It’s a Saturday morning in 1989. My mom just made me a hotdog omelette for breakfast. My dad drinks a tall boy in the living room while watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I finish my omelette and sit on the couch just in time to see Mola Ram rip the heart out of some dude (don’t worry, it’s rated PG).
After the movie I go outside and play with some friends from the neighborhood. We don’t have movie going money, so we talk about how we can’t wait for The Last Crusade to come out on video even though it’s not even in theaters yet.
Growing up Steven Spielberg dominated my interest in movies. His films fed my sense of wonder and filled me with an otherworldly excitement. One of my earliest memories is being in my backyard, watching the sun beams fall through the leaves of our partially collapsed sycamore and thinking, “Wow. Being a movie director would be so cool.” That wasn’t practical though, so I decided that I’d become President instead.
As I grew up my taste in film flourished into different genres. Partially because my parents began watching more adult themed movies as my siblings and I got older. My Girl, White Men Can’t Jump, Forrest Gump, Selena, Saving Private Ryan. Not to mention, my cousin Stephen would sneak and let me watch all kinds of horror movies when I’d spend the summer at my godparent’s house. My favorite movies growing up were usually off beat comedies though. Stuff like Ace Ventura, American Pie or any Farrelly Brothers movie. My DVD collection was stacked with almost every 90’s to early 2000’s comedy you could think of. Movies always seemed so serious, so as a young person seeing people just act silly was fun. They provided the greatest escape from the awkward phase between teenager to adulthood. The period of life when things begin to get problematic.
Then one day, as a junior in college, I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It filled me with that same sense of wonderment I had as a child but added an overall feeling of uncertainty and emotional turmoil. I liked that a lot. Over the next few years, I started watching more and more dramas, Oscar worthy films that made you think about the deeper meanings of life, relationships and death. I could feel each of these stories pulling me further and further away from the mundane life I had settled into working at Walgreens after college. I still loved comedy and was influenced by the boom in web content from places like CollegeHumor, but it was during this period, when I was fascinated with the more emotional aspects of storytelling, that I decided to go back to school and major in film. Well, web design first, because a career in film was still too impractical, but I eventually switched majors.
I worked very hard in school, which was a nice change of pace considering I graduated with a 2.7 GPA from my first degree and side eyes from a few of my old psychology professors. I quickly became one of the more sought after people to collaborate with. As I got deeper into the program, I remember one of my professors telling us that if we continued on, we’d never be able to see or enjoy a film in the same way again. The magic would be gone and all we’d be left with would be a very scripted and analytical view of the film. I didn’t care though. I had something to say. A message to share with the world. So I pushed on, often bringing myself into the realm of mania, and throughout this process, I actually did it. I created a number of short films during my tenure in film school and not only that, I edited an absurd amount of other peoples films. I won multiple awards and was one of only a few students to be collaborating on projects with people both inside and outside of the school. My career had begun.
Something happened during all of this though. And if I think back, I can’t actually pinpoint the exact moment that something changed, but I remember after wrapping the last day of my senior project, a drama heavily inspired by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, my roommates had gone out to celebrate and I said I’d catch up. I was standing in the dark, in the living room of the house I was staying at, looking at all the gear we had just unpacked, and for some reason I just knelt down and wept. I cried for a good 20 or 30 minutes. Some kind of emotional block had been removed or created. I’m not sure which, but I just remember feeling emotionally burnt out and more exhausted than any other time in my life up until that point.
After that I didn’t want to work on anything serious. Those Oscar winning films that filled me with so much inspiration during the monotonous years I had spent working retail didn’t appeal to me anymore. And my teacher was right, I couldn’t see anything the same way again. No matter how much I enjoyed a film, the majority of my thoughts were filled with questions about editing, blocking, and lighting. Even worse, since I had a background in filmmaking the questions didn’t stop at, “How did they do that?” Now, I knew how they might have done it, and that led to an almost never ending rabbit hole of questions like, “Could they have done it better? Could I do that? How could I do it cheaper? With less people? By myself?” It’s really a special kind of torture, especially if it’s dealing with something that you love, in this case movies.
So what happened after I was no longer inspired by all those artistic films and high brow cinema? Well, I guess some would say I regressed. Now I usually only watch comedies. The dumber the better. Stuff where I can just shut my brain off and not think about anything because the entire premise is so ridiculous that I can just laugh and enjoy myself (hello Pineapple Express). I can still watch and enjoy a well made drama or thriller, but I have to be in a very specific mood and ok with the fact that my heart is about to get its ass kicked.
Now this isn’t all bad. Remember when I said I wasn’t sure if an emotional block had been removed or created? I really meant that. Since graduating I’ve had a very blessed, successful career in editing. I definitely shy away from watching what people would consider a tear-jerker, but I love editing things like that. It’s strange but I feel like I’d rather save up my emotional cache to create something of my own than watch something that might temporarily deplete it. I absolutely love embedding emotion into the scenes and stories I create. I even tear up while working on my projects sometimes. And the greatest compliments I get are from people who say that my storytelling or editing made them cry or feel joy. So I don’t know what changed exactly or why, and I don’t plan on going to therapy to find out because this works for me. However, I do know that I learned how to channel my creative energy in a productive way and that my priorities have changed as far as who I admire in the film industry now. Don’t get me wrong, I still idolize directors like Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, and Kubrick, but as far as life goes, who I really want to be like is Adam Sandler or Kevin Smith; guys who get to make stuff that they like, with their friends, get paid for it, and maybe, every now and then, dip their toes into a more sophisticated project.
So that’s how my taste in movies changed after film school. I guess you could argue that it didn’t really change at all, but I think it did. Instead of shifting to a new class of cinema, it just partially excludes another class.
I hope you enjoyed this. If you had a similar or different experience after film school I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
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Previously Published on Medium
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