I love plenty of films, but there are few which have inspired or influenced my art in some way. (For the purpose of this essay, I’m assuming “inspiring” means “inspiring my own art” instead of the “inspiring” Hollywood uses to market sports movies.) For me, the most influential movies have been those which exposed me to a whole new genre or style of film, and did so with class.
When I was a child, my parents didn’t let me watch movies or TV (a decision I credit for much of my creativity). It wasn’t until I turned 10 that they showed me
Star Wars, which is both my dad’s favorite movie, and the cliché film which influences everyone to go to film school. The magic worked on me.
Star Wars was a big movie - especially for a kid who’s barely seen a film in his life. More than the spark which first got me into filmmaking though, the more lasting impression
Star Wars gave me was a love for stories which create an entire universe around themselves - a universe larger than the story itself, into which the audience is mercilessly thrown and expected to fend for themselves. Though pop sci-fi has since been degraded, there’s surprisingly little exposition or hand-holding in the original
Star Wars. I think the best “universe-creating” movies throw the audience in, in the same way. It’s a smart means of suspending people’s disbelief in a fictional universe. I aspire to achieve this in several of my unproduced scripts (some of them even microbudget).
On the opposite end of the spectrum are two movies I saw early in college -
Clerks and
Before Sunrise. I’d just finished taking courses about story structure, and learning Joseph Campbell’s monomyth like the Bible, and here were two films which were apparently about nothing. They had no obvious structure, yet were still entertaining, moving, and meaningful to me. This was when I learned that although story is important, storytelling is actually based more in characters … then the story comes from them. These films gave me a sense of rebellion - the idea that a narrative film can be anything as long as it works for an audience. There is no formula. Also,
Clerks was dirt cheap, and
Before Sunrise could have been dirt cheap, so these were the first films which influenced my interest in microbudget filmmaking. Only a year later, I saw
Once, and in terms of artistic influence, it reaffirmed what I’d learned from
Clerks and
Before Sunrise, so I mentally group it in with those two.
Along the same lines was a little indie which played at Sundance called
Mystery Team. It was a gross-out R-rated teen comedy made on a micro budget by a group of college friends as an extension of their web series. Naturally, I was encouraged and influenced by that, given my own web series,
Generation Why.
The final film I count among those which have influenced me the most is an unlikely film -
Into the Wild, Sean Penn’s film. Growing up, I’d idolized the crafts of storytelling and filmmaking in and of themselves. It seems like common sense now that the best films have some sort of theme, or message … or COP. But this idea never clicked for me until I saw
Into the Wild. The message of that film moved me so much that I started to examine all my own work through the new idea that filmmaking and storytelling are means to an end - not the ends in themselves. I saw
An Inconvenient Truth around the same time (a few years after its theatrical release), and that had a similar effect on me - and also really got me interested in documentaries.
