My name is Nicolás Rojas Castro. I’m an independent filmmaker from Chile. And I knew pretty early
on that I wanted to tell stories, hopefully make movies, I was like 13 I guess.
And I went through high school and everything and then I went to a pretty humble university
called Viña del Mar University where I studied cinema (it’s like a film school) and I had
pretty good teachers (like screenwriting teachers) and history teachers and cinema teachers who
taught you more the craft than to appreciate the art itself. And in doing my University
days, I made a couple of short films and I ended up in my career with a very ambitious
project. It was a very big movie about a real life case that happened here in Chile about
some psychopaths. I actually shot 20 minutes of the movie and turned it into some kind
of teaser and went to the contest that the Government has to finance films and I didn’t
get it but I guess that was good because it was a really big movie for me to take. I was
22 and really young.
But I got the opportunity to work with great talent like big talented actors and I had
a great script and that kind of opened up something for me that when I finished the
university I went on to make and independent short film which I did and went to a couple
of festivals and got a few awards and a year after that I set out to make my first feature.
I went to a lower scale of feature and in the summer of 2013 I shot it. It’s called
DISTANCE (DISTANCIA) and I premiered it in 2015.
In the meantime when I was in post-production of that film I switched cities and I came
to Santiago which is the capital of Chile and started a job at University in a department
where I was in charge of making original content where I developed a series of micro documentaries
and it has ten episodes, it’s about different crafts that we are losing with time like shoemakers
and bicycle makers and stuff like that.
Then I made another project that consisted of grabbing a few independent musicians from
Chile (a couple of them songs from theirs) and gave them to illustrators, painted a picture
of the song in a canvas and that became a series of music videos that was along with
along with the museum exposition of the art itself.
And then I switched jobs and now I’m a director of video content in big local radios from
Chile where I direct commercials and make projects. Recently we premiered a documentary
about live music.
I guess the problem current and always issue about an independent filmmaker is making the
time to actually do the work to pull off your own projects (it’s hard when you have a
day job). Luck for me my day job also consists of on having a camera on hand and trying to
develop stories so I’m not that away from the craft itself but it’s still an issue
to make time, to get home and sit down and actually get something written down for a
project that you’re trying to pull off on your own.
Try not to let the day-to-day issues like work, family, love life or whatever can come
up to get in the way of what you’re trying to do because you actually have to be in a
very peaceful or sort of peaceful mindset to actually get something done. It’s really
easy to start procrastinating and having a lot of self-doubt and mainly issues with one’s
self like “I’m not good enough” or “Why am I going to do this if it’s probably going
to turn out worse than the previous thing that I did that didn’t actually turn out.”
But one is always it’s worse critic.
I think that the best way that you can deal with such issues is you can is be super headstrong
and try not to be a perfectionist…in my case I’m always trying to achieve, I’m
a real perfectionist. So it’s kind of hard when you are halfway through a project and
you realize that it’s not what you originally had it in your mind and you don’t find it
perfect and don’t put it aside. It’s actually the work itself that you need to keep doing
so I guess the way I’m trying to deal with these issues is I’m trying to do it no matter
what, no matter what the outcome is.
Even if I’m young, I know a lot of young filmmakers you have to do the work. You cannot
achieve an amount of greatness in the craft if you don’t actually do it. So I guess
you always keep on learning while you’re doing so it’s really important to just push
through it and keep doing no matter what.
Don’t think about what’s coming next. Once you get a job done and you put it out
there, it’s up to public opinion and public opinion some time can but sometimes it doesn’t.
But that doesn’t mean that it has to condemn the way you do things, you just have to keep
on doing them.
I think what is actually paralyzing in some way is fear first of all (fear of failure).
But you can’t event begin to fail if you don’t try. So I guess that the hardest thing
for me to do is to be that headstrong and just keep on doing it no matter what just
sit down and I don’t know finish the screenplay even if it’s not going to get made, just
do it. Maybe have like 10-20 screenplays locked in a drawer until there’s going to be just
probably one (could be a short film, could be a documentary, could be anything). But
one that will get shot and then eventually is going to come up with other different issues
but you just have to finish every project that you set your mind to do. I think that’s
really important because frustration is even worse when you set out to start something
and you don’t finish it.
I don’t know if there are any filmmakers out there that tend to deal with the same
issues that I do and I wonder what do you do to overcome fear and keep pushing through?