pre-pro Best way to handle it?: Director partner tells me he has a new movie idea and wants to work alone

A little background:
I'm a director that's about 20 years into the game. After doing so many shorts, bleeding in the post-production industry, winning awards for shorts, and helping so many people achieving their dreams, I decided I wanted to finally make a feature film.


How Would You Handle It?:
My best friend is also a director and we have worked together throughout the years. We've both done shorts, corporate work, written features, etc.

We decided two years we would focus on our feature that we mutually-created. Of course we had worked with other people, for smaller projects and also worked together on other projects besides the main project.

Surprise:
After we're close to securing funding, have more equipment than ever, solid crew, more funding investments than ever... he randomly tells me he came up with a new feature idea and wants to do that solo.

I was a little shocked at how easy he said it. It was like he didn't think it would bother me. You can't control a person and we have no contract to have to work together. I was just a little blindsided. Especially after the breakthroughs we made.

Part of me thinks he was traumatized by a bad experience l last year working with a mutual buddy of ours.

I feel a little blindsided but what can you do? It almost makes me want to just not work with him, but I know that would be childish.


Some Options?:
- Support him, be a good friend, let him know you understand and then work on my own material?

- Wait it out? (Mutual friends were shocked, but said he's the type of guy that starts projects himself but never finishes)

- A little drastic, but another idea: Let him know how much it bothered me and remind him of why we got into the project. Pretty much try my best to see if he wants to come back to the project.

- Show him 6 other concepts we could work on with the money we've raised and funded. See if he wants to work on those together. If not, let him be.


Any other ideas would be great.

I'm trying to get to the root of it. He kept mentioning his experience working a feature with another director was horrible last year. Either way, I think I'm overthinking this.
 
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As an update to anyone curious, we all recently met as friends for a dinner. Then said he wanted to make a movie with my wife and her sister as the leads. They are both actresses. He told me this like it was nothing.

I did have a talk and say stop focusing on giving random girls feature roles (he had met a girl who had never acted and wants make her lead in his film) and remember we're working together.

Talk about red flags.

Better to learn this now before you spend a decent chunk of cash together.

If I were you, I'd stop wasting time with him and move on.
 
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