There's a new Edgar wright movie coming out next week. I'm really excited about it as I'm sure a lot of you are.
He's one of my favorite directors if not my
absolute favorite so today I want you to sit back while I tell you the story
about the time that he kind of saves my filmmaking career.
Let's go
This story begins in 2009 during my senior year at Oberlin college when I realized that
I had no idea what I was going to do after I graduated
I knew I wanted to keep making movies since that's all I've done since I was like 15
But it's not like you can just go apply for film director jobs on Linkedin and I also knew that I didn't want to do
The classic path of going to La and spending years getting people coffee, and the hope that eventually someone will read your screenplay
I just wanted to be able to keep making stuff
Independently and also I was terrified of the real world and student loans and health insurance so I decided to apply to Grad school.
Something important
I should mention is that applying to grad school solely as means of staving off adulthood is
really really dumb, and you should not do it, but I did and I was arrogant about it
I decided I would only apply to the three best film MFA programs in the country
so that was NYU
USC and Columbia skip ahead to spring 2010 my last semester of college
And I was deep in production on my thesis film which did not turn out to be a career launching masterpiece
I didn't get into NYU I didn't get into USC, but I did make it to the interview Round at Columbia
which was the one that was by far my favorite.
I would my try to go to New York than La and in my experience
Columbia film students are not as insufferable as NYU film students, so I flew up to Columbia had an interview
I was pretty sure I nailed and finished my senior year of college and graduated -- and got wait-listed at Columbia
So I did what any college graduate with no clue what to do next does. I moved home and got a retail job and
So for the rest of that year. I just kind of hung out trying to figure out how to proceed and by November
I hadn't had any good ideas so I just applied to film school again. Let me reiterate. Do not apply to Grad school
Just because you aren't sure what to do immediately after applying
I realized I didn't actually want to go, but hey why not see what happens and once again
I got rejected from NYU, rejected from the USC, and made it to the interview round at Columbia, but for now
Let's jump back in time and talk about Edgar wright.
In 2004 when I was 16 and really getting into filmmaking I convinced my mom to drive us
45 minutes see this British movie that had gotten really good reviews
called Shaun of the Dead
It was a revelation. It was the exact movie I needed at that point in my life
It somehow totally synthesized all my interests and sensibilities and my sense of humor and built on this foundation of rock-solid
storytelling and character work. The hyperkinetic
filmmaking was apparent enough that even me as a novice could recognize the craft on display and most importantly it showed me that
Comedies could be visually dynamic. So the following week, I got my friend who had a car to drive us back
so he could see it and because I needed to see it again.
And immediately I started ripping it off in my own work
I would quote lines from it in my scripts and it began a long
obsession with whip pans and smash zooms. To the extent that in college I made a movie literally called WhipSmash
Then in my freshman year of college, when I was getting hyped as hell for Hot Fuzz,
I discovered that years earlier Edgar Wright had directed a TV show called Spaced and at the time
it wasn't available in the us. So it was the first thing I ever torrented, but don't worry the following year
I bought the DVD set the day it was released.
This might sound like hyperbole
but I had never connected as deeply with a show until I saw Spaced
This was still the days before nerd culture had become mainstream and it felt like I had discovered this secret
show made exclusively for me, and then I saw Hot Fuzz and became obsessed with it
And then I learned that Edgar Wright was directing an adaptation of Scott Pilgrim,
one of my all-time favorite comics, and going into that theater in 2010
I'm not sure
I've ever been as hyped for a movie in my life, and I saw it six times in theaters
So it's safe to say that I was in
LOOOOOOVE [audio from clip]
So now that I've covered that let's go back to Columbia University
In 2011 on the worst day of the year to be in New York City
I went down for my second interview in two years at Columbia in the interview. In the interview they asked me to talk about a movie
I'd recently thought was great
So obviously I talked about Scott Pilgrim. When I got home, feeling pretty good about how things went,
I open Twitter and shot off a tweet.
And then a few minutes later a couple DMs popped into my inbox
This blew my mind,
as small a gesture as it was on Edgar's part, getting that encouraging message from my favorite director meant the world to me.
So let's skip ahead a month. Even though I wasn't really anxious to go to film school
I desperately wanted the validation of getting accepting
I was totally stagnant at the time I had this vague idea that this would somehow
provide some kind of direction
And I was feeling pretty confident because if I got wait-listed the previous year surely that meant this year I would get in.
I didn't get in I didn't even get wait-listed this time -- this time just straight-up rejected
it was
disappointing
Okay, that's obviously a big understatement
this was crushing.
And I realize it's kind of silly because A) I didn't even really want to go and B) I was sad because I didn't get into
An Ivy league school like how much more of a first-world problem can you ask for but the message?
I was getting was that I had regressed
I was worse than I had been a year earlier
And I had no idea what to do so I locked myself in my room for the weekend
And I watched the knife fight from The Man from Nowhere on a loop because I found a really cathartic
to watch bad guys get fucked up with knives.
I felt terrible, I was truly miserable, and then at some point on Sunday
I remembered the message that Edgar had sent
Edgar Wright, one of the best filmmakers working today, and been rejected from every film school
he applied to. Which was exactly what I was going through, and he got past it and did all right for himself.
So maybe I could too.
And that wasn't going to happen by sitting in my childhood bedroom feeling sorry for myself.
The irony of it is that Edgar sent that message thinking I had gotten into film school when the opposite turned out to be true.
So his message ended up being way more encouraging than he ever intended.
By the end of the weekend I realized that I had to get my shit together so a few days later
I made my first Youtube video in which I brutally killed an anthropomorphic rejection letter.
And a couple months after that I launched this whole youtube filmmaking endeavor. I never really got a chance to thank Edgar
I met him briefly once in 2013 at San Diego Comic-Con when I sort of stumbled into doing press coverage of The World's End
But it would have been unprofessional to use my super brief interview to bring this up
So now in the very slim chance that he sees this:
Edgar, thank you for telling me exactly what I needed to hear. Six years later it still really means a lot to me.
I've got my tickets for the baby driver screening at BAM in Brooklyn next Tuesday, and I could not be more excited
That's all
Thanks, bye