“Chance is another name that we give to our mistakes. And all of the best things in my films are mistakes,” said filmmaker Robert Altman in an interview.
Chance and creativity go hand in hand. Actors are stimulated by a director to improvise, finding clues out of errors, or unintentional gestures. A Chinese calligrapher creates his work in a snapping brushstroke and it looks perfect (Accidental drippings enlighten the pictogram). A songwriter bases a song on a word he or she found scribbled on a street wall. Pablo Picasso incorporated his friend Gertrude Stein’s business card onto one of his cubist paintings after she left it behind in his studio.
Theater director Jonathan Miller describes his method: “As to the actual execution of the scene, I don’t really know what I’m going to do until about 15 seconds before I start directing,” he told the New York Times in 1997. “You have to have confidence in that part of yourself of which you are not the proprietor, your unconscious. […] I know that over 40 years of reading and thinking and wishing and looking at things and keeping my eye open, I have forgotten at least 80 percent, but that somewhere inside me, it’s all there, and under the pressure of an actual occasion, it will deliver itself.”
—Raúl Rodriguez, Grammercy Park, 1.15.2019