Film Courage: Do you consider yourself an artist?
Chris Gore, Founder/Owner of FilmThreat/Author/Filmmaker: Oh wow
do I consider myself an artist. I would say yes in the sense that I try to do something
creative every day and I try to live what I would describe as a creative life. I drove to your place
here in my car and most people that buy a car they just okay they get their car and that's it. I
have no allegiance to Toyota and I turned my car into a Batmobile where I have Batman
stickers in certain places on the hubcaps on all the interior in the console I covered up
the Toyota logo with a Batman logo and so I try to like and if you ever come to my place everything
from the bookshelves is just something creatively stimulating everywhere. I always have some
creative project I'm doing whether I'm modifying something and then even with my website and film
projects there's sort of a handmade feel to it so I guess artists would be an all-encompassing thing
in that describes the way I live my life also the way I like to write I don't I just like
if everyone's doing this thing I'm trying to do I'm trying to go the other way or find another way
or we've heard this line a million times I'm going to try something different so I would say that
like artists would be a good all-encompassing thing but I would never say that about myself
but I think in and live that way because I tend to not accept the choices we're given
and by that I mean one of the things when I was in high school
they try to see what your capacity is for certain careers right and one of the questions
that puzzled a teacher of mine was why did you put that hours of work don't mean it matter to
you? Don't you want to work a nine to five job and I said no I don’t. The hours don't matter
and so I look at the choices we're presented in terms of how it's possible to live your life and I
try to do something different and maybe that's sort of a bit of a Generation X rebel in me but
also something of I just can't do I can't accept a thing as like this is the only option right? Which
is why I altered my car to not look like anybody's car and I will say this whenever I do have the
luxury of valet parking my car the valet parkers love it and I always just say get my Batmobile.
There you go. Film Courage: Would you consider yourself a businessman? Chris: I definitely
would consider myself a business person from this standpoint the most successful artists
that you know about that you have awareness of whether it be Steven Spielberg as a filmmaker
or other filmmakers Steven Soderbergh and this is the challenge of working in film
is that you have to be wildly creative on the one hand and that describes a lot of people
but the ones that succeed, the ones that work consistently have an output of work
are the ones that are very good at business and so that is I think the biggest challenge facing
filmmakers is to balance the artist side which a lot of times conflicts with being a business
person because what I learned about being about being successful in business is it's all about
deconstructing and doing kind of a little autopsy on your process and then coming up
with the successful parts of the process and then repeating it. For example having
written a couple of books non-fiction in the nonfiction realm I would always have friends
ask well how did you write a book and I said I didn't write a book I wrote a thousand words a day
and I did that every day and I did it five days a week because I got up at five a.m and
I worked till 8 am when I was spent I had about a thousand words. On a good day 3,000 words,
on a bad day maybe 500 words but I did that every day 5 days a week never not for months
and within 60-70 days I had enough words for a book the average book is 60 to 70,000 words so
what you don't know is before that I spent six months on an outline for that book so what I began
to learn and just through many sort of business wonky books that I have read I tend to sort of
glean there's always like a read a book like the Four Hour Work Week [Author Tim Ferriss] or
the Seven Habits of Highly Successful People [Author Stephen Covey] and
I usually get like one or two nuggets of like oh that's really good but you gotta like
sift through that 60,000 words to get to that like that you know a pot of gold of knowledge
but I began to realize that part of this is about is about breaking down processes no one
writes a book or just makes a movie or writes a screenplay it's breaking that process down
into the smallest smallest task and then just doing that task every day like anything and
creating a habit and I think that scientifically speaking they say that it takes about three weeks
to instill a habit and I think that if you can develop those good habits and just do a piece
even if it's a paragraph you're gonna have I mean it boggles my mind when I see people who do these
long Facebook posts or social media social media posts and I look at that and I said if you took
that energy and you put it into like a book or a screenplay or some other piece of work
and you just you would really have something I feel like I feel like we're we're giving away our
creativity to these social media companies and it I i it's it's it's really disheartening to see a
generation waste their time with these long-winded posts when you could actually have have created
a work of some cohesive work but back to the book thing I do like tend to spend about six
