Being a filmmaker is one of the most challenging and yet most rewarding journeys a person undertakes in the world. You cannot really define it; it’s much more than just a career or just a passion.
It’s your inner being taken hostage every day for the rest of your life. Your eyes become camera lenses in which you frame and see the world differently. Your ears become a microphone that captures words as sound waves and send them to your brain for analysis. Then your brain starts operating at the speed of light marrying moving images to sound waves, hoping there is a story there you can turn into a movie. One minute your heart is about to burst out of your chest in excitement, thinking you have the best story in the world. The next minute you lower your head, feeling down and defeated when you realize that story is not what you thought it was.
But, when that one story captures your heart, you turn into a behemoth that will stop at nothing to bring that story to life and share it with the universe.
As your journey continues outside of your body and mind into the world, you face one obstacle after the other. You hear the word NO a million times. Some brush you off as a loser wasting your time, and telling you to go into a different career − but you overcome. You employ and bring tens of people together, money and resources; you spend months capturing your story on film; sometimes your earn a living, other times you don’t. And if that was not enough, now you have to put your business hat on and engage and negotiate with distributors so they may help you bring your story to audiences everywhere.
You ask, but why put yourself through this?
If you are not a filmmaker who completed a movie, or a parent who witnessed the birth of their child, you will not be able to experience what it is a filmmaker feels when seeing their movie playing on the screen. Its magical. It’s like holding your new born for the first time. Or, if you’re single, it’s like having one of those out-of-body experiences (where the holy spirit came down and lifted you up to the heavens, and God himself tapped you on the back, telling you “GOOD JOB SON”).
Yes there are all types of filmmakers, ones that create stories out of thin air, they are storytellers motivated by their love of cinema and their stories are honest and entertaining. Then there are filmmakers who want to change the world. They are storytellers motivated by their love of cinema and humanity. Their stories are spiritually rewarding and speak to the soul.
At the end, our goal as filmmakers is to bring a smile to your face at that moment when you watch one of our films, or make you laugh as loud as you can, to touch your heart, engage your mind, stand with good against evil, cheer for the underdog, and most of all…to make the world a smaller and better place for you and me.
Tony Kandah
