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Producing and Motherhood
One of my favorite Filmmaker articles is contributing editor Taylor Hess’s winter 2018 piece, “Disclosed: Producers and Therapists on Dealing with the Stress of a Demanding Profession.” Hess, whose producing credits include Between the Temples and John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, found parallels between the work producers do and that of therapists. (I suggested the article to Hess after joking for years that when two producers get together, one in production and the other not, the conversation ultimately turns into “producer therapy.”) When I asked Hess how she’d like to follow up that piece for my final issue, she suggested this piece based around another parallel: filmmaking and motherhood. — Scott Macaulay
Once upon a time on the set of a movie I was producing, one department head wanted to confront another about an unresolved issue, something having to do with paperwork. I had been informed that prior attempts to handle the matter had been futile, so I stepped in to help. Standing beside a plastic folding table underneath fluorescent lighting, one of the department heads began to fritz out. “This is all possible because of me,” he shouted. “I’m fucking killing it!” Off he stormed. I moved on to whatever I needed to do next and ended up picking up the paperwork pieces myself some months later.
If only I had Dr. Becky’s voice in my mind at the time. Before formulating a response, I would have taken a breath. Once the heat of the moment passed, I would have headed straight to a bathroom mirror to look myself in the eye. I would have said, “You are a good producer having a hard time,” then quickly decided how to talk to both department heads about what happened.
But I was still a new mom at this point and hadn’t yet encountered the clinical psychologist who has since risen to internet fame and overtaken my social media algorithm with bite-sized zingers and thoughtful monologues. Rather than focusing on parenting techniques, Dr. Becky Kennedy’s advice centers on emotional regulation by teaching parents how to stay grounded in the face of their children’s big emotions. She frames a parent’s calm presence as the most powerful tool they have, calling it the root of what she terms “sturdy leadership.”
A constant metaphor in her podcasts and writing goes something like, “If you’re on a turbulent flight, you don’t want a pilot who panics. You want one who says, ‘This is going to be bumpy, but I’ve got you.’” I think about this a lot, especially when I’ve just reminded my child to use her quiet voice and she looks at me, then proceeds to use a louder voice. I try to take a breath before I respond. I am the pilot. Not the turbulence.
Few producers talk openly about being parents. This silence is partly cultural. For the most part, our society still associates professionalism with emotional detachment and sees caregiving as a liability rather than an asset. But being a producer—and for the purposes of this essay, I’m specifically referring to the kind of on-the-ground producer who is running all aspects of the production from set—is fundamentally about care. It’s about guiding a fragile project through a volatile process, protecting it while also allowing others to shape it. And parenthood, with its constant negotiation between boundaries and nurture, is not a distraction from leadership. It is leadership.
From an existential perspective, the parallels are there—both worlds tend to be defined by a scarcity of time, money and sleep. Such conditions bring out the worst in everyone. Now, sprinkle in the highly charged emotions that accompany the rearing of something fragile into the world. A producer who can validate frustration, set clear expectations and hold her own anxiety without displacing it onto others becomes a source of real stability, much like a parent who remains calm during a tantrum.
But the job of producing is often framed as solving problems, not managing feelings, which is precisely where the analogy between producing and parenting begins to break down. One can’t resolve human complications—missed deadlines, bruised egos, the contract that slipped through the cracks—without first acknowledging the emotional landscape on which such problems unfold. Feelings, especially “big feelings”—intense emotions that are valid, as Dr. Becky would remind us—are the center of everything. They are ambient, contagious and combustible. To solve problems is to manage feelings; the two are intimately intertwined. Yet, the prevailing mythology in our industry insists that the producer’s value lies in her stoicism, her detachment, her ability to bulldoze over dysfunction.
I used to joke that if I could deliver my baby in my car on the side of the Taconic (a narrow and winding highway in upstate New York), I could make a little movie. While nothing will ever be as hard as growing a human being inside my body and yielding to the excruciating process of childbirth and then, most of all, everything that comes after (i.e., being a parent forever), the more complicated truth is that the realities of producing can be a lot more complex.
