I’ve been saying frequently over the past six months that it’s called ‘show business’, not ‘show friend’, that I care a lot about getting films made and released and much less about making friends along the way.

But while that’s partly true, from even a purely Machiavellian, ends-justify-means perspective, it turns out it’s far, far easier to get things done when people agree with you, and with what they’re doing. So, a lot of producing, like a lot of running a company in general, is about persuading. It’s about convincing. It’s about getting people to feed you back your own ideas as though they came up with them themselves. (As they say in Washington: you can get any bill passed, as long as you’re willing to let the other side take the credit.)

So, really, producing is a lot of diplomacy. Diplomacy in a world where few questions have objectively right and wrong answers, yet millions of dollars and lifetimes of reputations nonetheless hang in the balance. Diplomacy as defined by the old saw, “the fine art of telling someone to ‘go to hell’ in such a way that they look forward to the trip.”