We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Keith Rivers a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Keith, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

Most recently, my biggest risk was in 2018, leaving Seattle, where I grew up for 30 years, moving my wife and two girls, selling a production company, selling a house, and saying goodbye to a thriving community. Leaving all of that to pursue a career in directing movies. Many peers would ask, why do you need to leave Seattle when you can make movies anywhere?

I started to look at my life not in a resume fashion, but as a eulogy. How do I want to be remembered? Am I to continue directing commercials for Microsoft and Amazon for another 25 years, or am I to chase the unimaginable? When I am gone, the risks I take right now are how I communicate with my kids in the future. What is my relationship with our creator, and do I have faith that if I follow the intuitive feelings within my heart it’ll lead me, and others, to find a greater purpose?

Six years later, I’m 41, living in Malibu in a newly constructed home, raising our daughters, building a community, and developing several feature-length projects. I’m realizing now that my life is not all about my personal gain, and my resume doesn’t need to be curated and displayed on every social platform. There’s something greater than I at work. It is surrounding me with, and working together with talented people, for the purpose of telling stories that are quietly and humbly going to change the world.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m not a quiet person. I’m good at sales, which I’m not proud of. I’m good at speaking, but nervous before events. I love people, and I smile too big when there are two or more gathered. But… after film school, no one would hire me. Ad agencies. Production companies. Executives. Film studios. I felt a quiet sense of rejection. I felt like I was being ignored on purpose. I wasn’t going to wait for the limousine to show up and take me on a magical ride, so I started doing my own films and everything slowly clicked into place.

I competed in 24-48-72-100 hour film races and won. I entered commercial contests and won. I shot music videos, promos, documentaries, short films, and commercials before YouTube, just as DSLR cameras and interchangeable lenses hit the prosumer market. I was writing, shooting, and editing 55 videos a year, about per week.

I was getting good. People noticed. It landed my first big advertising gig with Microsoft Windows 7. Five web videos from concept to completion for $50k. I quit my job as a video compression engineer which was earth-shattering to my fellow employees. They thought I was insane. After one month we delivered and the videos “went viral”. Blog sites that love to defame Microsoft all of a sudden couldn’t, and AdAge couldn’t understand why Microsoft chose to hire “some kid in the Pacific Northwest” vs. their AOR (agency of record) but alas the carnival ride was over and it was back to reality. 6 months later, I was broke and badly needed to get a job.

I applied to work tables at a restaurant in Kirkland and moments before my first shift, I got a call from the only client I knew, another Microsoft project, and this one hit big. An acclaimed blog site picked it up and it went viral on YouTube. I got to meet James Cameron, and my commercial was screened before his director cut of Avatar at the IMAX. I think I made my dad proud.

For the next decade, I made a lot of commercials for Microsoft, and then some of those relationships went to work for Amazon so I made commercials there too. One after another, I accidentally started a production company and we built out a multimillion-dollar space featured in Dwell. We had 8 directors on a roster and a sales team across the US. We were billing 10 million dollars a year, and it was a lot of fun, but also a distraction from what I really wanted to do. Make movies.

As far as answering the question that prompted this concise rant, I don’t like to rest in the pride of the past work I’ve successfully done. It’s small-minded, and not for me to judge. Others already do a fine job of judging my work, and that’s good. I’m more fixated on the present moment. What I am doing right in front of me is what seems to matter.

As for being a problem solver, I find that when I’m doing my best work it’s for the sake of serving someone or something beyond my own self interests. It’s why I don’t spend too much time thinking about “the director’s cut” because the thing I am creating is usually made with a brand or a person. If I’m only making it for me, then why would I need to share it?

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

In the Blink of An Eye by Walter Murch shattered my small-minded way of crafting the story. It’s an intuitive look that considers your blood flow, breathing, and the way we blink when making choices in the edit bay.

The Director’s Intuition by Judith Weston opened up my sense of trust and feeling. Later on, I took acting and directing classes working with Judith.

And I know this is going to put me in a box, but there are 66 books that make up The Bible. I’m currently reading them on Dwell, cover to cover. I’ll be sure to update you if and when I ever finish.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Society as a whole can’t but you can! Here’s a list of what I am doing:

+ Meet up in weekly small groups
+ Join a directing actors class
+ Surround yourself with people you want to become
+ Do not doom scroll, instead read
+ If you don’t see a thriving creative ecosystem around you, create it yourself
+ go on hiking meetings instead of zoom calls
+ stop thinking in transactions and start thinking in service to others
+ favor that brings promotion and power isn’t going to come from a gatekeeper, stop waiting for the call and instead, go make it happen. I know I don’t like hearing that either!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.keithrivers.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/keithrivers
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krfilms/
• Other: www.mountainnestfilms.com is how we rent our house for film shoots https://vimeo.com/keithrivers