Talking about Fire

There's a story which I first heard a few decades back which caught my attention. It involved a little boy who grew up with a passion for firefighting. He loved fire engines and firefighters and everything to do with them. He read books about fires. There was never any doubt about what he was going to do when he left school.

He was admitted to firefighters' school and soon rose to become top of the class. In fact he was so good and passionate about it that when he graduated his bosses decided to send him on a special course to do further training. From there he was invited to do his PhD on new techniques for fighting fires. After that he was offered a job at the school, lecturing other people learning how to fight fires. Eventually he retired after a long and successful career with the fire department.

But one thing he never did. He never got to fight fires.

I keep a model fire engine in my office to remind me of the story. After a few days of filling in forms and writing documents, it raises the question for me once again of how many people in this business still have the passion for making films, and actually get to do it? As opposed to talking about films, meeting about films, producing forms about films etc. Hard to relate what I'm doing at the moment to what it's all about...