Filmmaker Ben Stark

Benjamin Stark was born in Heilbronn, Germany, before his family emigrated to Huntsville, Alabama in 1987. Stark graduated from the University of Alabama in 2006, formed Wonder Mill Films with Lee Fanning in 2007, and has directed seven shorts and one feature film (The Nocturnal Third).

What is the current project you are working on?

All of my film work is done through Wonder Mill Films, which I co-founded with Lee Fanning, who wrote and directed our first feature film, A Genesis Found (http://www.agenesisfound.com). Right now, I am trying to get our second feature (The Nocturnal Third) out beyond our local area. It has screened here in North Alabama, and is available to purchase and stream online (http://www.thenocturnalthird.com). I wrote, directed, and edited the film.

Both it and A Genesis Found (which I produced), are regionally specific films, so our goal for the next 9 months or so is to screen them as a double feature throughout the Southeast. We'll also try to find a home for both films on a reputable streaming app, like Hulu or Netflix. We're also developing a science fiction film for me to direct in late 2012. Lee is writing that.

I've decided to take a break from aggressively writing for the foreseeable future, as the process of directing a feature film has shown me where I excel, where I find the most satisfaction, and where I have the most fun. I'm constantly jotting ideas down for another project, but I'm working hard to zone in on taking care of our past two films, while preparing for our third.

What is the casting process like?

Casting is quite possibly the most enjoyable part of production. It's an extremely important process. Every mistake at the end of a film project probably points back to an issue in casting, whether it involve performers or technicians or artists. It's always a good idea to take as much time as possible to carefully consider and choose the people you surround yourself with. For actors, flexible and down-to-earth people with a good sense of humor tend to collaborate well. In regards to crew, the less drama they bring onto the set, the better.

In our productions, we try to make auditions and casting as comfortable as possible. For each of our feature films, we auditioned about 100 people, but we wanted to make sure the experience was a positive one for everyone that came out. With The Nocturnal Third, we cast Luke Weaver several months before everyone else, because he was an actor I trusted and he was great for the part of Jeffrey. We had him read for the part and gave it to him a few minutes later. It was easy. For the lead role of Eli, we were more meticulous. We narrowed down our options to three actors, and had each read with Luke, who had already been cast. All three were great, and brought a different texture to the character. We finally decided on Kevin, and he proved to be an extremely surprising and curious guy.

Again, I can't stress enough how early casting starts and how important it is. Selecting which story to tell is casting. Deciding that an iteration of the script will be the shooting draft is casting. Deciding which cinematographer, sound man, costume designer, production designer to work with… These are all casting decisions, and a thoughtless move in pre-production will cause a severe headache for everyone involved.

How do you measure success?

I think it's very important for an individual to have a strong personal definition of what success. You need to share your goals and be accountable to your family and close friends, but not the entire world. I set goals on a large and small scale. I usually try to only have one item a day that I absolutely have to get done, and then count extra accomplishments as bonuses. I also have a five year plan for Wonder Mill, and for my personal life- family, finances, and so forth.

Speaking strictly about filmmaking, I feel like I've done my job when there are no walls between myself and the movie.  "Success" in filmmaking is completely subjective, and should be decided by the filmmaker, his loved ones, and his close collaborators.

How do you handle rejection?

I put a lot of hard work and time into the projects I take on, but I always try to keep my identity out of them. If I pour my entire being into a project, it hurts the project. Consider a mother that roots her identity in her child. When that child leaves the nest, the mother is crushed, and the child is stunted. In more enlightened moments I remember that Jesus is God. When I put my hope in something much bigger than me, I can embrace failure.

Failure will happen. I should emphasize that, I suppose. We will fail. We will fail often. The key is to fail early, as they say in prototyping. Your reaction to your various failures will depend on your motivations, and your reaction to failure will determine how quickly you recover.

 

Did you always want to be a filmmaker?

When I was very young, I wanted to be a detective, a pilot, and - after seeing Jurassic Park - a paleontologist. It took an astute friend of mine to point out that when we talked about paleontology (which he also had a newfound interest in), all I talked about was Jurassic Park. I was about ten years old then, and realized that everything I wanted in life was a reflection of movies. That's when I became interested in how they work, and was soon overwhelmed by the frightful realization that they cost a lot of money, were created far away, and took a long time to finish. I loved movies, but was deathly afraid of moviemaking. After some failed attempts at shooting car chases in miniature and recreating John Woo action scenes with bottle rockets, I abandoned the goal. Throughout high school, I got very lazy and spent a lot of time watching television and reading comics.

