Teamwork is everything, and movies are no exception. Despite the advent of digital and other time-saving tools, making movies is extremely people-hour intensive, no matter what the budget. It's no coincidence that end credits are getting longer and longer with each new blockbuster. More people means more, and hopefully better, creative collaboration.

Now, creative collaboration is normal for, say, actors. They know they must work together to stay "in the moment" and achieve an organic ensemble performance. See Robert Redford's "Lions for Lambs" for a good example and Robert Davi's "The Dukes" for a bad example. In the former, actors take time to listen to each other (witness Cruise and Streep's well-timed reparté) while, in the latter, the actors don't feed off each other at all, despite the fact they're all playing chefs. I saw both at Cinema-Festa di Roma this year, and was amazed at the differences in collaboration, and the end result, despite the experienced actors in both productions.

A rarely mentioned aspect in which close creative collaboration is even more vital, occurs at the initial stages of a film project, where script meets cash, art meets capitalism: the first meeting between director and producer.

Producers and directors need to be tight, no doubt about that. Some of the most successful producer-director relationships of all time have been highly personal in nature (i.e. Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, the Cohen brothers, Tom Cruise and himself). However, these duos share something more: they all had/have a common creative vision.

Far from being a meaningless and bogus catchphrase (like "pre-approved loan"), creative vision is a complex concept that embraces dozens of small, undefinable moviemaking nuances, such as thematic overlap, visual style, and, my personal favorite, the "when-to-end-the-film", a perfect aspect of filmmaking to highlight the need for continuous creative collaboration between producers and directors.