As you can tell, I’m either an optimist or a masochist.
So, in 2017, I decided to make my own show. I saw the writing on the wall that I couldn’t keep doing this for much longer without giving up completely. All I wanted was some sort of product to show for the amount of time, tears, thought, energy, money, and sacrifices that were poured into creating something. I had been working for people for so long that I forgot that there was an audience. For a storyteller, that’s messed up - because at that point, what’s the point? Here I am, so preoccupied with just getting some overlord to approve an edit/script/treatment/budget, that I totally forgot that there’s an audience out there that’s the actual reason I have a job.
So, I needed the show to be honest, open, and driven by real humans smarter than me - which is the opposite of Hollywood. A travel show seemed to be the best fit. Though I’d grown up rather poor, my mother was born in Poland and we traveled there almost every summer - so travel and diverse culture has always played an important role in my life. I love being the intermediary for story, carrying my American stories to Poland and my Polish stories back home; I had a captive audience at both ends. Making a travel show fit the bill, and with my track record of failures, I felt more confident in developing a creative project that was personal to me.
I could make a better travel show.
But life is complicated. I have 3 kids, a (very patient) wife that works full time, an unstable income, debt, various creative impulses, and a deep-rooted frustration with urban life in the concrete jungle. I’m always looking for an excuse to get out. It wouldn’t be for another three years before I developed enough insight into my own life to realize that what follows would be my greatest excuse to do something for myself. And I’m still not sure how I feel about that. There’s definitely some latent guilt floating around that I protect with layers of justification.
I asked three of my best friends, and fellow filmmakers, to join in. The pitch was “want a free trip to Scotland?” Worked pretty well. The team consisted of Martín Vielma, Steve Ryan, and my intern-turned-brother-in-law Ryan Ford. A Pole, a white Mexican, a hairy Irish man, and an in-over-his-head Millenial walk into a country… We all have, I think, great aesthetics so I knew the show would look great, but what’s the purpose of it? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself to great lengths regarding every job I do. There’s a lot of content being made out there that doesn’t NEED to be made - and I had to start drawing some lines in the sand.
But justifying travel can be harder than one thinks.
I love travel but at the same time am waving the “live local” flag really hard. So which is it?
Still not fully aware of why we were going to Scotland, we called in all the favors we could. My friend, who owns his own small production company, loaned us two Sony FS7 cameras and some beautiful, vintage prime lenses: Canon K35’s. We decided one creative decision we were going to stick to was filming the show exclusively with prime lenses; no zooms. When you can’t sit in the corner and zoom in across the room, but rather, as a camera operator, you need to physically move in closer to the subject, it changes the fundamental approach of the documentary process. We AREN’T flies on the wall. The people we meet know what we’re doing - they can see the camera on our shoulder and our faces behind the viewfinder. It’s a connection that most of Hollywood hides behind to maintain the illusion. I wanted that human connection to exist. We would need to be intentional and engaged in the entire filmmaking process; more vulnerable.
We’ve all heard it: It’s not an adventure until something goes wrong. That’s Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia. We wanted to lean waaaay into that. We would be underprepared and over-willing. But also Mark Twain and Brené Brown:
