Please tell us about the projects you worked on before making ‘12 And More Omissions’. How did you start, and how did you learn to make films?
Growing up, my parents made sure that I was immersed in the arts. My mom took me to the theater, my dad took me to art fairs and museums. My parents made sure that I had a plethora of arts & crafts supplies to play with and books to read. I remember going to the library often as a kid. Art—creating and consuming—was as natural a part of my life as a kid as anything else. We didn’t have cable TV until I was older, which I am thankful for. I remember being very young and having the urge to create. I have my parents to thank for fostering that desire.
When I was in middle school, I taught myself how to edit. The computer was at the time an emerging form of media in which I saw the potential to create art, and so editing was a natural draw for my curiosity. My ability to edit soon landed me an internship at BRIC Arts Media, a cultural arts center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where I worked under three figures who would come to have an important impact in my early artistic development: Shaun Seneviratne, an independent filmmaker, Greg Anderson-Elyseé, an independent comic creator, and Jackie Chang, a visual artist and activist. I spent three summers, from age 14 to 16, working at BRIC, where my love of and interest in art truly began to crystallize. It was with Shaun Seneviratne’s camera that I made my first short narrative film “Infinite Mind”, a surrealist drama about a man who disappears from time after an electrical malfunction, and the consequences that his total erasure has on his best friend & lover. Even then I was interested in film as poetry, in creating meaning with contrast, and in transcending storytelling in favor of conveying deep emotion. I made a few more short films in high school after that. As I started getting old enough to look into colleges, it was Jackie Chang who told me something I will never forget: “Everyone will tell you how hard it is to be an artist. No one will tell you how hard it is to not be an artist.” My heart aches thinking about that moment. In some ways, it changed the course of my life. I applied and was accepted to Boston University’s film program.
At Boston University, my life changed once again when I met Dr. Ray Carney. Dr. Ray Carney is an entirely unique individual with a specific viewpoint on art, and he is generally acknowledged to be the world’s leading expert in American independent and arthouse film. However, what many people don’t understand about Ray Carney is that as a professor, learning about film is secondary to the main goal he has for his students: learning how to think, and think hard. In Professor Carney’s courses, of which I took 6 during my time at Boston University, he never once allowed any lazy thinking, and he showed me there was always a way to go deeper—mountains beyond mountains, as he referred to it. Studying with Carney felt like discovering the secrets to the universe, and it was the most exciting and profound time in my life.
In college I wrote, directed and otherwise worked on several short students films while also gaining an immense amount of practical filmmaking experience working for Clifford and Griffin Nash of Nash Pictures, a Boston-based production company. To this day those two remain some of the most technically talented filmmakers I have ever seen. Griffin is one of the most skilled camera operators in the world, and the pair of them have a detail-oriented system of filmmaking from preproduction through post which is unlike anything I have seen anywhere else in my time in film. I started working with them when I was 19 years old and through my time at Boston University I worked on what felt like one hundred film sets with them. After each set, Clifford would ask me: “what did you learn today?”
After college I worked as a director’s assistant on a feature film in Boston before moving back to my hometown of New York City, where I then worked as a research & development assistant for a documentary film producer named Amy Rapp, before moving into freelance editing and assistant directing. During my time in New York post-college I have worked on a variety of commercial, narrative, documentary, and music video sets, where I gained the experience, connections, confidence—and just enough desperation—to write & direct my own film.
Tell us about ‘12 And More Omissions’. How do you describe it?
12 And More Omissions was my personal vision of the world when I wrote it at age 23. It contains all of my deepest fears.
On a story level, it is about three separate groups of people who are all struggling with distance, or issues, in their most cherished relationships. Each group exists in a different part of the American Northeast and is experiencing a different stage of young adulthood from college to their mid-30s. The film deals with the eldest son of an ailing mother, a fragile friendship between two young women, and a single guy navigating his dating world throughout college.
What the film really deals with are regular people in regular situations, navigating the absurdity and complexity of day-to-day life. The film is not interested in “big” life events but rather the small moments which stack over time to form the content of our lives.
Please tell us about your favorite filmmakers.
