How I Accidentally Premiered A Film At Cannes In 2017…
One day, during my freshman year, I was walking to class but was running a bit late.
It was college, so there was obviously a random fliers everywhere. I was almost at the door to the classroom, when I saw one that caught my eye. It said "Campus Movie Fest".
Campus Movie Fest is the world's largest student film festival, touring college to college around the country.
I looked closer at the flier and realized, "wait, this is happening this week".
I checked my phone, I was going to be even later to class than I’d liked.
"Wait a minute", I realized, "the intro meeting is literally later today".
I learned at the meeting that you only have 1 week to find actors, write, direct, film, edit, and submit a 5 minute film by the award show Friday.
I had an idea for a short film that I never got around to making in high school.
The idea of a sleepover with a "deep sleeper". But not just any deep sleeper.
This one randomly says really profound things in the middle of the night. I didn't know who were going to be my actors.
But then I hit up high school friend that was also at The University of Arizona because I knew she had done some acting in the past.
I also asked a guy from the social fraternity I joined that mentioned he wanted to be an actor.
I hit the U of A facebook page to ask if anyone could help film the movie I was to write, direct, score, and edit. I obviously had to make a minor cameo too.
We had a week to make a 5 minute film but we all had different class schedules. So, we met late at night.
I wrote the script, we filmed our movie, and finished just in time to submit.
Funny enough, we won first place out of over 20 submissions including those of film students, sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
Because we won our schools Campus Movie Fest, we were invited to go to Cannes that summer with the Creative Mind Group and make another short film there.
Sauter, my cinematographer and I, were the only ones that went.
I wanted to write and/or direct but I was assigned a producer role for our film and it was not good tbh. But I scored it and it was fun to see a ton of movies and have ours premier at the festival too (even though it was really bad).
My Cannes experience would've been solid but what made it incredible was what happened towards the end of the festival.
The father of one of my best friends from high school was the COO of a big film company at the time.
Therefore, Sauter and I got invited on their yacht, to their movies' film premier, and to their after party too.
It was an insane experience to say the least. One I'll never forget. Especially, because at the after party, I mustered up the courage to ask Taylor Sheridan a question.
This was before he did smash hits Yellowstone, Tulsa King, Mayor of Kingstown, Lioness, etc., but it was less than an hour after he literally got a five minute standing ovation from the entire theatre for his movie.
The movie was "Wind River", which he'd wrote and directed. It's currently got a 7.7/10 on IMDB based on over 233,000 reviews.
I was nervous to say the least, but I said fuck it and asked him what his best advice would be to the 19 year old version of himself, what advice does he have for an upcoming creative writer?
He told me something I’ve kept in mind on my creative pursuits over the last 7 years. He said "make the movie you want to see".
