RISK TAKING: HOW TO TRANSFORM CREATIVE CHOICES
- Modern Rituals
- Apr 8
- 5 min read
Why Playing It Safe Can Be the Biggest Gamble in Film, TV, and Theatre
In entertainment, risk is usually framed in financial terms, rarely in creative ones. Real risk is when a filmmaker bets on themselves and a vision almost no one else believes in, or comes up with something unique against time and money constraints—like George Lucas with Star Wars, or the Fargo TV team leaning into a single gunshot sequence that defied TV convention. (see it below)
Safe choices can feel responsible, measured, even professional. But when you’re building new story worlds and trying to do something different, playing it safe is often the riskiest move of all. Risk and creativity are inseparable.
Look at the recent glut of superhero films that failed to find an audience. The same formula—an unstoppable, world‑ending threat taken on by a lone hero or team—has led to diminishing returns. Re‑hashing old IP feels safe: there’s an already built‑in audience, and financiers sleep easier.
Yet the last year has shown that new stories are increasingly resonating at the box office—like Warner Bros. in 2025 and 2026, releasing a string of original films that opened at No. 1, including Sinners, Weapons, One Battle After Another (nine No. 1 openings in 2025), and Wuthering Heights in 2026.
Theatre can fall into the same trap. The safer the play—or the programming season—with familiar names and predictable revivals, the greater the risk of creative stagnation. By contrast, the National Theatre’s London Road was a huge creative gamble: a verbatim musical built around the Ipswich murders, a show a commercial producer would have dismissed as “never going to work.” Yet its innovation made it both a critical and commercial triumph, redefining the musical genre.
In film, Everything Everywhere All at Once was a multiverse story about immigrant trauma, martial arts, and googly eyes—on paper, a non‑starter for any major studio. It took rising indie powerhouse A24 and the filmmakers’ vision and courage to push it through, earning seven Oscars and becoming A24’s biggest hit.
Last month, the BAFTA‑winning film I Swear showed just how bold that risk can be. The director and producer—a husband‑and‑wife team—took a major financial gamble: selling their house to fund the film privately. Then they doubled down creatively, refusing to cut the swearing despite an executive who insisted “all that swearing will never work.”
All of this shows that when artists, producers, and creatives take control and confront risk head‑on instead of running from it, they can discover something truly alive and new.
How do we invite creative risk into our own storytelling and creativity?
From the examples so far, it might sound like the advice is to sell your house, ignore every executive, and go it alone as a maverick. That’s not where we’re going.
Creative risk can be simpler: backing a script that scares you because it means something; casting an unknown because they feel real; or choosing a pared‑down, camera‑driven approach instead of a flashy big‑budget look—as in that Fargo TV example above. Risk is about trusting your creativity so that you go for it—whether that is in the pitch meeting, with investors, or "in the moment" creativity during production.
Film, TV, and theatre are inherently risky. Even a “perfect” project can miss its audience on paper. Avoiding risk doesn’t guarantee success; it just dulls the work. At least when you lean into originality and back a strong vision, bolder projects can survive and find their audience long after safe, formulaic ones fade. Risk taking can become a secret ingredient that unlocks real ingenuity.
When you face the next safe decision, pause and picture the alternative. If you have a vision, fight for it. From Fight Club to The Shawshank Redemption to I Swear, the stories that endure are the ones with authenticity and integrity—stories the creatives refused to compromise. The remakes and IP reboots will be forgotten; those backed visions will stick around.
BOOK OF THE MONTH
THE WAR OF ART
- STEVEN PRESSFIELD
To go with the invitation to take a creative risk in this month’s learning, the book of the month is perfectly placed to guide us on that path. It builds courage, because risk means stepping outside our comfort zone.
Pressfield suggests something radical: resistance will always show up when we do our art. Fear is part of the game—a mandatory part. It will never vanish. Waiting for confidence is often just procrastination in disguise. The invitation then becomes to: "Just start". Take that first step toward the creative risk staring you in the face.
Pressfield’s The War of Art becomes a manifesto for doing the work we are most afraid to face. When we decide to act, hesitation appears—in procrastination, self‑doubt, perfectionism, fear, and distraction. What matters most tends to have all of them blocking the way.
That’s why the film, TV series, play, or creative project that means the most often never gets made. The bigger the risk, the louder this resistance will roar. Pressfield frames the struggle as a daily battle between the life we live and the unlived life inside each of us.
To take risks in our daily creative work, we must show up. That is the core thesis of the book: do not treat creativity as a mood or a burst of inspiration. The professional shows up regardless, works consistently, and treats the craft like a job rather than a fantasy.
So creative risk is less about waiting for the right time or for confidence, and much more about acting before you feel ready. Courage, according to Pressfield, is not the absence of fear, but motion in spite of fear.
HOW TO TAKE RISKS MORE CREATIVELY?
For Pressfield, creative risk means choosing the project that matters, even when it threatens your ego, comfort, or identity. He warns that amateurs often get trapped by needing to be seen as talented, while professionals focus on producing the work itself.
That idea is especially useful if you are building something original, because originality always carries uncertainty. Pressfield’s framework suggests that doubt is not proof you should stop; it is often proof you are near something worth making.
HOW TO IMPLEMENT THIS TODAY?
A Pressfield‑style approach to risk would look like this:
Start before you feel ready.
Protect a daily work habit. (31 days till it becomes ingrained)
Ignore the urge to overexplain or overperfect.
Treat fear as a signal that the work matters.
Take one step today, right now, to bring life to a creative project that you have.
Repeat that one step until you have built the muscle that performs irrespective of how you feel - making fear not an inhibitor, but fuel
Watch an interview with Steven Pressfield below:
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