We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Gianfranco Fernández-ruiz. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Gianfranco below.

Gianfranco, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you take us back in time to the first dollar you earned as a creative – how did it happen? What’s the story?

Can I answer that by not answering that? That’s the philosopher in me. But no, I do have an answer—just indirectly.
The time between starting this artist thing out and actually getting paid felt like waiting for a tree to grow from a seed I wasn’t even sure I had planted correctly. I think there are artists who calculated things better, who ventured with monetization in mind, who oriented themselves toward the business of it— the “media services” or “project manager” of it all.

But I think, for me, what I found was that I’m not a lumberjack. So when you grind an axe because with the purpose of grinding an axe, and not because you’re chopping down trees you have to learn what that means, and that takes time. The kind of creative I am had to learn how sharp was sharp enough. And more importantly, what makes this axe your axe—the “Gianfranco-Axe”—before you can start selling them en masse.

Your first dollar isn’t fast, and it’s usually not a big cashout for the work you put in. After years of grinding, I think I got paid $350.00 for a music video. In the long run, that’s worth more in relationship equity—but also, I really cared about it, the creative process, the freedom to play, that’s a luxury in itself.. There’s ways to balance that value scale.

As a creative, the most important dollar isn’t always your first. It certainly wasn’t mine, but it’s an indicator that with training and time you have a real prospect to turn your life into a meaningful dedication to a craft you believe in.

But we’re talking money… And that means we’re talking survival… And the dollars that kept me from drowning came out of grant writing, in getting other people to see my work, to see me, and to invest in whatever their imagination paints with my voice. That work is its own sort of art.

Nothing in this industry is an exact science. Everything has a price. But today, I work on projects I love, with people I love, backed by institutions that believe in me and in the project. That first dollar didn’t fund my life, but it funded little snapshots of a dream—and I keep building that on my own terms.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’ll say I was confidently a cinephile from a very young age. And I don’t mean that I was watching Tarkovsky, right? I was watching Back to the Future, Robocop, Jurassic Park. Tentpole stuff. Milk before meat. But I was also remembering the names of directors, and that’s kind of weird. I remember watching Darkman and thinking Sam Raimi was a genius. I was seven. And my mom, whether knowingly or exhaustedly, took me to the movies every Sunday—rearing a practice that’s routine to this day. The movie theater was my first ever education. The more I watched, the more I understood myself and the people around me. Cinema is a reflection of the human condition, of the repressed, of the punk, of the fabled and the marginalized.

I dabbled in filmmaking as a teenager, but there was no craft yet—I was just playing with a camera, making up scenarios.

But I was a writer always. I wrote on my hands, in the margins of books, in emails, on the back of my homework. I was always writing something. I kept a notebook filled with phrases that caught my ear—things that sounded foreign to me at the time. I’d dig into their origins, chasing down the reasons behind idioms, which usually led me down some kind of rabbit hole. Looking back, I realize that was all part of my process.

That instinct—to chase language, to chase images—eventually led me to filmmaking in a real way. Now, my work often explores the in-between spaces of identity, family, and personal myth, but I always put character first. Culture is integral, but story comes first.

Those writer roots are strong. I actually thought I’d be a novelist or poet. You know, actualizing that into a career. But film, as magical as the process is, keeps me touching earth. And for as communal as it is, it also leads me back to myself.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The community of it. All art requires an audience, but the artist is often isolated. No matter how talented you are as a filmmaker, you need people to bring it to life—hopefully, people smarter than you. I would hate to be the smartest person in a room where I’m the creative lead. What a perfunctory performance that would be.

My cinematographer, my writing partners, my producer, my editor, my production designer—they should all take my work to places I couldn’t have imagined on my own. And the moment I see them in their brilliance, I see the work in a new light. I see the universal. That hypes me up, man.

But on the flip side, knowing your creative boundaries is just as important. And it’s never the same from team to team. That’s why filmmakers tend to “marry” their collaborators—it takes time to merge workflows, to develop a shared language. We’re all so damn complex. Everyone is equal parts Felix Ungar and Oscar Madison. Jekyll and Hyde. Banner and Hulk.

That’s why boundaries matter in collaborative art spaces. It’s important to hear everything, but at the end of the day, the writer/director’s choices belong to the writer/director. Just as you entrust important singular pieces of your vision to the several arms of your team, they should be entrusting the whole of the vision to you—knowing that you see what they don’t, that you’re protecting the story. And that’s the chief job of being a director. Protect the story. Then, yes, okay—release expectation, align yourself with the actors, defend the choices, trust the process.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

Yeah, I think non-creatives might struggle with the uncertainty of it all—the feeling of falling without grace. Most of the time, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m stumbling in the dark without a flashlight. I have the bones of a plan, but I’m feeling things out, not always on the set path. A lot of my process is chasing sparks of enlightenment, letting them lead me wherever they go. That’s not easy. It means constantly pivoting, adjusting, surrendering to the unknown. It’s the contradiction of always having ideas but never having answers.

As a storyteller, the work is this breathing dialogue with the unknown, and most of the time, these expressions aren’t conclusions—they’re explorations. It’s an Aristotelian exercise. “The mark of an educated man is to look for precision in each class of things just so as the nature of the subject admits.”

Maybe a lot of this lifestyle could be avoided with proper planning. But planning requires a dedication to outcome, and what I’m describing is a dedication to discovery. And discovery isn’t always pretty. Sometimes, you turn over a rock and don’t like what you find. Worse, sometimes it’s some part of yourself under there. A dear friend once taught me that this practice requires you to approach the world with less rigidity and more curiosity.

And even knowing better, I think I still want to control what I can. But I can’t. I don’t know what I don’t know. So I ask the question, put my shoulder to the wheel, and try not to lose myself in the process.

So I said that romantically, but I’ve heard friends call that, from the outside looking in, like gambling. And, honestly? It kind of is, because it spills beyond the work. It’s my whole life that’s a little bit of a big testing ground. There’s something to unpack there. But I take comfort in knowing that everything we do is in relation to something else, to somebody else. Every moment carries infinite equations, a multitude of perspectives. What’s right? What’s wrong? Can we be frugal with our judgment? To withhold certainty—to resist the impulse to decide too quickly—that’s the work. Learning to live inside uncertainty.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.gianfrancofernandezruiz.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gianfranco_f_ruiz/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/directorgfr

Image Credits

Mario Vega
Zach K. Johnson
Andrew C. Phan
Oscar I. Jimenez
Alex Jimenez
Zhirayr Avestisyan
Miko Malkhasyan
Joewi Verhoeven