Working within a Team

I watched a documentary on Haskell Wexler an Oscar winning Cinematographer. He is highly regarded with multiple awards and worked on famous films such as American Graffiti. The interesting part to me was the dynamics and the egos of the teams producing movies. Mr. Wexler’s award winning success created challenges when he is working with directors. In the documentary, he basically says the directors usually don’t know what they are doing and he could do it better. Some directors described Haskell Wexler as having been a pain in the neck to work with and he was removed from working on “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” for his failure to get along.

Haskell Wexler is of course a tremendously successful person and his strong ego is paramount to his success. No matter how successful someone is there will always be this balance of control and keeping ego in check. There is a fine line to navigate - if you give up too much control you risk failure and if you try to take too much control no one will work with you! It is a conundrum – the yin and the yang.