In a book by one of my favorite authors, there is essentially a warning to artists not to reveal their influences. I don’t really know if the author believes this, or if it was just something one of his characters says, but I actually had the opportunity once to speak to this author over the phone, and when I asked him who his favorite authors were, he evaded the question. I am incredibly superstitious and as a result I cannot go into much detail here. Besides, I don’t think my favorite filmmakers have much to do with the films I’m interested in making. My art stems from being a little boy playing with clay and markers on the arts & craft table that my mother & father built for me, from the picture books I read at that time whilst curled up with my stuffed animals under my loft bed, from memory and the deep subconscious, and from my consistently and overwhelmingly profound experience in the everyday world. The filmmakers I love play a minimal role in my own art making. I am interested in my own personal and unique expression of the world and I have no time for emulating something else which has already been done and which belongs to someone else.
What I can say in response to this question is that it is absolutely no secret how much I love Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu is the most beautiful mind I have ever encountered in any form of art. I strongly encourage everyone to watch Late Spring, and to watch it deeply, before they die. What Ozu has done in his movies is give us the gift of life, as seen through the most beautiful possible lens. Though this has nothing to do with that which is inside of his films—and I will refer you to Directed by Yasujiro Ozu by Shiguéhiko Hasumi if you disagree with me on that former point—it is also incredibly heart-breaking and profound when you consider the circumstances under which Ozu was making films about love—immediately following the devastation of his country via the most massive and brutal loss of life in human history, and of his own incarceration as a prisoner of war—and as a single, unmarried man himself. Most men would be left in the fetal position for the rest of their lives after that—or would at least be irrevocably bitter. Instead, Ozu chose to continue showing us what was important in life. Ozu chose love.
If you were given a good budget, what would be your ideal project?
I have three feature films which I pray I will be given the chance to bring to life one day. Again, I am incredibly superstitious, and I worry about the implications of putting these things in writing prematurely, but much like a boy shooting hoops in his front yard waiting for an NBA scout to drive by, I am hoping that an executive producer will read this and shower me with money, so I will discuss one of these ideas below.
The script I have that is most ready to shoot is called ‘Panim-El-Panim’ which is Hebrew for Face to Face. It is a story about a rabbi who has lost his faith in God after the death of his neighbor. It is about man’s search for meaning. My ideal budget for this film would be 3 million but I’m willing to negotiate.
Describe how you would ensure that production is on schedule. What steps would you take?
There is only one way to make sure a production is on schedule—the human way. You must see and hear people, listen to their needs and desires, and figure out a way to meet them as a human, and not as a tool. It is far too easy to steamroll others on set, but it is much more rewarding to find a way to work together in harmony. You can always tell when a film was made with joy. It all seeps in.
What was the hardest part of making ‘12 And More Omissions’.
Everything about making 12 And More Omissions was difficult. We shot over nights and weekends, spread out over the course of a year, with no money or resources. The first weekend we shot was in Upstate New York during a blizzard. One of our crew cars got stuck in the snow and had to be towed. Felix Phillips, my DP for that portion of the film, and I worked 18 hours on Sunday to make that weekend happen. When I saved enough money for the next portion of the shoot, I drove an SUV full of gear up to Boston and we did a weekend of shooting up there. I slept in the car that weekend because we had nowhere to put the gear and I couldn’t leave it unsupervised overnight. It took six months for me to get the rest of the money to finish shooting the film. The last two weekends we shot in New York City. For the hotel scene, my crew and I carried gear up four flights of stairs because the elevators were tied up with guests. The challenges we faced are incalculable and indescribable. There wasn’t a single day in 2023—until our final shoot date in December—when I thought this movie would ever come to fruition. Nothing about this shoot was easy, and I nearly gave up at every turn. Every moment of my life in 2023 was consumed with making 12 And More Omissions happen. I missed my dad’s birthday, I missed out on social engagements, lost friends, and I poured every dollar I had into this thing. It was the most difficult endeavor of my life. If I could go back, I’d do it all over again. It was the greatest adventure I could’ve hoped for.
If possible, tell us about your next work. What plans do you have for your future work?
I hope that one day I will have the resources to make a film again. I can never do again what I did with 12 And More Omissions. I was young and crazy enough to have done it that way, but it’s not a sustainable way of making films. It took too much of a toll on me, and left me in debt. So, until then, I will be working on other people’s films as an assistant director, I will be writing, I will be watching movies and reading books, and I will be living my life with extreme attention to detail—all research for the next one.
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