months coming up with an outline a very detailed outline usually about between 15 and 30 pages
and then that outline I detail usually it's like here's the chapter heading here are the sub heads
and here's a sentence about that will describe the next 500 words I'm going to write I’ve
literally written the book in my head so then it's a matter of just going back and then doing
that daily routine of getting up very early in the morning kind of when you're in that
lucid state this is pre-coffee pre-caffeine so you're so you're not quite all there
and you're in almost a trance-like state and a lot of writers will talk about that you're just
sort of your what they call in the zone you get it's it's easier to get in the zone when you're
you know fresh out of bed pre-caffeine and that was always that was a process that worked for me
other people it works differently I feel like you have to kind of know yourself to know what
works for you other people late night that's their most productivity for me it's mornings
so I think getting to know how you function as a creative machine is extremely helpful
and then coming up with a series of repeatable processes where you're successful and then
feedback also to any artist is like air I mean you need it to live you need feedback
both positive and critical to to grow I'm always very skeptical when someone
compliments me I don't take a compliment very well so but I will take a note a really specific note
seriously so that it can be so it's an addressable note whether it's I don't know a
film project or whether it's a book project notes notes are I feel like I give good notes too
I think I think you you you have to learn to give good notes as well as like take those notes
in as part of that process did you know living a creative life meant not living a nine to five
life 100 I was well aware that living a creative life would not mean nine to five I mean I i can
just I can even tell you when I'm out like socially and having fun I'm still working
there's a part of my brain that is always kind of I'm never not without a a notepad and I tend
to like like to physically write like a notepad and i've always carried in my pocket for probably
almost 30 years I always carry a space pen. This is the space pen that was developed by Nasa,
they spent 10 million dollars to create a technology which seals the ink so that it forces
it out right and the Russians used a pencil but we Americans invented this pen they're about 25 bucks
the ink lasts maybe four to five years I’ve always got a backup when this one runs out it's never not
with me so napkins if I don't have a notepad or a tiny notepad I love those little tiny notepads
and I will if it's an emergency write notes in my phone I may not like to do that but I
prefer the heart but yeah I I'm kind of always working or always like or something will spark
something and I do think that that's where that early morning work like once I'm sort of spent my
brain is still working on a problem how to solve a creative problem still working still working
still working I just don't have the solution and sometimes taking a step away is the best
best way to for your brain to continue that work subconsciously and I found that that that
works for me as part of the pre creative process also I love to be stimulated by
like I don't know dive bars are fun that may not work for everybody the horse races
are fun I like to just go somewhere where there's a lot of life being lived and and
observe and and I find that is also very stimulating to the to the creative process.
Film Courage: Would you consider yourself a contrarian?
Chris: Yeah I'm 100 % a contrarian I mean I can just tell when I look at old photos
of myself I was almost never on point with whatever the fashion of the day was if this
was the fashion of the day I was over here you know what I mean like I can't and even when it
comes to thinking about things you know like the films even that film threat had championed at the
time weren't the ones that ever became big hits I mean we covered people like Quentin Tarantino
earlier in their career or Richard Linklater in the 90s when Film Threat was a print magazine
and just to explain to some some of the people out there that may not know what a print magazine is
print magazine is just like the internet but it's but it's printed on really thin slices of wood and
magazines were sold at things called bookstores and you go to a bookstore you get a magazine I'm
gonna we're joking I'm joking of course you guys know what magazines are books come on but yeah
no I i mean I was a magazine I was effectively a media junkie and I at one point was subscribing
to 50 magazines that I would get every month and they all across the gamut artist magazines stuff
about comic books pop culture science fiction the business of publishing folio being one
Newsweek I mean I was a media junkie now it's easy to be a media junkie with you know access to
everything online but back in the 80s and 90s that was that was not as easy a thing
but yeah I'm definitely a contrarian in the sense that I look at like and this has always
been a problem for me whenever I have worked for a traditional company because I do like to look at
processes like and like this is how film threat if you look at my website and our you know what
we do on our youtube channel and whatnot some might think oh this is a big organization of
a lot of people and it is represents about 30 writers located all over the world but we just
