Before Dreaming Whilst Black was a BAFTA winner, it was an idea Adjani Salmon had no reasonable basis for believing in. He decided to make it anyway, then spent years finding out what that decision would actually require of him.
In episode four, he talks with Jazz Lintott about the kind of ambition that looks like delusion from the outside and functions like a strategy from the inside. He is unsentimental about the bill. The sleep, the money, and the relationships that quietly paid for the thing other people later described as an overnight success.
He is equally generous with the craft. How a writer learns to see a script's problems by putting the whole thing up on a wall and standing back from it, and why the safest moment to make something bad is early, while nobody is paying attention yet.
Up Next in Season 1
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Steve Carr
Steve Carr got his first feature by flying to Arizona, sitting down with Ice Cube, and telling him what was wrong with his script. He had never worked on one before and no real idea how the job was done. He got it anyway.
In episode three, he walks Jazz Lintott through a career assembled almost e... -
Mena Massoud
Mena Massoud sent in an audition tape and then heard nothing for half a year. While it sat unwatched, he was bussing tables and sleeping on a borrowed air mattress in a friend's closet. Not long after, he was Aladdin, in a film that took more than a billion dollars worldwide.
In episode two, he s... -
Katerine McNamara
Katherine McNamara was cast in the first Broadway production she ever sat in an audience for. She was 14, and one phone call rearranged the rest of her life.
In the opening conversation of Season One, she talks with Jazz Lintott about what that kind of early start actually builds and what it qui...
