5 Questions with Taylor Ervin
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
Art Boy was my first serious attempt at making a narrative film. I had made a few videos in High School that I suppose now you could call short films, but I was not thinking about them in that context at the time.
I studied journalism in college, and my instincts as a filmmaker tend towards a documentary approach. For years I’ve made essayistic or atmospheric videos that don’t necessarily conform to the tradition of Cinema per se. Art Boy was my first attempt to make a film using the language and grammar of cinema, though the film still employs some of the more essayistic techniques of my other work.
2) What was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?
The idea for Art Boy started as a documentary project. When I moved to Chinatown in 2015, I fell in with the artists, models, and writers in the neighborhood who were trying to live out their fantasies of what they thought downtown New York was like in the 70s and 80s when people like Basquiat and Grace Jones were hanging out on Canal Street. Today there’s still a kind of bohemia that exists in the shadow of that history, and it helps create a mystique around the art world that ultimately benefits the high dollar galleries in other parts of the city.
There were a few different people I had identified as typifying a certain ethos that has come to represent the art world as a whole. These are people for whom all the social trappings and status markers of the art world are the primary concern. The art itself for them is irrelevant or is relevant only to the extent that it provides an excuse for a social milieu to exist. My plan was to follow one or two of these people over the course of a few months to shoot a fly-on-the wall style portrait of the more vacuous aspects of the downtown art scene.
Ultimately, I was unable to convince any of those people to allow me the kind of intimate access into their daily lives that I thought was essential to making a good film. So, I decided to write a script, which became Art Boy.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And generally what part of the creative process do you enjoy the most?
I had never made a film like Art Boy before. There was a certain level of production that I wanted to achieve that meant assembling a crew, coming up with a shooting schedule, scouting locations, staging scenes etc. The most challenging part of the process for me were those premeditated aspects. I prefer the fluidity and spontaneity of following a subject with a camera, which is more in line with the documentary approach that I always gravitate towards.
But really, for me, editing is the most rewarding part of making a film. It’s the part where you take what you’ve captured and sort it out, put it together and see if it makes any sense. It’s the most contemplative part of the filmmaking process.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
I recently watched Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Camera Buff. It’s about a man who purchases a camera to take home movies of his newborn child, but he quickly becomes obsessed with using the camera to document everything. It’s a parable on the inherent dangers of making a film. A filmmaker is essentially someone who creates a facsimile of life, while in so doing, fails to experience life itself. It resonated with me as someone who has become somewhat compulsive about documenting.
In addition to making films and videos, I also take photographs as part of an ongoing documentary project of Chinatown and the artists that live there.
It’s important to ask at what point the document comes at the expense of one’s lived experience of reality.
5) What’s next for you?
I’m planning to shoot a feature film next summer. The film will be self-funded and shot with a skeleton crew on shoestring budget. The story takes place in the same general world as Art Boy. It explores the ways that the downtown art and party scene exists alongside and occasionally clashes with the long time residents of its adopted neighborhood of Chinatown.
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http://taylorervin.com
IG: @the_yearbook_committee