After graduation, I rediscovered cinema and the spark ignited. I studied marketing at home for a year before switching majors and transferring to the University of Alabama's Telecommunications & Film department in Tuscaloosa. Things really took off there, as I consumed a ridiculous amount of history, technique, and theory in a very condensed period. It was really very thrilling, and sometimes I wish I had the time now to be as ravenous as I was back then. Eventually, I met up with Lee and we began producing short films with a group of friends.

What inspired you to become a filmmaker?

Again, Jurassic Park was a big part of it. I think Tim Burton's Batman was the first movie I saw as a kid. We only went to the movie theater on our birthdays, so seeing a movie on the big screen was a huge deal. My dad watched a ton of James Bond films when my siblings and I were little, as well as Clint Eastwood westerns, Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, and superhero stuff. On my own, I watched Looney Tunes endlessly and read a lot of Calvin & Hobbes.

I've always drawn comic strips, but I've never had the talent to really imbue them with any sense of perspective. Cinema allows for that, and I think that's the fulcrum of my romance with it. Perspective, either in a character sense or in a visual sense, is a film's greatest power.

What is the best thing about being a filmmaker?

What's amazing about directing a film in the year 2011 is that there is a codified set of visual rules that, when wielded with a deft hand, can tell a story more potent and dynamic and reflective than any written work. Film grammar has not really developed or become much more complex in the 60 years since its culmination, and things like trendiness and gloss constantly threaten erode it, but the fact still stands that it works. Novelists rarely bend the language drastically to tell a story, and yet the medium survives and flourishes (I assume). I certainly love to experiment and bend the medium, but I appreciate the fact that I can experiment with a fall-back, and with easily accessible tools. In our day and age, the printing press of film has been invented. For less than $5,000, which anyone can scrape together over the course of a year or so, you can have all the tools you need to tell a story using the grammar of cinema. That is absolutely amazing.

What is the worst thing about being one?

The absolute worst part of the filmmaking process, the part that makes me feel like a completely lecherous fool, is looking for money, and in turn, looking for an audience. Those are the two elements of the process that I not only hate, but that I am absolutely horrible at. I am a bad salesman and I would prefer the films do the work for me. Lee, one of the other cogs in Wonder Mill, most likely agrees with me. We do our homework, we perform the due diligence, but it never really clicks, and I'm not sure why. I fully admit that this is a weakness of Wonder Mill's, and I think both of us would love to collaborate with someone who is as passionate about audience-building as we are passionate about narrative film.

What is the estimated number of projects you have worked on?

I've worked on two feature films, and over twelve short films. That doesn't count for-hire work on commercials and corporate videos. It also does not include failed experiments, like the Vietnam spaghetti western I made when I was much too old for that kind of insanity. I've directed seven short films and one feature film.

Who is your favorite filmmaker?

My ultimate triumvirate of directors is made up of Steven Spielberg, Akira Kurosawa, and Orson Welles. Their films were essential to my film education and development, and their approaches to visual grammar just kind of set off fireworks in my brain. The stories they choose all combine skepticism of the human spirit with a hope for improvement. I also love the Coen Brothers, Michael Curtiz, Alfonso Cuaron, Francois Truffaut, Martin Scorsese, and Werner Herzog, all of which deal well with the “agitation” of the male mind (as Herzog himself might put it).

How has your life changed since you became a filmmaker?

I have very little free time. Ten years ago, I was a pro at wasting an entire afternoon watching The Simpsons or playing Nintendo 64 or reading movie-related message boards. Now, I can't sit for more than twenty minutes without getting anxious and looking for something to work on.

What is one piece of advice you can give to someone who also wants to become a filmmaker?

First, I would recommend that any prospective filmmakers figure out if they want to generate their own projects or focus on a particular craft. I'd encourage a sharp focus on a certain skill, but at the end of the day, any broad experience is good for your tool kit, as long as you're learning.

If you want to be a project-generating writer/director, you're probably not going to get paid for it, and that's okay.

