We recently connected with P.M. Lipscomb and have shared our conversation below.

P.M., appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

A life in filmmaking is nothing but risk. Honestly, risk becomes your little brother if you’re able to manage it. At first you’re irritated by his presence but soon, you realize your siblings worth. And by your later years, you learn to love your little brother and yearn for his presence in your life. When risk is present in the beginning it could cause an artist to give up or to not fully commit to one’s craft. But if you realize this idea then you could become the greatest in the world—whatever that means of course—to be truly the greatest at a subjective form is up to the creator’s opinion. The idea of risk is literally the entire path of an artist’s attempts at creating a career. You must see risk as nothing more than limitation. Limitation is the truest path towards art that the artist might feel is great. My best work—in my own opinion—are the films I’ve made on 16mm. A giant reason I feel this is the case is because of limitation. Each 100 foot roll is only 2 minutes and 40 seconds at 24 fps. So you must understand and choose what you film. Shooting within this limitation as caused me to rethink how I’d run a digital camera as well. You must decide deep within that risk is your family and commit to doing nothing but taking risks. You will be far better off for it in the end and maybe, if you’re lucky, create something that your world sees as great.

P.M., before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

On April 23, 2006 I devoted my life to making movies. At the time of this article it’s been nearly eighteen years since my devotion. I’ve made three feature films and forty short films. I’ve just been hired to make my first feature film on 16mm, which I’m over the moon about. I have a production company called Picture Remedy here in Hollywood. I’m originally from Hamilton, Ohio but began making films for years in Cincinnati. So for me as a creator, Cincinnati feels like my home. Life making movies has been amazing. The reason I haven’t felt much tension within the craft of making films is because filmmaking took the place of skateboarding for me. For the first five to eight years of creation I was treating filmmaking like skateboarding; taking actors to locations where we didn’t have permission, hoping fences to get the scene shot and running before the security guard caught us. This is pulled straight from filmmaking. I left Ohio and headed to San Francisco. That was my beginning foray into cinema. And I do mean foray. I was born into being a fifth generation paper mill worker in Hamilton. Getting to Hollywood and making movies felt like space travel. When I look back at my journey it’s extremely hard to believe the path I’ve traveled and where I originally came from. I was a horrible student. It wasn’t until April 23, 2006 that I suddenly fell in love with writing. Fell in love with storytelling. I realized that if I wanted to make a film it was completely up to me. No one else was going to come up with the plan of action and motivate those around me to hop in and help it get made. I love making movies and I love the theoretical ideas of juxtaposing images off of one another and off of the human mind. Anything is truly possible and you never stop being a student of cinema.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

When I wrote a script called CLOWNING I was working at a rental house at the time in Hollywood. During this time the owner of the rental house purchased a set of Cooke Anamorphic lenses. He asked me to take them for the weekend and shoot something with them. At that time I was still writing the script that I intended to have my best friend, Jonathan Gaietto to star in. He was eager to dress up like a clown and play around in front of the camera. So that weekend we did just that. Shot some play around test footage of my friend dressed like a clown. I snapped a picture of my computer of an image in my editor of him dressed like a clown and posted it to instagram. Didn’t think much about it and continued on writing the screenplay. Jump around three months later an executive producer read the script and wanted to raise money for it. This was a giant moment in my creative life. A few weeks later he brought me 165k to make my movie. I was in shock and completely over the moon at this one in a million opportunity. However, my SAG rep saw this post from my random clown shoot and sent me an email stating that she knew I had already shot the movie and was trying to backdoor it into SAG. In that same email she denied our film and stated it would never be a SAG movie. Now, at that moment I had already casted nearly all of my cast and they were almost all SAG actors. So I was completely screwed to say the least. She wouldn’t return my emails and wouldn’t take my phone calls. I was shocked. How could this crazy opportunity be pulled from me for nothing?? In a last ditch effort I did some research and found every email connected to SAG I could find, including the president of SAG’s email, and mass emailed everyone the most passionate email of my life. This email was read by so many people that they had to overturn the verdict and allow my film to still be SAG. Being able to make and sell my first movie is a fence that every filmmaker has to climb to become professional. I had to overcome this obstacle. It was a must. Most may have given up and allowed the pain of the loss to overtake but I’m proud to say that I fought and wouldn’t take no for an answer. So now that movie is on a ton of platforms where you can watch it today.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I year ago my California mother passed away in my arms out in front of my building in West Hollywood. She was the reason I was able to get into this building here so easily and even during COVID allowed all of her tenets to not pay one month rent so that we could get through the shutdown. I was devastated at the loss of such an important figure in my life. It made me look at time and my work so differently. Today my mission is to look at all of my films and ask myself, “Why am I leaving this behind? What does it say about mankind and how can it better our future?” I love narrative based filmmaking still but making creative documentaries around relationships is so meaningful to me. I’m creating a film series called My Flesh, My Blood about our relationship with our mothers. The good, the bad, and the ugly in such a complicated relationship. I want to make one of these films in as many different countries as possible to really illustrate the similarities and differences in all of us as a whole. The world has so many dividing lines that are man made. In reality we are all more similar than most may want to realize.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p.m.lipscomb/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009898538227
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/p-m-lipscomb-620574a0/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXzBI9DkaQK4k1DUyod95aw