Tony Gilroy has had a better year than most people have careers. First up, The Bourne Ultimatum, which he wrote, premiered to extremely high expectations by an increasingly fan-boy driven audience and ended-up making like a billion dollars (give or take). Not only was his task of closing out the trilogy somewhat daunting, but at this point, they are so far from the source material that it is basically a completely new story-arc requiring all original content. It's pretty impressive that he managed to make each successive movie better than the last while keeping the spirit of the original novels in tact.

Next up is Michael Clayton, a film Gilroy wrote and directed, which has been met with some pretty glowing reviews. Gilroy was recently on The Treatment to talk about the new movie and he had some pretty interesting things to say about working with others.

"It's very easy to collaborate with someone who has lots of ideas. For me there's no one easier to collaborate with than Steven Soderbergh. This is because people who have lots of ideas are constantly trading up: You have an idea; I have an idea; your idea is better, let's go with that. So ideas don't have this enormous currency. They are just the material that you're working from.

The worst people to work with are people that — every now and then, once a year — have an idea, because they build a temple around it. And it becomes THE idea."

This is so true. If you have ever worked on a project that requires some creative input, then being surrounded by people who either have lots of ideas, or rarely an idea at all, can make or break the flow of the project. This is because ideas are NOT the finish line. They are not something to hold as a trophy. The important thing should be the final product, the execution. As Gilroy said, the ideas are just material to work from.

Of course, the other end of this spectrum — and something that Zack and I often face — is that the generation of ideas can become so fast and fevered that it's hard to take a step back and focus on one thing and execute it. At some point you need to gather your source material and actually begin to make something. Any additional ideas can be used for the next iteration.

This balancing act is the key to managing projects that require a lot of creative fuel. If you can put together (or stumble upon) a team who has the right mixture of ideas and focus, you should have a nice foundation. This is often why it's recommended that people looking to form a start-up do a few projects together first, before they officially become partners.