We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Matt Devino. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Matt below.
Matt, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
I think anything worth doing is going to be inherently risky on some level, but I find the risky things to be the most rewarding. It’s strange that we’re naturally afraid to take chances when it comes to the things we want most in life, fear of failure is always there, but not going after my dreams has always been even more terrifying. In 2006, after finishing film school in the Northeast, I got in my car with a few friends and drove to Los Angeles with no place to live, no job, and less than $2000 of savings so we could chase our filmmaking dreams.
When we arrived we convinced a landlord to lease us an apartment in North Hollywood, saying we were “freelance filmmakers”, and handing him two months rent in cash. We would go to Starbucks every day to use their internet so we could apply to every job on Craigslist that had anything to do with film production. Slowly but surely we found our way onto sets – music videos, spec commercials, short films, and started making connections.
I don’t feel like you’re ever really in control of your career in the film industry, especially when you’re first starting out, but looking back on all of the projects I’ve done and all of the amazing places around the world that filmmaking has taken me, taking the risk to chase this dream has been the best decision I’ve ever made.
Last year two of my closest friend, Dave Yohe and Tyler Q Rosen and I took one of the biggest risks of our careers, and produced a feature film “The Deep Dark”. We put everything we had into making a film that we all believed in, and were going to make it happen no matter what, even if we didn’t know exactly how we would do it when made that decision. We’re currently wrapping up post production, and the journey of making this film has been the highlight of my career. You have to take those leaps of faith sometimes, and I’ve found more often than not that what you need will find its way to you.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
In 2006, after finishing film school on the east coast, I moved to LA , determined to make it in the film industry. Fast forward a decade and half, and filmmaking has taken me around the world several times over, creating narrative films, documentaries, commercials, branded content, music videos, and digital media for the social age with some of the biggest studios and brands around.
In 2022, I co-directed and co-wrote “The Deep Dark”, a feature length cosmic horror film, with my long time creative collaborator Dave Yohe, and we co-produced with Tyler Q. Rosen.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
This year has been a major pivot in my life. For most of my career I’ve felt like if I wanted to be working in the film industry I needed to be living in Los Angeles. I’m originally from Southern New Hampshire, about 45 minutes north of Boston, and as much as I love it there I never thought I would go back permanently.
When Covid hit, a lot of things changed in our industry, but I think one of the biggest changes was people leaving LA and continuing to do production and post production work in other areas of the country. Technology is also making it so much easier to work on projects from anywhere.
When we shot our film “The Deep Dark” at the end of 2022, we all stepped away from well paying commercial and film work to make our passion project. When we got back from the shoot, LA’s film industry was in a dead stop because of the impending WGA and SAG strikes (which I fully support), but it’s been the toughest year financially for myself and everyone else I know in this industry since the start of my career.
In May my wife and I found out she was pregnant, and we decided to sell our house and head back to the Northeast, where the majority of my family still lives. Since I’ve been back I’ve still been working with LA based production companies remotely, and getting on a plane when I need to, but I’ve also been connecting with the local filmmaking community in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. There’s a thriving community of film and video professionals here, more so than I could have imagined before I came back. There’s even production stages with an LED Volume (like the Mandalorian) in the small town I grew up in. I don’t know exactly what the future looks like for my career, but I’m thrilled to be living in New England again now that I don’t need to be living in LA full time to do what I love.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
I think the best thing people can do to support any artist is to pay for content and not expect it to be free, plain and simple. Audio and visual art has been devalued tremendously in the last decade, and it’s becoming harder and harder to make a living as an artist. Profits from streaming aren’t shared with the artists properly, which is why the strikes are currently happening, and for some reason executives keep getting richer off of the art they aren’t actually making. So go see films in theaters, rent them on VOD instead of waiting for them to show up on a streamer, buy an album instead of streaming it, and support the artists that make all of our lives better.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.mattdevino.com
- Instagram: @devocam
- Twitter: @MattDevino
Image Credits
Jason D. Arroyo