Let's be honest: You, the aspiring independent filmmaker, have two options. You can go to Hollywood, struggle to get a P.A. job, and battle your way up the industry food chain to generate a single project that has a very narrow chance of actually getting made. That's option one. Option two is to make what you can, with what you have, where you are.

Second, if you’re going at it outside of the “system”, I recommend you get a day job. Find some sort of steady work and make sure your groceries are paid for, because your decision-making on a given project is always going to suffer if you're worried about paying the bills.

In the case of a part-time filmmaker, your worst enemy isn't your well-connected friend with the similar goal in the competitive industry town. Having a day job and being self-sustaining takes you into the big battle. The great enemy of the independent artist is comfort. Your worst enemy isn't comprised of your doubting mother or nagging girlfriend or irritated boss. Your worst enemy is comprised of video games. Your worst enemy is comprised of good television shows and movies. Your worst enemy is comprised of parties, food, alcohol, pets, and vacations. These are all wonderful and amazing things, but it is up to you, the artist, to temper them.

Third - and this is the tricky thing - is that you need a greater motivation to create than just to fulfill your own dreams. If all of my motivation comes from within myself, then I have no reason not to let comfort win. However, if I am working for a greater sense of mission, or if my work serves a cultural, spiritual or societal purpose outside of myself and my paper dreams, comfort will be a quaint prize rather than an enemy. For me, I think a well-crafted scene of suspense or humanity is beautiful to God, the way a good bottle of wine or a well-sung song or well-built automobile are.

On an organizational level, Wonder Mill's mission is to show that regions can produce evocative, intelligent, and entertaining cinema. I personally think Kelly Reichardt is doing this beautifully right now with her Oregon-set films. The tools are available for film to flourish in the United States, outside of Hollywood, the same way it has flourished out in the rest of the world. So that’s the biggest thing I would tell someone looking to get into filmmaking: Don't do it for money or to fulfill some vague dream. My generation has been fed this lie our entire lives: If we work hard enough, we’ll achieve our dreams. That’s just not true. Shoot for something bigger.

The second biggest piece of advice I would give is - above all - do NOT go off on some maniacal rant about your personal convictions in an interview on some gracious gentleman's blog. Hell's bells, that'd be suicide!

What do you like to do besides filmmaking?

I try to watch a lot of movies, which rarely actually happens. I'd like to be able to watch one highly regarded movie a week. I try to read a book a month, often non-fiction. I try to run and lift weights several times a week. Other than that, I just kind of eat food and drive around with my wife.

Have you had any other jobs before you decided to become a filmmaker?

To be honest, filmmaking has never actually been my job. I have a full-time gig as a video editor and videographer at a local company. It's fantastic, supportive, and completely contrary to the clichéd nightmare of the soul-sucking "day job". Before this, I worked some retail, but spent most of my childhood and adolescence working at my parents’ tile company. Our film The Nocturnal Third was actually filmed at their shop.

What are some of your favorite American films? Foreign films? Television shows?

American: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Rear Window, The Big Lebowski, The Sea Hawk, The Dark Knight, The Palm Beach Story, Jurassic Park, Children of Men, Frankenstein (1931), Unforgiven

Foreign: Seven Samurai, Shoot the Piano Player, Fitzcarraldo, Knife in the Water. I'm watching The Decalogue soon, and am very excited. I’m also anxious to get into some Melville, and have the Le Cercle Rouge blu ray sitting on my shelf, waiting to be watched.

TV: The Simpsons (Seasons 3-10), The animated DC shows from the 1990s, Lost, Twin Peaks, Star Trek (Original Series)

How would you describe your film education?

The University of Alabama doesn't have a strict "film school", but my time there was well-spent. I took plenty of film courses and, with Lee, was able to finagle a good bit of equipment to make shorts outside of class. I had some very helpful professors, one of them being an accomplished director that just launched a web series (http://www.gettingrowntv.com ). I spent as much extracurricular time as possible learning the history of film, and making my own short films. The Tuscaloosa Public Library has a staggeringly great selection of a wide array of cinema, so UA students have no excuse for being behind on the classics.

How would you describe the film "scene" where you live?

I'm not sure it exists. There are some very hard-working filmmakers that travel outside of our region to get paying work, and there is a contingent of scrappy DIY-ers like Wonder Mill, but we are pretty bad at communicating. One of our goals for 2012 is to make a stronger connection with other filmmakers in Huntsville and its surrounding areas.

