FilmStack Challenge #11: Finding the Inner Child in Creativity
Your February FilmStack Challenge is here!
Hello, FilmStack! Thank you so much to Kelli (KLA Media Group) for passing the baton to me for this month’s FilmStack challenge! If you haven’t already, please check out their challenge from last month—it’s fantastic. I’ve admired these monthly prompts for so long, and I’m excited to help in encouraging the ongoing creative spirit of this wonderful online community of dedicated filmmakers, writers, and artists.
I sort of gave up on the concept of New Year’s resolutions quite a while ago, but one thing I want to accomplish this year is being more active on Substack. So here I am!
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about films that make me feel such a particular, visceral emotion. It’s one that I couldn’t quite name until recently: childlike wonder. This feels like such a broad term, and can be interpreted in various ways, so I want to clarify what I mean by it. Let’s see what the good ol’ internet has to say, shall we?
Childlike wonder is an attitude; it is a way of seeing the magic in simple things and finding the fun and joy in simple things.1
yana yuhai wrote a wonderful Substack article on the neuroscience aspect of this!
We all have those favorite films that encourage us to reconnect with the adventurous spirit we lost in adulthood, and to celebrate life for the messy, beautiful, ugly, fantastical journey it is.
When you’re a small child, everything fascinates you. Like, when I was a tiny little thing, my dad would bring home a box of donuts on Saturday mornings, and every time I saw those rainbow sprinkles, I was overcome with pure wonder and joy. All of that for little chunks of sugar dyed with food coloring, but I must admit that even now, as an adult, seeing those rainbow sprinkles brings me back to that feeling—perhaps not as intensely, but it’s certainly still there. During that stage of life, everything is interesting and special in some way, and even the seemingly small, insignificant things somehow manage to become adventures in their own right. Curiosity is all-encompassing. And of course, as we all know, things change as you get older. That curiosity gets a little squashed along the way. We learn to be hard on ourselves. I recall what it was like to be a little kid doing fingerpaintings and drawing giant scribbles in various crayon colors, never for a moment thinking, “Wow, this looks awful!” Somewhere down the road, that faded. One of the things that opened my eyes to this reality was reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, which I buddy-read with my friend Katie Westerlind. In the book, Cameron goes into so much depth about how she has observed this truth in fellow artists and within herself, and one of the main pillars of The Artist’s Way is viewing your artist self as a child:
Your artist is a child. Learning to let yourself create is like learning to walk. The artist must begin by crawling. Baby steps will follow.2
In other words, part of tapping into your creativity requires also tapping into your inner child, and letting go of the subconscious (or conscious) constraints around your desire to create. While writing my senior thesis in college, I sat down with my favorite screenwriting professor for a check-in. Dark circles under my eyes, I admitted to him the struggles I was having with my work. He responded with, “Don’t take yourself so seriously.” God, do I wish someone had sat me down and told me that sooner. Holy shit. I somehow managed to forget why I was even writing in the first place. I spent so much time trying to prove myself as a creative person while over-analyzing my writing and ideas so much that I couldn’t bring myself to sit down and write. When I brought this up to my professor, he said, “Yeah, you’re gonna have to get over that somehow.” Ha! Harsh, but ultimately true (I say while anxiously re-reading these words as I type them). The fear of failure stops many of us from even beginning. And with that, curiosity and the thrill of adventure have subsided. We forget all childlike wonder in those moments where the perfectionism monster swallows us whole. But aren’t those feelings of wonder what drive us to create in the first place? Is that drive for adventure not the lifeforce of creativity? Is our inner child not inextricably tied to our work as artists? This is a rhetorical question, of course, because I firmly believe you cannot claim them as entirely unrelated. Yes, we grow old and mature, but childhood is stuck to us like Peter Pan’s shadow forever, in whatever form it decides to take.
As a young adult, I’ll admit, moments of that wondrous nature I once clung to as a child are a lot more sparse. Lately, especially. In life, we are always afraid of taking leaps of faith, whatever that may mean. As artists, we often hesitate to take creative leaps of faith. Maybe you have an idea for a script, but haven’t written it because the story is just “too out there.” Or maybe you’ve said no to something that you really wish you hadn’t, but the idea of saying yes was too much because imposter syndrome struck deep. I’ve been there. We all have.
