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Max Kinchen: Screenwriter, Filmmaker |
What are some of your most successful projects so far?
I produced my first short film,
GROCERY RUN, my junior year of college. It’s a subjective, B-movie thriller. We
shot the short on 16 mm film, and the idea is that you're seeing through the
eyes of our main character as he goes through his day and slowly realizes he's
gone insane. We couldn’t shoot the entire movie straight through in one take on
16mm film because we didn’t have enough film, film’s expensive and it was
really difficult to do. To hide the cuts we shot on a mini DV digital camera
and we had the main character walk past surveillance cameras or turn his
computer on. We experience every angle from something's perspective: either the
main character or the various cameras and devices watching him.
My second short was PRISONER TRANSFER, a military drama set during the beginning of the Korean War that
explored the themes of enemies in wartime as individuals. That one was a much
bigger undertaking. I wrote it the summer of 2011. It took a year to fundraise
and then I had to find the right pieces: the right actors, the right crew,
locations. In addition to producing PRISONER TRANSFER my senior year of
college, I decided to write a large-scale feature screenplay. It was a
magic-sci-fi, period piece with Jewish and political themes. I finished both
projects but nearly ran myself ragged.
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| Directing Grocery Run in the fall of 2010 |
How did you realize
that you needed to fundraise for PRISONER TRANSFER? What were some of your
fundraising strategies?
GROCERY RUN was really small. We
shot it in my apartment and on the street next to my apartment. When I realized
the scale and scope of what I wanted to do for Prisoner Transfer, I realized
that despite my guerilla-style sensibilities and my instinct to do things as
raw as I can, I couldn’t fake this one. I had a really great producer, Esha
Rao, a fellow NYU Tischie who really came to my rescue. We drew up a budget and
realized it was going to cost many thousands of dollars but we were able to
find options to get it made.
We used Indiegogo and Fractured
Atlas to fundraise. Because we made it through NYU as an educational project
and we weren't trying to sell the film, we were able to go through Fractured
Atlas and qualified the project as a non-profit. So when people donated they
could write it off. That was very appealing. We hit up all of our collective
communities. We sent an email out to the Newton Center Minyan my family's synagogue. We got the word out in my dad’s
community, in our church, and tried to get as many people donating even five,
ten dollars as we could. We did get some donations from the parental financiers
and we found a couple of people who were willing to donate equity for the project.
It was a dry run of trying to finance for a much bigger project.
Any fundraising
advice?
As passionate as you are about your project and as much as
you know it can be the next great thing, you still have to convince someone to
open their wallet. You have to adapt a salesman persona. You have to make it
appealing, you have to become a smooth talker and get people excited. I think
the idea of ‘well I just want to make my art’ is counter to ‘I need to acquire
the resources to make my art.’ Your movie has to be worth taking on that
mentality. We would not have raised the money for PRISONER TRANSFER if we
didn’t get a little smart and make the project appealing to someone other than
us.
You mentioned that in
order to make the movie you needed to find the right actors and crew. Can you
talk a little more about that process and about your relationship with the crew
on PRISONER TRANSFER?
My producer, Esha is the big reason
PRISONER TRANSFER happened. I would get hung up on the creative parts but she
kept track of production. If I wanted to change the script, she would say “we
can do that but you have to consider the logistics.” It was also a huge help to
know that for all the stuff I was trying to juggle, Esha was keeping track of
me and making sure I didn't miss anything. It kept me in a good frame of mind.
We had a lot of curve balls thrown at us and I don’t know if I would have been
able to make it by myself.
No one will care about your project
as much as you do (Esha not withstanding). That’s especially difficult with
film. Film is so collaborative. Even if you have a good producer, it’s still
difficult to recruit other people, especially on the student level when you are
not paying anyone. For PRISONER TRANSFER, I learned that lesson multiple times.
We would have a really good crew set up and then they'd get recruited for a
paid gig. It was sort of an unwritten rule amongst student film makers: you
trade working on each other's projects but if someone gets a paid gig, you
gotta let them go.
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| Directing Prisoner Transfer on location in Hudson Valley, upstate New York, April 2012. |
What was the transition
like from film student at NYU to filmmaker in L.A.?
After college, I went out to
Hollywood, following the big dream. I thought “look at all this great stuff I
have. I have two films that I’m very proud of and I even have a great, big
budget screenplay.” I entered PRISONER TRANSFER into some festivals. I realized
that people were happy to look at my work, but just the fact that I had done
these things didn’t mean squat to people in Hollywood. That was a big wake up
call.
In the end, my creative endeavors,
as proud of them as I was, were not the things that would directly lead to me
getting work. But I will say that what I learned making those films and what I
learned working on other people’s projects helped. I could demonstrate that I
had a working knowledge of how to break down a script and write coverage, I
knew proper set protocols and I could deal with actors. Those were all things I
learned in film school that were useful, and put me ahead of some of the other
people I'd be on set with. One of the first sets I was on when I got out there,
I went from Production Assistant to 2nd Assistant Director after the first week
because I was one of the most aware people on set and it set me apart.
Can you talk a little
more about finding your day job?
When I first moved out to L.A, I
worked freelance on film sets. At first it was exciting because everything was
up and down. I was working and then I wasn’t working. When I wasn’t working I
had to motivate myself to go and write my own stuff. There was no structure,
and I liked that I had all this free time to work creatively. The freelance
world is kind of like the Wild West because you are all vying to make movies
together, but you're also all trying to get the same few jobs that are out
there. It’s competitive and cooperative at the same time. But after a year, the
anxiety of never knowing when my next job was going to be and running out of
money was too much.
