EP. 120
Keeping going when the work goes quiet
Director Elena Marsh on the two-year stretch in the middle of every film when the footage isn't working and nobody's clapping yet — and the small rituals that got her through it.
Now recording · Season 4
The Long Cut
A weekly show about the part of making things that nobody puts in the highlight reel — the doubt, the dead ends, and the work that finally clicks. Hosted by Nadia Reyes.
Latest · EP. 120 · Jun 4, 2026
Keeping going when the work goes quiet
Director Elena Marsh on the two-year stretch in the middle of every film when the footage isn't working and nobody's clapping yet — and the small rituals that got her through it.
52 min · with Elena Marsh
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EP. 117
Launching to crickets (and continuing anyway)
Founder Theo Nakamura on the launch that got eleven signups, the eighteen months of quiet that followed, and why the boring middle is where his product actually got good.
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Short pieces — half-formed ideas, things cut for time, and the occasional rant.
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I'm Nadia. I make a show about the middle.
Beginnings get all the attention and endings get all the applause. The middle — where most of the actual work happens — gets nothing. The Long Cut is my attempt to fix that.
Each week I sit down with a maker — a director, a founder, a luthier, a novelist — and we skip the origin story and the victory lap. We talk about the eighteen months in between, when it wasn't working and they kept going anyway.
Before this I produced radio for a decade. Now I do this, from a small studio in Lisbon, with too much coffee and a microphone I'm sentimental about.
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