have a process for how we do things that leads to being able to put out and cover so many films that
don't get coverage in your traditional mainstream media and that's just from looking at processes
when I work for traditional companies what usually tends to happen is I look at how
they're doing something I think oh I know how I would do that better and that would save me hours
I’ll give you an example I wrote a book years ago called the ultimate film festival survival guide
and in the process of writing that book I created a database of film festivals and I would time
myself how long it took to compile this data and I used a very simple at the time spreadsheet program
and I would type in the data and it it took a while it took like 15 20 minutes for each
festival well I was trying to collect data on 2,000 film festivals located all over the world
so I talked to an intern of mine at the time and I and I and I said to him and said hey what do
you think if I gave away a ps3 and maybe bought some pizza and drinks for some college students
so we got about 60 college students together I bought them pizza and drinks I got them all in
front of their computers logged into a database and I calculated in my head with the number of
students how long it takes it's going to take us three to four hours blah blah blah like and
I will have all the data so they had a name of a film festival they went they found the website and
then they just put in all the data points and at the end we did a drawing and somebody won a ps3
and I had all the data for my book and it happened in just an evening so again that
was just sort of a a way of looking at what is what is the end goal how can I get there
and then what is what is a way to do it where everybody gets something out of it
and I kind of feel like in a lot of ways in my career i've Tom Sawyer-ed myself into you know the
Tom Sawyer story where he's painting the white picket fence and he enlists the aid of everyone
to help him paint the fence so he's you know I'm not saying I'm also not there painting the fence
but that is how i've been able to do a lot of what I'm doing is taking a look at like this
is how you would do this in the real world is you would hire a company to collect that data
for you and they would charge you between twenty and thirty thousand dollars or I could buy a ps3
some pizza and drinks we can have a good fun night and and and I get I collect that data so I always
look at like how can I be competitive and how can I do something and I think a lot of it is
there's with my organization there's just very few layers of approval I mean it's a very small group
of people so there's not a lot of hand-wringing over decision making you know it's like cut to the
chase what's our end goal let's let's come up with that process and boom so we can get something done
we can be very efficient whether it's an award show we're doing or some some documentary project
and this is gonna sound weird but I will like even for we did this award show called Award This
which is my part of our mission sort of completes our mission with film threat
where we're championing smaller indie movies that get no love in award season
zero these are movies that are small that don't get love from say the even the independent spirit
awards and I wanted to create an event that really was diverse in the sense that you know we were
awarding every giving acknowledgement to films on the spectrum everything from like coded bias
by Shalini Kantayya whose movie played Sundance and then a movie called Corona Zombies directed
by Charlie Band from Full Moon Entertainment which is a schlock exploitation zombie movie so
we did that and we even had gift bags for the event and I just timed how long it takes to
stuff a gift bag and then I knew that if we had this many people we'd do it
in this amount of time. Film Courage: This sounds kind of like in a way like
because now I can hear myself saying this I sound like a crazy person but
you're a Virgo though right? Chris: Yes so how did you guess that? Film Courage: Oh it says it
on your IMDB, it just says you're September 5th or whatever. Chris: Oh I'm a yes and if you see
yes I have all all the aspects of Virgo that you would say like you know neatnik perfectionist all
that like yes that's me yes but but I try to come up with I don't try to not like burden anyone else
anyone else with my…with those aspects of my personality so I try to make it a gift
at least within our organization right like this is the thing that I'm good at, I'm not
good at what other members of my team are good at and collectively we're able to do what we do
but yes yeah I fit into all all of those aspects and try to approach everything with some sort of
precision but I’ve learned that timing out tasks just tells you how long something is going to take
I mean I would even say to anyone pursuing writing the thing that I always look at is
how long did it take and I do a word count you know no matter what program I'm using
I just do a word count or a page count and what did I produce how much time is it repeatable
and where do I have to get how do I have to get in the zone what are the circumstances what is the
time of day I don't like to work when the leaf blowers are around distractions I'm very prone
to distraction. I find that it's useful to break things down into a process and to know yourself.
Question For The Viewers: What is
your favorite part of this segment?