 

How has social media changed the film industry?

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure just yet. I've made the mistake of keeping my productions very insular. In college, we tried to reach out to other filmmakers on campus, but nothing really stuck. After college, I immersed myself in the production of our two feature films, using the internet only to advertise auditions. It's only now that I've really found my footing on Twitter, and it's amazing. I've learned so much and gotten into a ton of great conversations with people I would have never met otherwise. I've yet to see it really impact one of our productions directly, but it can only be a good thing to connect with and learn from people in similar situations. Again, Wonder Mill Films’ big thing is regional filmmaking, and the potential for a region to be represented by its cinema. I think the internet, and social media in particular, is essential to visual media being spread and shared on a grass-roots level, and we're probably just seeing the beginning.

What's your opinion on crowdfunding?

I think it's a wonderful and intuitive development. We're planning on using crowdfunding to help us further distribute our first two films, as well as to raise cash for our third feature. That said, I think there's a large danger for filmmakers to become lost in the fundraising stage, and crowdfunding does allow for an overemphasis on money. Money is a delicate element of filmmaking. It's important and necessary, but if you give it too much attention, it'll pull you in and influence your visual style, your writing, your casting, and your editing decisions. It's a monster that should be attended to and fed, then ignored as much as possible.

I'm seeing filmmakers now that put so much thought into how they're going to crowdfund, and by extension how they're going to build an audience from which to crowdfund, that their films are becoming about that and are becoming shallow projects that aim to please. It's important to remember that the story at hand is much more important than the audience. The audience is not a customer, but they are an essential component of storytelling. I think Sheri Candler is quite wise in recommending that every DIY indie film crew include a "Producer of Marketing & Distribution". The screenwriter or director or editor or performer of a given piece should not be spending an awful lot of energy on fundraising if they can help it.

How does independent film differ from the mainstream?

I'm not sure that it really should. In a perfect world, I think that both would be telling stories, but mainstream films would be those that naturally attract a multi-cultural or inter-continental audience. The problem today is that "independent" has become a genre, and that's very sad and unhealthy. What's equally sad and unhealthy is that people use "mainstream" and "independent" film fandom as a kind of prideful merit badge. It's all become about why we like a movie, rather than what the movie is saying, whether it be produced for $2 or $2M.

You could go back in time and see any film being made. Which film would it be and why?

I would have to say Raiders of the Lost Ark, with the caveat that I'd bring some canned goods to avoid the stomach issues that plagued the production. I would get a huge kick out of seeing Harrison Ford work. At the time, he exuded an on-screen comfort that's only been rivaled by Jeff Bridges or someone like William Holden. Of course, it would be amazing to watch where Spielberg put the camera, how many takes he did, how the special effects team worked out gags, and how stunts were mapped out.

What's your favorite quote and why?

Right now? C.S. Lewis - “Our instincts are at war. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.”

I can’t really tell why I love that so much, so I’ll add my all-time back-up, from Indiana Jones -“I’m just making this up as I go.”

What is your opinion on movie remakes and sequels?

I am okay with remakes, reboots, and sequels, if they're good. I think it's only natural for a story to be continued, or re-purposed in a new context, like in the case of The Departed. I do wish they were not as en vogue as they are right now, but I suppose it's only a symptom of the short-sighted thinking in Hollywood. My ears do perk up when I hear about a completely original movie, but often those movies are just as bad as the "branded" ones.

What is your opinion on book to movie adaptations?

I think they're a great for visually-oriented filmmakers looking for a kernel of an idea. I'd consider Stanley Kubrick to be the master of book adaptations, as he took a book's basic central idea and developed everything around that. If a movie shows off a cinematic nature through a solid story and in an interesting context, it should be produced. If that story is grown out of a book, or a comic strip, or a video game, or a pre-existing movie, or a newspaper advertisement for dog shampoo, then so be it. A great movie can be grown out of anything if there is a story to be told with a measure of focus, discipline, and patience.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

We need more reviews for both of our films! If any film writers are reading this, we'd love to send them screeners to check out. We're always looking for honest, probing reviews that are open to engage in a dialogue with our movies. Folks can get in touch with us on Twitter (@WonderMillFilms) and through e-mail (wondermillfilms@yahoo.com).

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Thanks for doing the interview Ben. I've become a fan of the work you and Lee are doing over at Wonder Mill Films.