5 Questions with Valerie Brooks
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I started skateboarding in the sixth grade and I found a DVD of Chris Cole’s Hot Wax at Goodwill. It was essentially a skateboarding video compilation w intermissions of friends having a good time. I couldn’t skateboard very well, but I liked being fast enough to film other people skateboard. My best friend and I used to watch the videos over and over. I also had very little supervision as a young person and was constantly at the movie theaters, which were kind of like my baby sitters. I had no taste and watched anything. It was great.
Later, I applied to the arts magnet high school downtown because my 8th grade brain didn’t want to get bullied at a normal public school. I fell into their film program and it kind of took off from there. I was introduced to a lot of beautiful moving images as a young person like Fischli and Weiss, The Grandmother and Michel Gondry’s music videos. I’ve also had some amazing teachers and mentors who were very encouraging about my style and were also weirdos. I didn’t really imagine I would ever take to filmmaking as a career but I still haven’t managed to learn another skill and I can’t imagine anything else - besides being a musician, but the only instrument I’ve ever learned is the camera.
2) What’s the backstory here - what was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?
In the dead of winter, right after college, I moved to the middle of nowhere in NJ so I could bus back and forth every day to my Last Week Tonight internship in Manhattan…. On my bus rides I’d imagine falling over and over again in the snow, so I wrote a poem. I eventually decided to film what I’d written but, by the time I filmed there was no snow, only walls. So this is what became of it. There’s definitely some angst in here from my own frustrations as I was graduating film school in FL. I was looking for an outlet to do anything and everything the school had told us not to do. It was a very traditional narrative school that focused heavily on technical training. My high school which focused completely on self expression, had been the opposite. Ultimately, I think this was me coming to terms with the idea that I’m the biggest wall there is, and that’s a lesson I’m still learning. Pollo Cante’s also a celebration of things I was enjoying at the time. If you listen closely you can hear parts of Jim Carrey’s graduation speech he gave to the Maharishi School of Meditation. I am a huge fan of listening to graduation speeches.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And generally what part of the creative process do you enjoy the most, and the least?
The biggest challenge in Pollo Cante was convincing myself to finish. I found myself with footage that wasn’t classically narrative or really experimental either. I worried that when I did finish it, it wouldn’t have a home. A lot of the editing process was uncovering just what needed to happen next and not being like “what is this? It’s nothing.” At first it was an improvised performance, then Jean Louis (a rapper in the band Cook Thugless) actually sang some lyrics that I had written over it, and then I found a youtube video of a parrot singing that felt right. I learned a lot working with Keith (music producer of Cook Thugless & basically the only reason this movie works) in the basement of the house I was living in. I think the saving grace was having a huge, totally safe space to just throw ideas at the wall with little consequence. The family I was with definitely let me take over and were really generous about letting me stay down there for many uninterrupted hours.
The spontaneity of shooting was the most exciting to me. The DV camera was attached to Jean Louis 50% of the time and held by me in an old pair of quad roller-skates the other 50%, so we were pretty free to improvise in any of the locations I had fallen in love with on the bus. My favorite thing about filmmaking is filming in pedestrian spaces and being comfortable enough to find new truths in real time.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
I recently rewatched Kurosawa’s Dreams when I lent the bluray to our eighty-six year old neighbor, who speaks a slew of languages and has impeccable posture. I used to find her kind of intimidating, but connecting over Kurosawa was very special. While I appreciated the film (the story of the secret cat wedding and the one of the trees becoming the ancestors especially) what I really loved was bonding over a great film with someone multiple generations apart from me. I’ve also been watching Marvelous Mrs.Maisel and Tony Shalhoub is laugh out loud hilarious in that.
5) What’s next for you?
At the moment, I’m working on a short series of satirical sketches & musical numbers called Infinite Waste with my filmmaking partner Rafael Lorie. We’re trying to dance between comedy and crushing existential dread while exploring humanity's deeply strange need to produce crazy amounts of garbage. We’re working on figuring out exactly where to draw the line between fiction and reality - since the reality of our trash problem is already so intense and ridiculous as it stands. Ultimately for the future, I just want to keep making more dreams into reality and hope to work smart so those opportunities keep arising.
—
IG: @valentinebrux