Film Courage: You are sitting in traffic on Wilshire Boulevard.
I’m sure it was a lovely Los Angeles intersection with lots of commotion [recounting how he
developed the idea for his feature scifi film AFTER WE LEAVE], was this your first feature
script that you were planning to write?
Or had you written prior feature scripts?
Aleem Hossain, filmmaker and AR/VR creator, assistant professor in media arts and culture
at Occidental College: I had written many feature scripts.
Most of them I had written right after I got out of film school.
Largely with an eye for trying to sell them or get them set up to be produced sort of
within the studio system, a few of which I even liked.
Some of them I’m glad I wrote just because I think you need to write a certain amount
of bad scripts just to get to a better script.
But yes I had been writing a lot and with a few things that I had been well-received,
I was still running up against the roadblock of people saying this is a potentially makable
script but not with you as a director.
You’ve never directed a feature.
No one is going to take that risk.
And so AFTER WE LEAVE was my answer to that recurring complaint.
I was like “Fine, if that is the case I’m just going to go make my own movie and get
that one excuse out of the way.
I will be a feature filmmaker by making my own film and then I can hopefully return and
get something bigger budget off of the ground.”
Film Courage: And these were producers that you were pitching that were saying this?
Aleem: Producers, agents and never by the way in a mean way.
I think appreciate of the work that I was trying to do and interested in the stories
that I wanted to tell.
But just being frank about the reality of who they were going to entrust “X” dollars
with and that it would be a hard fight for someone who hadn’t made a feature.
Which is sort of a catch-22 right?
We talk a lot about access to the industry and if the access point is how come you haven’t
already made something we get caught in this vicious circle.
And so I just wanted to break out of that.
For me the solution was just making a very small budgeted film that I could direct and
craft in the way that I wanted which again I did primarily as a form of self-expression.
I made the movie not as a career calling card primarily, not as a strategic movie in Hollywood.
I made it because I just wanted to tell that story.
I think the benefit is it now makes me a director in a lot of people’s eyes and it has opened
more doors but it wasn’t really my main reason for doing it.
Film Courage: Speaking of access…and I know we are taking a little bit of a…we are diverging
a bit.
Aleem: That’s fine.
Film Courage: What are some of the misconceptions whether they are from students or other people
in the industry about access and what have you seen from going through this process yourself,
being told this yourself that you can’t do it.
Aleem: I think if we are specifically talking about feature films, I think the biggest problem
with access is that the business entirely has changed since a lot of us fell in love
with movies.
There are just so many fewer smaller movies being made but the studios and the big production
companies that I have to think that opportunities for new directors or less experienced directors
aren’t even there.
I actually think that a lot of that access problem is they are not in the business of
making those movies that they used to give to a younger director.
They are just making these huge movies.
That being said I definitely think for sure the overall industry has biases against and
they are structural biases, they are biases that come not from necessarily bad intentions
but there are barriers to women, to people of color, for sure.
I think the hope right is that there is an antidote to that where we can now make our
own content.
And I do think that that is a valid idea.
That the way around the access problem is to make stuff.
But I think the funny thing these days is I don’t know if the model anymore is make
a low-budget film so you can then jump up to a lower mid-budget studio movie.
Because those don’t even exists.
I think that really I have sort of re-thought how I think about my career.
I’m just going to keep making movies.
I don’t actually expect there to be this moment where all of the sudden where now I
don’t have to self-produce or at least partially self-produce my own movies because I don’t
know if that path exists anymore.
I really think that if I want to make these movies then I will make them.
The career of directing movies in Hollywood there are so few films made these days that
I don’t know that that is a path that one sort of incrementally gets to.
Sometimes you make a film good enough on your own and you get that lightning strike and
you can level up in a big way.
But I don’t think there are more incremental steps because I think there is nothing in
between.
Film Courage: When your students come to you with questions about access are you telling
them the same thing basically?
Don’t try to make something just so you can get to that next level so someone can
“endorse” you?
Aleem: I mean the very first thing that we talk about at Oxy [Occidental College in Los
Angeles, California] that the skills involved in filmmaking and media making we don’t
think of those as skills that are inclusively for Hollywood.
I think we live in a world where the ability to tell your story and express yourself visually
is something that everyone needs to do.
Individuals, companies, non-profits, governments, cultural institutions, all of them need to
do that.
So I think of this toolbox (artistically and logistically) that we are giving people in
the classroom as applying to a huge amount of life.
When we talk specifically about access to Hollywood I do tell people that I don’t
think that film director is a career.
I think film director is an aspiration.
I think independent film director is a calling or I wish I had a better word than hobby because
I don’t think it’s a hobby.
But I don’t actually think it’s a career path.
I think it is a thing one does because you are compelled to do it.
If you were to corner even who you think of as a successful independent director and ask
them “Do you pay your mortgage with filmmaking income this year?”
So many of them will say no and that is just the reality.
That is not a reason to stop making movies.
It’s a reason to ask myself “Why am I making movies?”
If you are making movies because you just feel compelled to do it, that is the right
answer.