Brit marling ~ From JP Morgan to Hollywood
I love this story of a cute, young blond girl sitting at the back seat of her parents’ car. She was just picked up in the middle of a summer camp with many other children.
She was sent home early. None of the children wanted to share a tent with her anymore.
What’s wrong with her, you might wonder?
From my perspective: everything about her was perfect.
Too perfect?!
Too soon?
So, what happened?
This cute girl’s name is Brit Marling, nowadays know as a successful actress and script writer, especially for mystical and unconventional stories.
Back at this summer camp she already showed some of her storytelling genius. Every night she gathered a crowd of curious children around her and told stories with ghosts and mythical creature. The kids were so unnerved by the vivid stories that they couldn’t sleep afterwards.
Even as a young girl, her talent was already obvious.
But don’t think that after this camp experience she right away went straight into script writing and acting.
She took another direction on the journey – at first.
Marling grew up, studied economics at college, and after graduating she started working for JP Morgan bank.
But as one can never avoid who one really is, after only one month into this first job Marling became very depressed and disillusioned.
She sought out a doctor, who advised her to take anti-depression medication. But deep within her soul she knew she didn’t want to take these pills nor follow this path into a finance career.
She says, "It’s not really a measure of mental health to be well-adjusted in a society that’s very sick." This might be a reference to that time and experience at her job that she later scripted into one of her series The OA.
In an interview she confessed that it felt off to take medicine just to be able to do the job she disliked doing. In fact, destiny had another plan for her and sent two of her friends from university to NYC for a weekend. They were in town to attend a film-making competition.
These two friends persuaded Marling to shoot a short movie for the competition with them. They spent the whole weekend, almost without sleep, just working on making the film happen.
You guessed it. After her experience acting in her friends’ film, she quit her job at the bank.
Did she immediately have a super dream career upon leaving her job?
No…
Being in L.A., Marling and her friends – and later their co-producers – faced the challenges most young artists face trying to make it in the film industry.
Brit Marling attended many auditions for movie roles, which she later wrote about for a very famous article “I Don’t Want to Be the Strong Female Lead” in the New York Times Magazine.
She was cast in a lot of “girlfriend” roles, meaning playing the pretty girlfriend of the main character in the movie. And when her role was a main character, she was most likely a copy of a strong male role, not very specifically a uniquely female character.
So, the young ambition crew (at that time Brit, Mike Cahill and Zal Batmanglij) didn’t make ends meet in financial aspects, but they also didn’t like what was presented to them in the current industry in creative aspects.
So they started to write their own scripts. Their intention was to write different main characters with different flavors, facets of character and with more depth.
And although her nighttime stories scared the sh** out of her childhood camp mates, she confessed in an interview that the first scripts she and her friends wrote as a script team were a disaster, and the feedback they got, while honest, was devastating.
Being devastated didn’t lead them to give up.
Instead, as a result of the dismaying feedback they received on their scripts they started studying more about scriptwriting, and they improved little by little. In the meantime, the friends tried to stay afloat with a lot of side jobs.
Marling’s acting ambitions did not lead to success (yet).
Not even for clichéd female roles.
The huge breakthrough came at last when they won their first awards at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011 – not with one film but with two films at the same time! (Another Earth and Sound of my Voice)
Both films were produced with very little money — they had had to be very creative with how to get the shooting done.
All this – 🌱 leaving a well-paying job and career in New York, 🌱 refusing to play the girlfriend roles, 🌱 studying screen writing and 🌱 being willing to start where they are with almost no budget - was not the usual way for being successful in L.A. and definitely not a shortcut or direct approach…
… and maybe the turns in the path were very unexpected… or was it what we should expect from Marling after being a fierce storyteller at such a young age…
From my perspective it’s both…
And as you must already know about me by now, I adore these paradoxes…
Maybe Expected –
because her passion, genius and destiny were already shining through at such a young age…
Unexpected –
because we so often cannot see our path clearly as we are so blinded by our conditioning, by outside expectations and conventions…
Talent and destiny don’t mean that everything like resources, success, attention flies to you fast and abundantly… but it means – from my perspective – that there is a seed that you can (and maybe should – but that’s totally up to you) nourish…
… and it may grow and flourish and lead you to opportunities and new paths and new resources and new guidance from within…
Fast-forward to today: Marling and her co-writer and co-producer Batmanglij have made a lot of different films, as well as a Netflix series and, more recently, a murder-crime mini-series for Disney+…
It’s definitely not for everybody, but it’s for those who feel the vibe and genius of these amazing souls…
Take care!!!
Inside and outside!