We were lucky to catch up with Samina Martens recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Samina, thanks for joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

Quite a few different ways. Firstly, I think just reading and watching everything I could get my hands on was where my education started. Watching films outside of my usual genres, or older movies, or foreign movies. Reading anything and everything, from scripts to articles to novels to short stories. All of this helped me develop a sense of my own creative taste, but also helped me understand the basic tenets of storytelling: what works, what doesn’t work, and why. Another big learning opportunity is obviously the people around you. It’s a very basic rule that exists within the entertainment industry: if you want to DO a particular job, try to work for the person who is CURRENTLY doing that job. I’m very grateful to have been able to work with some fantastic producers over the years, and made sure to pay close attention to how they navigated the day-to-day of their jobs.

My path to get here was perhaps less traditional than others. I didn’t go to film school, didn’t do the entertainment industry internships a lot of students do, and didn’t work in a talent agency. I think you can absolutely make it in Hollywood without doing these things, but it required me to learn from other sources. If I were to go back, I’d tell my younger self to jump in sooner. Meet everyone you can – you never know what vital information you’ll learn from a simple coffee chat, or bits of advice that will stay with you for years. Take advantage of any opportunity that presents itself – panels, seminars, classes. Join industry associations, go to events. Read the trades, listen to entertainment industry podcasts, get your hands on samples from up-and-coming writers. All of it adds up, if you make the effort!


Samina, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I work in creative development in Los Angeles, helping develop, package, and produce films and television for an independent production company. But it took me a while to get here. I grew up in Vancouver, Canada, but knew absolutely no one who worked in the entertainment industry. My first job was in extras casting, helping source background actors for TV shows and movies filming in Vancouver. From there, I jumped into working at a production company in their legal affairs department, where I learned a ton. But I always knew I wanted to be a creative producer, and so I found a job working on set, and was able to travel with that team as they shot a few different projects around North America. I got used to a production lifestyle – waking up before dawn and getting home late, flipping between day shoots and night shoots, long hours spent out in the rain or the cold – but can honestly say they were some of the coolest years of my life. I eventually landed in LA doing post-production on a feature, and then jumped into development from there.

So much goes into the day-to-day of my job, but the core of it all is reading material, understanding the creative vision, and then seeing it through all the obstacles that filmmaking brings (things like budget, financing, production logistics, casting, distribution plans – and so much more.)

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Ultimately, my job is to identify a good story, and then help it get made. There are so many things I look for when hunting for that initial idea, or when reading a spec or other piece of available material for consideration, but I think the primary thing I’m searching for is emotion. Does it make me feel something? Does it stay with me after I finish? Do I find myself thinking about it later, on my drive home? Stories are so powerful, and on the hard days in this industry I try to fall back on my emotional, gut reaction to a good story – it makes everything worth it.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Learning to adapt to an unexpected change of circumstances is a hugely valuable skill in this industry, especially considering the turbulent climate we’re all going through right now. Looking back on my career from the outside, it looks fairly linear, as if each job lined up perfectly to bring me to the next one. But going through it, it never, ever felt like that. Instead, it felt like complete chaos, like I had very little control over anything. There were so many times that the paths I envisioned for my future would disintegrate without warning, forcing me to snap into action and forge a brand new one.

One example – when I was twenty-five, I decided to quit my very stable office job and accepted a new position. I gave my two weeks notice, made all the arrangements to leave, but then, two days before my very last day in the office, I got a call from the new job. The position was no longer available. Of course, I panicked. Not just about how I’d pay rent, but also about the now looming gap on my resume. Plus, I had really, really wanted that new job! But, two days later I got a random call from a friend. Her production was looking for someone to work for a producer. I interviewed, accepted the job, and started working ASAP – and that job ended up changing my whole life, as it eventually led me here. And if the other job hadn’t fallen through, I never would have been able to say yes to it.

There have been many more occasions since in which my life or career hasn’t gone in the direction I wanted or expected, but I try to tell myself that nothing feels linear while you’re going through it. And the chaos and change could just be opening a door to a new, more exciting opportunity.