How five Sundance creators navigate the messy middle

Most creative projects hit a point where the answers stop coming easily. You’ve done the preparation, you’ve started the work, but somewhere in the middle, clarity gives way to uncertainty. It’s unclear whether you’re moving toward something or away from it, because the project just hasn’t taken shape yet.

That in-between phase—the messy middle—isn’t just something to power through. It’s often where the work begins to reveal what it actually is. This year at Sundance, we spoke with the crews of four films that collaborated using Dropbox about how they move through that stretch of doubt, experimentation, and discovery.

Louis Paxton, The Incomer director, on overcoming self-doubt:
“You’re stuck with this self doubt, which you’ve kind of imposed on yourself, but I found the way through that was just to get it in front of people and to get feedback. It’s not that they necessarily tell you what to do. As soon as you start talking about how they’ve received the story, you immediately realize what’s working and what’s not working. It sounds obvious, but feedback, feedback, feedback—loads of feedback.”

Charli XCX, The Moment actress and musician, on embracing creative mess:
“Sometimes, I really do have this finite idea, concrete knowledge of what the end thing is going to be, and all of the things leading up to that are totally in service of that. And then sometimes the actual creating and bouncing off ideas part really is the best bit—that’s the joy—where you can totally take a huge pivot and turn down this completely different alleyway. Generally speaking, when I’m making something, I really do love that creative mess phase. I find it really rewarding.”

Mia Wasikowska, Leviticus actress, on the magic of uncertainty:
“I think filmmaking is a process of doing all this preparation, but ultimately in the moment, you let it all go, and something completely different happens. As I’ve made films more and more, you get more confident in that space of surrender. You’re confident in prepping everything, and then inevitably, it changes. That’s the magic of it.”

Ramzi Bashour, Hot Water director, on letting the edit reveal the story:
“There was this engine that pushed its way through the edit. It was a case of letting the engine drive. A lot of scenes didn’t make it in for good reason because there was such a strong connection between these two people. When I wrote this film, I thought I was making a movie about landscapes and locations. I didn’t understand that I was making a story about a mom and son. It was in the edit that revealed itself.”

Edward Norton, The Invite actor, on collaboration as a way through uncertainty:
“All you can do is throw what you’ve learned and what you feel and what you’re nervous about out loud, and then light it on fire and let it go. The whole thing, process-wise, was a creative dream—a dream experience in terms of collaboration, a sense of kinship in what we were doing, and the thrill of discovering it on the fly.”