Make the thing you want to make
Will Forte, an SNL skit, and David Lynch on creative integrity
Actor and screenwriter Will Forte is on Hot Ones. It’s a YouTube interview show where guests answer a series of questions while eating 10 chicken wings, each flavored with a different hot sauce that gets progressively spicier.
Forte is chewing on wing number five.
The host asks him about MacGruber—the 2010 film based on a recurring Saturday Night Live skit that parodies the 80s TV action show, MacGyver. Forte wrote and starred in the film alongside Val Kilmer and fellow SNL costars Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph.
When MacGruber was released, it was widely panned by critics. Parade Magazine put it at number two on its list of the biggest box office flops of 2010. But in the decade and a half since, it’s become a cult-comedy classic among fans, even spawning a spin-off TV series in 2021.
“I’m curious,” says the host, “what, if anything, do you learn from an experience like that?”
Forte’s eyes draw down to the table as he contemplates his answer, his mouth still chewing on chicken meat.
“We were oddly proud of that movie,” he says. “It bombed, and it was very hard, but knowing that it was the exact movie we wanted to make made it so much easier. After a couple of weeks, we said, ‘You know what? Fuck it. We love this movie. Let’s not let these headlines taint this experience for us. Let’s just be proud of what we did.’”
The late filmmaker David Lynch (Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, and others) often said ideas were like “fish,” swimming around us, ready to be “caught.” When you catch an idea, the job is to stay true to it throughout the creative process—this is how you create good work. But whether the work is commercially or critically successful is irrelevant. The real marker of success is whether you’re happy with it and proud of it.
“Money is the last thing a person should be thinking about,” Lynch said. “You fall in love with ideas, you get fired up, and you try to translate those ideas into cinema—it’s the love of doing it.”
Replace cinema with any creative pursuit, and the rule still applies.