Parents are granted cultural authority and a clear role in their children’s lives. Society generally affirms the parental right to set boundaries, say no and guide the child. An assumed hierarchy gives parents a default legitimacy. Producers, on the other hand—particularly in independent film—often operate in a blur of ambiguous power dynamics. Directors hold creative vision. Investors or other producers hold financial leverage. Crew members may be union-protected or, in the absence of formal protections, form their own loyal cliques as a shield against extractive labor practices implemented by producers who feel they have “no other choice.” Producers can’t be sturdy leaders if the authority of their role is contested.
Parents have time to build relational trust and a shared emotional vocabulary with their children, which means that there’s a foundation upon which ruptures can be repaired. Producers, on the other hand, are almost always working under compressed timelines and high stress. They end up absorbing distress and anxiety from people they’ve just met without the appropriate processing time and shared investment. Producers can’t be sturdy leaders if their collaborations are strictly transactional.
Parents are increasingly reminded these days that their emotional state shapes their children’s world. While not all parents have the time and interest to explore available resources, there’s an abundance of modern parenting advice about emotional regulation from the likes of Dr. Becky. Producers, on the other hand, get no such guidance. There’s no normalized language for holding space or absorbing emotional overflow, though producers do both of these things constantly. Producers can’t be sturdy leaders unless the job is understood, not undermined.
It’s certainly not novel to declare that the industry needs to recognize listening, validating, de-escalating and regulating emotions as real labor. If producers are to be responsible for outcomes, they need to be granted genuine creative access, clear authority and relational continuity. But it’s also not helpful to just wail for a sea change. There are plenty of (a handful of?) valiant filmmakers and organizations working to redesign the industry’s power structures so that sturdy leadership might someday be more viable, more possible, so that producers could be supported, not sidelined.
What’s helped me is to practice sturdiness even in the absence of a framework that supports sturdy leadership, and being a mom’s given me that chance. As a mom, I set boundaries instead of making requests (the difference between “Can you put your shoes on?” and “I am closing the art box so that you can focus on putting your shoes on”). I practice seeing feelings as real, even when I don’t condone the behavior that is temporarily representing those feelings (the difference between “Don’t whine, dinner is coming” and “You’re hungry, which makes it especially hard to wait”). Naturally, these approaches can’t be cleanly enacted all the time. But if the overall intention is to connect and validate, to be as equally firm as I am warm, I’m showing up with the emotional presence of a sturdy leader. This means refusing to take the bait from a child who is still only learning. This means saying, “I see this is hard” rather than quietly boiling inside and pretending nothing is wrong. This means calmly tolerating discomfort instead of bulldozing over it.
“In sports, people practice all the time,” Dr. Becky says. “We don’t do that with emotional regulation, but we should.” Becoming a parent and being the kind of sturdy leader that I believe will help my children thrive is not an innate trait or instinct. It’s a skill, a muscle that strengthens with exercise, but even as I feel myself growing stronger, I anticipate and look forward to the blunders. They are opportunities to find myself in a mirror and calmly say, “You are a good parent having a hard time.” This is a kind of training—a tuning of the nervous system oriented toward problem-solving with calm clarity, relational steadiness rooted in care.
Dr. Becky calls it sturdy leadership, but it’s really a kind of awareness, noticing what lives beneath the words we say. Since becoming a mom, I notice how I speak to people and how I react when they speak to me—not just with my children, but my friends, my family, my collaborators. Before, I think I moved through conversations trying to be efficient, trying to get things done, appease who I needed to appease, not disappoint who I least wanted to disappoint. There’s something about the repetition of small daily exchanges with a child that’s got me listening differently now. I listen for what’s underneath someone’s tone, their silence, their defensiveness—and I try to meet that rather than what’s on the surface. The challenge is to stay engaged without collapsing, to respond without retaliating. I don’t always manage it. But something has shifted. The sturdiness I’m cultivating as a parent is seeping into every corner of my personal and professional life.
I think back to how I processed that outburst on set and see now how the sturdier me would have met it not with silence, not with a defensive posture, not with a feeble apology that wasn’t mine to make. The sturdier me would have set the stage for a productive conversation, would have seen the conflict as a chance for repair. The sturdier me would have met his feelings as an invitation, the chance to say, “I believe you.” And in this sturdier version of myself, a strange realization begins to take shape: though it’s obvious why independent producing is not compatible with being a mother, being a mother is making me better fit to produce.
