Why I'm Making this Film, and What Makes a Great Film For Me

I wanted to make 15 Minutes of Faye for a number of reasons (outlined in the artist's statement on our website), but my primary goal is to influence positive personal and social change in my audience.  Based on my research and my personal experience, our culture’s idolization of fame is a massive problem not dealt with by much art.  Climate change, gay rights, and the economy are all important issues, but they’re also popular issues, and I feel there are many other artists to fight those fights.  I prefer to deal with a more obscure yet equally significant social issue.  This particular issue is one that’s near and dear to me, since it’s personally affected me quite a bit over the past several years.

I’m also attracted to the story at a genre level.  Though the film is not a mumblecore film, it takes cues from the genre, which is one of my favorites, second only to sci-fi.  Overall, I classify 15 Minutes of Faye as a dark romantic comedy - a genre of which you don’t see much.  I enjoy taking clichés, and elements with which audiences are familiar, and contorting them into something new and unique.

Truthfully, my interest in this film - and in film in general - comes from a very content-based perspective.  Artistic form, new media, and new distribution models are things I’ve learned out of necessity, both because I’m a filmmaker in the internet age, and because I go to school at UCF.  These are not, however, things which fundamentally interest me.  I’m interested in storytelling, in content.  (So I sometimes feel a bit out of place at UCF, which emphasizes those other things so much.)

My taste in film is eclectic, and I think great films take a variety of forms.  I love The Puffy Chair and Once just as much as I love Star Wars and Titanic, and just as much as I love An Inconvenient Truth and Inside Job.  Storytelling and originality are important to me.  I strongly disagree that there are only a few stories which can be told and that it’s all been done before, so I love films that do something totally new, and push boundaries - in content and in storytelling; not so much in form, though I often appreciate this as well.  I also have a soft spot for films which create fictional universes around their stories (which often, but not always, requires a big budget to pull off).

Films which inspire social change through non-cliché means are also some of the best.  Many filmmakers get caught up trying to move people, or to make people think, which are good motivators for art, but these should be the means to an end.  I think we have a duty as filmmakers to not only move our audience, but to change our audience.  A hundred years from now, a moving story will be obsolete, and a formal experiment with the medium will likely vanish into obscurity, but the way we filmmakers change and shape our culture will carry through.  A focus on positive change, with an original story, well-told, is what makes a great film to me.