I was halfway through another late night online lecture when Jordan Peterson paused on a point that made me stop the video rather than take notes.
He was talking about the Big Five personality model, specifically the OCEAN framework, and he made the claim that Openness to Experience is the strongest predictor of future success. Not grit. Not conscientiousness alone. Openness! The trait most associated with creativity, curiosity, abstract thinking, pattern recognition, and the ability to generate novel solutions to complex problems.
He went further: Highly creative people are often more intelligent, not in the narrow academic sense, but in the way they solve problems. They do not merely apply technical solutions to technical problems. They invent creative solutions to technical constraints.
That line stayed with me.
It forced me to reflect on my own time in media, broadcasting, and film. On the surface, the idea seems obvious. Film is a creative industry. Media is populated by creative people. Yet when I examined my own experience honestly, the pattern did not hold as often as one would expect. In fact, the opposite seemed more common.
I spent the next day mulling over a troubling question. Why does the local media and film space have the form of being creatively rich yet shows the substance of being innovation poor?
Yes, we are creative in the classical sense. We paint striking images. We frame scenes beautifully. We can be expressive, symbolic, and emotionally literate in a way Picasso or Dalí would recognise. But innovation is something else entirely. Innovation looks more like Elon Musk than an abstract canvas. It is the ability to reimagine systems, routes to market, production models, and economic structures. That kind of creativity is showing up lesser and lesser locally!
Then the picture came into focus.
As forums and social media lit up with reports of film industry professionals picketing Parliament over stagnation and lack of support, the missing link revealed itself. The light bulb moment was uncomfortable not flattering.
We have been conditioned to feed off the state.
That dependency did not emerge overnight. It became the slippery slope of woke-conditioning that slowly eroded creative risk-taking. When funding depends on approval, creativity shifts toward people pleasing. When approval comes from bureaucratic panels, content drifts toward the middle. Vanilla stories. Safe narratives. Ideologically acceptable themes. Work designed to offend no-one….. and excite no-one.
If that sounds like a recipe for long term creative depression, it is because it is.
A system that rewards compliance rather than originality will always sterilise innovation. Over time, creators internalise the constraints and stop thinking expansively. They begin asking permission rather than asking daring questions. The result is an industry that protests for more funding rather than one that invents new ways to thrive without it.
There is another model.
Quentin Tarantino once said he bought a writing pad and a few pencils and declared, with total seriousness, that, “With these I would write my next blockbuster!” No committees. No applications. No waiting period. Just a story and the willingness to take ownership of it.
That is where everything starts. A great story or a great concept. Nothing more needed than a writhing pad and a fist full of pencils.
The second step is harder. It requires convincing other talented people to believe in that story. The industry calls this attaching talent. Actors, cinematographers, editors, producers. When talented people commit, momentum builds. When momentum builds, investors pay attention. Not because of cultural virtue, but because these elements reliably lead to profit.
Money follows competence and conviction far more often than it follows government approval.
There are also structural realities we continue to ignore. There is a robust international appetite for foreign films, particularly stories from unfamiliar places. Audiences are curious about landscapes, cultures, and psychological worlds they do not inhabit daily. South Africa has that advantage built in, yet we rarely leverage it effectively.
At the same time, the industry has become bloated. Budgets inflate. Crews expand. Processes slow down. The independent edge that once defined cinema gets lost under administrative weight. The antidote is not bigger budgets. It is more manageable projects.
Matchstick Men, starring Nicolas Cage, remains one of my favourite examples. Modest in scale. Tight in scope. Character driven. Profitable. Proof that focus often beats spectacle.
Delayed gratification is hard, especially in a third world economy where survival pressures are real and immediate. But there is a different payoff model available. Getting paid less upfront can lead to getting paid more overall by retaining a larger stake in the film and its revenue. Ownership changes everything. It aligns effort with long term reward. You will be taken more seriously when you have skin in the game!
What we need now is innovation. Not slogans. Not subsidies alone. Innovation in how we produce, finance, distribute, and own our work. A system designed for the local paradigm rather than copied from failing bureaucratic models.
Action is required. More films must be made. Waiting for approval must stop being the default posture. Creativity thrives when it is exercised, not when it is submitted for permission.
This is a call to action.
Write the story. Gather the talent. Build something lean. Aim outward rather than upward toward authority. The industry will not be revived by another memorandum. It will be revived by people willing to take responsibility for creating value.
Openness predicts success because it dares to imagine alternatives. The moment we do that collectively, the stagnation ends.