I decided to switch tactics and
look for more consistent office work. Eventually, I became an office Production
Assistant at Exclusive Media. After spending a year down in the trenches on
sets, it was great to work with people on the development side of film and get
that perspective. For myself, having consistency in my schedule and knowing I
had a weekly paycheck allowed me to establish a routine to go and write at
least a few times a week. With a set structure and some financial stability, I
was calmer and could just focus on creative endeavors during that designated
creative time. I wrote some of my best stuff in that time, which in some ways
was surprising considering it was counter to the attitude I had when I first
got to LA.
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Directing Prisoner Transfer on a soundstage in New York City, April 2012
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What are some major
changes you’ve noticed in your art since moving to L.A.?
As an undergrad, my perspective
was, I’m going to write the things I want to write and not be burdened with the
logistics of getting them made. I wrote a large-scale period piece monster
movie. I’m still very proud of it but no one was going to buy that script
because it's a huge, hundred million dollar movie. Recently, what I’ve written
is on a smaller scale logistically, written with the intention of actually
getting the project made. It forces me to be a lot more clever. I would still
love to write another huge movie, but if I want to get something made, I have
to focus on going bare bones: write interesting characters and smart,
compelling small scale stories that showcase my abilities.
I’ve also veered more towards comedy. I’m not exactly sure
why that is. Maybe it's because I've since realized I'm hilarious. Maybe it's
so I can laugh at something when things are difficult.
Networking is a major
buzzword these days for artists attempting to rise to the professional level.
Do you have any tricks for networking and self-promotion?
It comes down to not just seeing
people as someone who can help you. The mantra in Hollywood is definitely
networking. It really is all about who you know. Hollywood can often seem like
it's impossible to get into as someone new, but by meeting the right people,
that's how you can get in and you CAN meet those people. But I have one
addendum: its not just about your network, its about relationships. The people
that work together consistently or help each other find work are friends.
They’ve worked together on projects, they trust each other.
I collected a lot of business cards
and had one time coffee with a lot of different producers but that alone
wouldn't amount to much. The people I know in L.A., the people that read my
work and were interested in my stuff are producers that I worked for, worked
with, built a relationship with. When I finally did shoot a project, it was
with my friends in Hollywood, not people I’d recruited for their jobs. A
network is a good start, but it's the relationships you have that actually will
make things happen, and there's a key difference between the two.
What are your future
artistic goals?
I have a feature that I want to
make. It's called EAST and it's a sort of found footage road trip movie.
Basically EASY RIDER for the millennial generation by way of CLOVERFIELD or
CHRONICLE. I wrote it deliberately to be a low budget, guerilla style film. But
the challenge still has been putting the resources together to try and make it.
That’s one goal.
I'm also launching a production
company called Bowtie Junior, named after Bowtie, my Dad’s production company
when he was in college. He’s been such a huge supporter, financially of Grocery
Run and also as a dad.
I have all these shorts, one or two
minute little vignettes. The kind of thing you could shoot in a day. My
immediate strategy is to shoot these shorts and put them on the youtube channel
as a showcase of what I can do. A big lesson I learned out in Hollywood is it's
really all about the content you produce. Everyone talks about what they are trying
to do, or an idea they have, but that means nothing. You need to show what you
can do by just going and creating it.
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| Filming Prisoner Transfer April 2012 |
Any parting thoughts?
You always hear about the starlette
or the hot-shot writer/director who gets to Hollywood and is instantly discovered.
That's what many people, myself included when I first headed out there, hope
will happen to them. But what I realized after being there and struggling for a
while is that those people are the
outliers. You hear about them because it's so extraordinary that it's happened
to them. The real way it works, that you don't hear about because it doesn't
make as sexy a story is that there are people who work for years on the bottom
rung, not even getting paid doing it, and then slowly they build up a portfolio
and get noticed after years. I’ve been out of college for two years. If you’d
asked just-graduated-me if I expected to be where I am right now, I’d have been
extremely surprised and probably pretty disappointed. I’ve learned you have to
pay your dues. You have to work hard and make stuff and work below your
capabilities just to make a name for yourself. It's all about the long game.
Also, I think a lot of people get
hung up on the idea of "making it" as if there is one point they'll
get to when they can just sit back and say ‘I’ve made it, I’m done.’ If you
look at “making it” as a finite thing, “I’ve just got to cross this line”,
you’ll never get there. I think a lot of people think, "oh, if this one
thing will happen, if one person will read my script, if I can just get my
first movie made, I'll have made it." but that's not how it works. If
you're lucky enough to get to that point, your priorities will change. What you
know you can do and what you know you want to do will change, so the goal will
never be the same and there will be a new line to cross. It's just the start of
a lifelong process that probably doesn't get much easier. You gotta be willing
to always work towards the next goal, knowing that it doesn't just end once you
achieve it. It's a long long game and, from where I'm sitting now, I have no
idea where it leads, but I'm still working towards it. Does that make any sense
at all?
To contact Max or for more information about EAST and viewing PRISONER TRANSFER, he can be reached at max.kinchen [at] gmail.com
PRISONER TRANSFER
View trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-V3IbHD9k4
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/
GROCERY RUN
Watch film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrpaDGAuMVY
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