“Staying silent was not difficult for me. Instead, my challenge was the constant sense of displeasure I experienced by watching and living with the other attendees as they noisily walked around the grounds, chomped and chewed their food, brushed their teeth and snored their noses. I realized just how loud silence actually is.”
Read More“Dent reminds us of Simba when he goes hunting in the beginning of the Lion King by himself but, he doesn’t even know what hunting means. He’s playing more than honing his skills. We were also imagining what nature would say if it could speak a warning signal to us. And what happens when its message is shared with somebody who doesn’t know how to listen.”
Read More“My older brother was first into making movie and such so I sorta just copied him for a while. Later in my self conscious years, I found it was my most frictionless mode of self expression given I had been doing it for 8+ years. So I figured let's get as good at this as possible and be an entertainer in this medium.”
Read More“I love the energy of shooting, the palpable sense of constantly needing to be in the moment, it definitely makes all the weeks and months of prep worth it. But I also love the edit as well as it really is the moment when you finally start to bring your film back to life.”
Read More“I went to college and studied sculpture and ended up doing bunch of stop motion animation. I needed to make things move! After school I moved to New Orleans and made those big sculptures that go on the front of Mardi Gras floats. The one I remember most clearly was a giant bust of Barak Obama with boobs that swung back and forth on a lever system.”
Read More“The initial idea for "Week In Paradise" was to write a love story between two professional executioners. I was interested in the idea of making a film where death wasn't seen as a negative experience, but rather, the ultimate spa treatment.”
Read More“The rest of the songs were sort of created with the filming in mind, and exploring different characters and POVs. And that led to the creation of Repressed Henry, Happy Henry and Angry Henry, as I call them. A lot of making this came from trusting my initial impulses and just diving into ideas once the songs were done.”
Read More“I was really curious about my Russian teacher. One-on-one language lessons have a way of really facilitating intimacy between a teacher and a student since it’s a lot of conversation practice, so you’re getting to know one another very well through that. But there also felt like there was this block or creative friction between us.”
Read More“I'd been wanting to make a film about bodies, communication, and perception. I'd seen Wiseman's National Gallery and had been re-reading a lot of Beckett. Things were swirling in my head… I knew I wanted this to have… a yearning to be seen, a need to be understood... all without words.”
Read More“I liked the idea of actualizing the worst art opening I could think of. It was so much fun to celebrate the arbitrary nature of artistic taste, how we define ourselves by the art we like, and what one can get away with under the guise of ‘artistic expression’. I wanted to address the biting competitive nature that poisons the artistic well.”
Read More“Eventually, Isabela shared with us her novel that she was writing in Spanish on her phone in an app called watt-pad. I was fascinated by the idea of how this character, an outsider and an artist would use her smartphone to express an inner world that her peers on the school bus couldn’t see.”
Read More“There’s something about the calmness of the editing phase, when the film is washing around in your head even as you’re doing other things, that I just love. Editing while cooking. Editing while getting groceries. Editing while walking down the street. I like to edit over a long stretch of time, and not to rush things.”
Read More“In 2014 I was traveling in Munich and decided to make my first video about vacation, I was so excited about the process of shooting and cutting, so I could not stop doing it. After that I decided to make video portraits of my friends and later I started my course of directing music video.”
Read More“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.”
Read More“My favorite part of the creative process for sure is just like dreaming up ideas and outlining and taking notes. Least favorite part is editing, and definite least favorite part is putting the final stamp on it that says it's done and I'm not going to touch it any more.”
Read More“I think the movie itself is less about religion than it is about people who are really desperate for attention, and use the performing arts to indulge their vanity. I tend to have very conflicting/cynical feelings about pursuing a career in the entertainment industry, and the kinds of personalities it attracts.”
Read More“This film basically became a love letter to two really sincerely talented women who's insanity I deeply relate to. All three of us are absolute crazy people, and this collaboration really did make me feel intimately connected, the deep relief that I am not alone in my craziness, that I am perhaps not an alien but a human being.”
Read More“I got stuck writing the script for a while and almost gave up, when practically as a joke, I wrote in a musical sequence based on John Prine's "Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You." I kind of liked the idea of just having one randomly thrown in, but I started to realize how many more John Prine songs fit the mood.”
Read More“There's something very creatively freeing about knowing no one needs this made, no one needs to watch this, no one should be putting any effort into this idea. It makes the concept of its existence fun and that's always a good spot to be in when writing.”
Read More“The Ballad of Junior was a lesson of vulnerability for me. I knew every single character in this story. It felt like I was writing a letter to my Mom, my friends, my older relationships, and myself. Brandon and I sat down and dissected every corner of our lives growing up together and realized how cyclic it was.”
Read More
