Not Impossible: The Art and Joy of Doing What Couldn't Be Done by Mick Ebeling

Author:Mick Ebeling
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2015-01-05T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

If Not Now, When?

So what, exactly, were we headed into?

In the middle of all that was going on, Richard Van As weighed in to give us a dose of reality. I gotta say, it was a pretty hard pill to swallow.

In no uncertain terms, he warned us that going into a war zone would be much, much more dangerous than we could imagine. He told us that the moment we hit Sudan soil, we would become targets. That we would be kidnapped by rebels. And that we would witness the most unimaginable of horrors: “Gutting of pregnant women, hacking off breasts to those with little and newborn babies, execution-style shootings. They line up people and have fun . . . It is all in the name of terror.”

I can’t pretend that I wasn’t scared to death by his email. I can’t pretend that I didn’t have second thoughts. And third. And fourth. And fifth. I certainly didn’t share this email with my wife or anyone else close to me. In fact, Caskey is probably reading it here for the first time.

But somehow, the mission stayed with us and carried us through the doubt. I realized that I would be putting myself and the lives of my crew at risk. But I also knew that the kid we were focused on was just a kid, just like my kid, and there was no one around to help him, and his whole life depended on someone deciding to take that risk.

And so the mantra stayed with me:

If not now, then when?

If not me, then who?

♦

And so we decided to press on. We bought plane tickets and flew everyone to Los Angeles for a big meeting at my house. It was like the hacker weekend when we’d created the EyeWriter. There is something incredibly electric about putting everyone under one roof, of starting a project saying, this is not about my comfort, this is not about me in any way, this is just about getting the job done. Caskey, the kids, and I moved into one room, and we had to draw out a floor plan to figure out where everyone else was going to sleep.

We have a saying in the production business: it doesn’t matter how much money or how little money you spend, all that matters is what shows up on the screen. That same philosophy was behind what we were doing here, only multiplied tenfold—it’s the idea that every penny you have, and by extension every ounce of your energy and creativity and every bit of strength in your body, is geared toward getting the project over the finish line. And if you can engender that kind of attitude in your troops—well, then, nothing is impossible.

Which is, after all, the whole point.

So I fired up the pot for another session of spaghetti-making, and laid out a bunch of beer and chips, and once again the music was blaring, and the cameras were rolling, and the team was talking faster than most people can think.

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