Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Brian. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Brian, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?
To say that my path as an artist has been a long and winding road would be an understatement of epic proportions. I started performing at a very young age, always being the first to jump up and volunteer for any school productions as early as second grade. I remember my very first lines as a performer, which were uttered while acting in a children’s production of select scenes from Shakespeare, As I stood onstage and recited the words, “boil, boil, toil and trouble,” as one of the three witches in MacBeth, I knew that I had found something which I truly loved to do. Throughout my elementary school years, I performed in productions of Annie, The King and I, and several other musicals. I was hooked. I continued acting through my high school years, but having a very traditional Japanese father who was a university professor who emphasized scholarly pursuits over the arts, I stepped away from acting when I first went off to college. I found myself even farther from my creative impulses when I joined the United States Marine Corps after a year of college. I found myself bored with school, and wanted to embark on the kind of great adventure I had always read about in the writings of authors like Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Upon leaving the Marines, I continued to pursue stage acting in college, with my primary influence coming from the acting method laid out by Stanislavski. Fast forward to the completion of my degree and a move to the West Coast, and I became friends with a renaissance man of sorts who was an aspiring director in L.A., and together we started making movies, as well as founding a collective of artists of all stripes and disciplines with a shared belief that art transcends genre and can move the world, and we eventually founded our own studio. However, after my son was born, I decided that I didn’t want him to grow up in the concrete jungle of L.A., and gave up my dreams of filmmaking and acting, and moved to Colorado, where over the next few years, I worked in numerous relatively mundane fields, until about 5 years ago when I found myself acting once again, mostly in indie projects, but then commercials, and eventually in bigger budget TV and film productions, primarily in Albuquerque.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
(Some of this was covered in my previous answer.)
One of my core beliefs is that art is truly transcendent in innumerable ways. It persists through time, crosses perceived and/or largely manmade cultural and racial boundaries, and in it’s purest form, maintains an emotional language far superior to mere words. On a personal level as an actor and filmmaker, I always want to seek out core emotional truths about the human experience, and attempt to convey those to a broader audience. However, I also maintain that the art in filmmaking is as much in the process as in the final product. There is no more collaborative art form than film, and that interaction with other creatives always yields new and unforeseen life experiences. There is nowhere in the world that I would rather be than on set, and that holds true regardless of whether I am in front of or behind the camera.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
When I left Southern California, I truly thought that I had left filmmaking and acting behind. The fact that L.A. is the hub of the film and television industry, and Colorado has much less infrastructure built in to support the industry, I simply accepted that for the good of my son’s childhood and growth, I would move on from the entertainment industry entirely. I was at peace with my decision, although my impulse to create persisted. The fact that almost 10 years later, I was presented with an opportunity to once again dive into the creative realm of acting, film, and television professionally, was nothing short of a miracle of sorts.
Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
I don’t know if it qualifies as a resource per se, but the importance of networking in the entertainment industry cannot be overstated. As a younger filmmaker and actor, my creative partner as I saw ourselves and artistic purists. The business side of the industry wasn’t something that we were particularly interested in, and consequently, something at which we were not very adept. However, we were looing at it all wrong. We saw networking as glad handing, and playing the role of narcissists. Spending time trying to climb into the right circles, and selling ourselves as a product. With time and wisdom, I’ve realized it’s really just about creating genuine relationships with like minded artistic individuals in the industry, which often lead to creative or business opportunities in the form of collaborations.
