Creativity Regained

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Between six and eight fellows for the Feature Film Lab are chosen from more than 3,000 applications and scripts and receive room, board, and equipment at a cost to the organization of up to $75,000 each. In labs that last anywhere from four days to four weeks they get the chance to rehearse, shoot, edit, and rework scenes under the guidance of creative advisers -- often institute alumni -- and with the input of other fellows, staff, and Redford himself. The goal is to leave the institute with a rough edited reel of four or five scenes from their screenplays, but they take away more. "The experience at the Sundance Institute was a creative epiphany about how to solve my first film," says writer/director Miguel Arteta, whose debut, Star Maps, won him a lucrative deal with Fox Searchlight. Arteta's next projects, Chuck and Buck and The Good Girl, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and sold to studios.

The institute chooses fellows carefully, as does any organization that relies on its people for energy and ideas. What it is chiefly looking for, Redford says, is "voice." Visionary business leaders -- Jobs, Chouinard, Jeff Bezos, Ralph Lauren -- bestow something of their characters upon their companies, but as organizations grow their founders' voices grow fainter. In the end, organizations draw their voices (their real voices -- not those manufactured by professional brand builders) from their members. In a world of easy imitation, Redford recognizes, voice can be a potent differentiator.

"When you have the good fortune to have success in your life," says Redford, "that is precisely the time you should reinvent yourself. Because you can get real stale. You can fall in love with yourself."

One way the institute staff fosters voice is by selecting fellows based on their raw ideas -- scripts, a rough 10 minutes of film -- rather than on their resumés. Michelle Satter, director of the feature film program and a guiding force at the Sundance Institute, describes the ideal: "a script or a short film so unique or with a story that hasn't been told, that only that artist could tell."

One thing Satter, who is the architect of the institute process, doesn't weigh is the commercial prospects of an applicant's idea. Indeed, market-focus groups are verboten at Sundance, as perhaps they should be in any business that truly values innovation. Consumer research, says Michael Lehmann, a veteran film director and longtime creative adviser to Sundance, is what makes Hollywood movies Hollywood movies. "Studios are first and foremost market-driven: They work backwards," says Lehmann. "They try to figure out what audiences want and give it to them. Beyond that they're not sure what to do." Sundance reverses the process and begins with the unique visions of the artists it supports.

Then, as they work, fellows are constantly urged away from proven solutions and toward experiments. Granted, it isn't difficult for the institute to encourage risk-taking since it expects no direct financial return from its investment in talent. Still, the Sundance brand is built on developing and promoting work Hollywood wouldn't gamble on: Sundance without risk would cease to be Sundance. So while breakthrough ideas are more common here than at most organizations, so are disappointments and dead ends. And that's okay. "The worst day of this lab, the day you feel you've fallen on your face, will be the best day of the lab because that will be your greatest learning moment," Satter says. "You may fail, you may fly, but you'll move on and learn."

Fellows appreciate that support, and they are also motivated by the many opportunities to have their work seen, which after all is what most creative people want. Sundance has developed multiple platforms, such as the festival, cable channels, and new film series, to showcase innovation wherever it springs up and cheerfully helps fellows make connections outside the Sundance mantle as well. "It's about getting the ideas out, it's about getting the work seen," says Ken Brecher, executive director of the Sundance Institute. "If the work finds its way to a Sundance platform, that's great. If it finds its way to another platform, that's also great."

"The labs and film festival are the twin engines that drive the whole deal," says North Carolina's Pollock. But "the entire Sundance family of organizations is synergistic and holistic. Each entity uniquely builds the value of the whole."

You can learn a lot about an organization by the language people use to describe what they do: whether they speak in acronyms or jargon or generics. The language of Sundance, not surprisingly, reflects its artistic purpose, but also the tools it uses to promote original thinking and inventive solutions to problems. The Sundance lexicon includes sketchpad, generosity, story, conversation, and contradiction -- words that are foreign to business but, I believe, fundamental to innovation. Here is how they are used at Sundance.

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