Kibwe Tavares
Award Winning Film maker, Director, Co-Founder of Factory Fifteen and Producer
The Voice of His Gremlin
“Is this decision going to end everything?”
I didn’t plan on being a director it kind of just happened, so I always feel kind of lucky and my Gremlin is always questioning when this thing is going to end.
It takes me to a place where I might not sleep at night and I’ll ruminate on making the wrong decisions; or think of all the bad things that could happen because of the decision I made. It’s amplified because I got sick doing Noughts and Crosses. It wasn’t a bad decision to do Noughts and Crosses; there was just a bad outcome whilst doing it.
Action starves it; it’s the doing of stuff. I think my way through things is to just try and plough through them, it definitely has massive benefits, but if there is an underlying problem it means I often don’t address it.
I often ask myself “do I have the minerals, would it be better if I had a more traditional path and went to film school?” At the same time I know if I’d gone to film school I wouldn’t have made the films I made, which have allowed me to make the splash I have. It was because I came at it from a different angle that got me attention.
The stroke has made me not trust my base skillset. I liken it to if I was a sports person and I had a leg injury, and I could go back to sport, but my whole game relied on me being able to twist and turn really quickly.
Now I can’t rely on that and I have to work out what my next game plan is, and am I still the same. I didn’t really ever question my skillset or my tools; but now since my tool got shattered it’s different.
It takes away the enjoyment of moments. It doesn’t allow me to pat myself on the back. I’m working towards something, and I work and I work and I work and then I get there it’s like … ohhh.
It does make me ask “What am I doing and why?”
That pushes me to make choices that have led to quite a unique spread of work. The Gremlin ultimately directs me to the right choice because it stops me from doing things just for the sake of it.
I work ideas out by trial and error, talking about things and spending intimate time with them.
Because of the brain injury I got scared of the moments when I couldn’t imagine something. I tried to visualise things and when I couldn’t get the images, my Gremlin was telling me that the thing I rely on for my work was now damaged, it didn’t exist anymore and now I’m doomed.
I stopped trying to work stuff out because I was too scared of failing. Whereas before when I wasn’t scared of failing, I could work stuff out because I would just try until I got there; because I was less aware of the limitations I had.