A recent piece in the New York Times talks about director Isabel Coixet's bumpy ride from first to second feature films, interesting reading for any filmmaker who has struggled with bad reviews.
When Coixet arrived at the International Berlin Film Festival this year for the premiere of her documentary Escuchando al juez Garz�n, which was showing in the special gala section for "new and extraordinary productions," it seemed a world away from her flawed 1988 debut. It took her almost eight years to get over her first movie, Demasiado viejo para morir joven (Too Old to Die Young), and resume her career as a film director. Although the movie, about two drifters in Barcelona, won her a nomination in Spain for best new director, it also got bad reviews and left her feeling that she had made what she still describes as a 'pretentious' film.
The sense of failure was such that "for the first year, I didn't go to the movies or even watch TV," she said. Instead, she immersed herself in advertising, shooting as many as 80 commercials in one year, for products ranging from shampoo to cars. Read more of this story here.