different parts might be rearranged so nothing essential is lost, and the whole reveals itself to be greater than the sum.
Yet even here, even with all this insight, we can still fail. We can reach for understanding and still find ourselves lost in translation. But this failure is human, rather than moral.
This, I think, is the often unseen work of an agent. We operate at the intersection of art and business, translating and interpreting back and forth between the two. We speak for both industry and creative, developing fluency across generations and hierarchies. We are prosaic in the language of aspiration and precise in the syntax of mechanism. Translation doesn’t solve misunderstanding: it makes continuation possible and that is the aim. Across language, across culture, across continents, translation ensures we continue to communicate.