When I’m feeling particularly stuck, either creatively or in life, I find myself turning to the movies that remind me why I’m here as a writer and filmmaker in the first place. The ones that evoke feelings of curiosity and excitement: “childlike wonder,” as we call it.
For me, one of those movies is The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013), directed by Ben Stiller. If you haven’t seen it, I have some homework for you: go and watch it. I will never forget the first time I saw it. I was 11 years old and in sixth grade. I was a bit of an oddball (or at least I felt like one). I spaced out a whole lot. Some found it endearing, while others found it frustrating and detrimental. There was this little world in my head that I would retreat to. There, I would go on adventures, creating stories, which was all I ever wanted to do with my time, really. When I saw The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, I realized that I wasn’t the only one who spent most of their time staring out the window, daydreaming. One day, on the school bus, I confided in my friend that I loved this movie so much because I related to Ben Stiller’s character Walter Mitty, to which my friend replied, “But he’s a 40-year-old man!” Okay, so she missed the point there. But we were 11 years old, after all. And it was a pretty funny response.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is about a reserved, middle-aged man (Walter Mitty, played by Ben Stiller) going through the monotonous lull of everyday life, daydreaming constantly, and then, suddenly, he is called to a whirlwind adventure, as we see those daydreams unfold into reality. What I love so much about this movie is its ability to recreate that visceral feeling of childlike wonder. Every time I rewatch this film, I’m taken back to the first time I saw it. That’s how strongly it makes me feel. It’s the rainbow sprinkles all over again. One of my favorite scenes is when Walter is in Iceland, desperately trying to track down this photographer, who possesses the “quintessence” his asshole boss (played by Adam Scott) has been asking for. He runs into two boys who agree to trade their longboard for Walter’s Stretch Armstrong toy that his sister bought for him as a nostalgic birthday gift. Early on in the movie, we discover that Walter used to skateboard all the time as a kid, but has since abandoned it, so when we watch him fly down windy, empty Icelandic roads with an active volcano not too far in the distance, we’re right there with him, as the song “Far Away” by José González’s indie-folk band Junip plays (don’t even get me started on how good the soundtrack is in this movie).
We watch him reconnect with a part of himself in what seems to be a circumstance out of a daydream, but it’s not. That “part of himself” is not just a younger version, but a creative, adventurous, and curious one. Something so spectacular happens to him that not even his daydreams could have made it up. His creativity is the force that ultimately leads him to that call to adventure and sets him on a different track in life by the end of the film. And every time the credits roll, I find myself smiling, teary-eyed, and utterly inspired. At its core, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a story about being a creative person and reconnecting with that part of yourself, and consequently, your inner child.
To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.3
And so, FilmStack, here is your challenge for this month…
Write about a film or TV show that gives you a profound sense of awe, curiosity, and adventure, aligning with your own definition or interpretation of “childlike wonder.” This can be a scene, a moment, a frame, or the story itself.
Or…
Film and/or edit something that you feel encapsulates childlike wonder. Take that state of mind, and communicate it to your audience through images and sound. Feel free to use archival footage as well!
Or do both options! Mash it up! Get creative! Be messy! Don’t think, just do!
Here’s a “micro-micro-short” featuring some footage I got on a train ride shortly after a snowstorm in December, edited with the song “Step Out” by José González from the film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty:
Wishing you all a month of rest and rainbow sprinkles moments…
Until next time!
Sincerely,
Brandt ♡
Johnen, Becky. “Childlike Wonder.” Author Becky Johnen, 5 Jan. 2025, authorbeckyjohnen.wordpress.com/tag/childlike-wonder/.
Cameron, Julia, and Eliza Foss. The Artist’s Way: 25th Anniversary Edition. Penguin Random House, 2021.
“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” 20th Century Fox, 2013.
Thanks for bringing back the magic! ✨
Love that micro-micro short!