We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Austin Mitchell. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Austin below.

Austin, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

The most meaningful project I’ve completed is the 2020 independent feature film Baphomet Mountain I co-directed and co-produced with an acting buddy of mine. It’s a film about an erratic evangelical preacher who’s brother has been kidnapped by a cult in the Las Vegas desert, and a failed country folk singer destined to help find the brother. My acting buddy and I also co-starred together.

Baphomet Mountain took roughly 5 years to complete with money saved from our boring odd jobs and taking off weekends when we could to shoot. We shot in the dingiest areas of Vegas and Hollywood totally guerilla. We never had more than 5 people at a time as crew. When shooting was completed, my acting buddy thought it was best to pay an editor a few thousand dollars to try and string the best narrative out of all the improvised and often times bizarre footage we shot. But we had put so much work and time into it, I felt it wasn’t worth the risk to pay someone to do this who had no clue what our vision was. So ultimately I took on the role of editing the film, and with my background in music and home recording, I also took on post producing the entire film.

At the end of the day, I co-authored, co-shot, co-directed and starred, and wrote the score, recorded the score, edited, color corrected, and re-recorded dialogue and sound mixed Baphomet Mountain. What I wasn’t able to do with my first short film with so much money raised, I was able to fulfill with this feature film. I wanted a totally unified, no holds barred artistic vision to come through and that’s exactly what I was able to get.

The crowning triumph of Baphomet Mountain, other than its actual completion and vision, was being accepted into the Hollywood Reel Independent FIlm Festival of 2020. It’s basically a mid tier festival held in downtown LA at the big AMC movie theater near Staples center. I really knew nothing about the film industry at that time. I didn’t know the back door strings it took to be accepted into a lot of film festivals. We submitted to roughly 30 festivals all over the world, paying fees to all that went in someone’s pocket, and at the end of the day, with no contacts whatsoever, we got into that one festival. Someone had seen what we accomplished, and out of thousands of films, decided ours was unique enough to play at the downtown LA AMC.

That for me made it the most meaningful project I’ve completed in my life. It also taught me who I am as an artist, and I was able to prove to myself and anyone else that I could take on a titanic sized project and will it through to completion. Would I do it the same way over again if I could? No, but I was able to do it and that’s what counts. There’s still a part of me that believes I could change what contemporary audiences want out of cinema if I knew the right people to get eyes in front of film.

Back then I thought art should speak for itself and the rest would be taken care of. I still think that way, but it doesn’t really work like that in the film world. Unfortunately, it probably doesn’t work this way in any world.

Austin, 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?

Back in 2013 I was still in North Carolina where I grew up. I was three years out of college and trying to save money to get to Los Angeles to become an actor. My degree is in general mathematics, but I’ve been a creative person my entire life. I loved art as a kid as well as music and films, and I learned to play guitar when I was 17 years old. I had a somewhat popular band in my home town and all that, and I’ve always written poetry.

When I graduated college I was disillusioned with many things in life. I had never rebelled ever as a kid growing up. As an introvert with extreme shyness, most dissatisfaction I had was turned inward, heavily processed, and then redirected into music or just shut away. I felt like a lot of my life was geared towards satisfying my parents because they worked hard and did the best they could to look out for me. I gave up my band so I could go get a degree and enter the working world. Essentially, I was afraid of looking like the “dumb know it all young artist.”

Deep down I didn’t connect with the “normie” world, so when I graduated in 2010 not long after the housing bubble collapse and all that, the idea of jumping into corporate America and becoming a cog in that machine seemed very existential. I realized I had accomplished what was expected of me to some extent, and now I had an opportunity to do what I wanted. In college I had become friends in a creative writing elective with a visiting student from NC School of Arts who was to become a talented cinematographer and filmmaker. He made a thesis short film based on a story I wrote in that class and I also acted the lead part. That’s how I came to know someone in the film world and how I got my first taste of acting and set life.

Fast forward to 2013 and I made it to LA, lived in a van for the “fun” of it (i.e. sticking it to every LA landlord), began acting classes, and I wrote, directed, and co-starred in a short film that had a lot of money raised behind it. My cinematographer since graduated with an MFA from AFI in Hollywood, so he shot it. His girlfriend produced it. That experience was an eye opener. My taste in film mostly lies in independent, art house, and 1970s cinema, and I naively thought that I was going to jump into the film world and change contemporary cinema with my unique vision. What I found out was how rigorous and confusing a film set is, that my ideas as a writer and director had to be filtered through 15 other people, and that time was money and vice versa. As rewarding as that learning experience was, there were many things about the process that just didn’t allow for a first time director’s art house inclinations, which was frustrating.

Later on, a weekend of reshoots for that short fell through because of scheduling. My acting buddy and I had already taken days off from our odd jobs. In order to not waste the days, we decided to get a hold of a camera and some equipment and spend a weekend in the Las Vegas desert improvising some scenes that would later become Baphomet Mountain. Initially and mostly through the process, we wrote nothing. Our acting class background was based in dramatic improvisation techniques, and our mutual sense of humor and world view made us a great duo for shooting dialogue and situations on the fly. As the story evolved, we would later write various things into the film that were necessary for narrative, story, and character.

That first weekend looking at footage back in my Hollywood apartment we realized what we had was unique. I decided in that moment that this was our opportunity to make a feature film. Nobody we knew had worked on a feature. Everyone was busy making shorts, but that’s not what I set out to do when I drove across the country. I set out to author a feature, or as what the normie world would call a “movie movie.”

I think the improv nature of Baphomet Mountain is definitely what makes it a unique vision. It’s very expressionist in how the drama and narrative comes across. There is a lot of us in that film, and there is a lot of us personally in the characters that we play. It’s as much a road movie and art house dramedy as it is an existential look at life’s meandering and fleeting purpose.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

I’ve always thought and still maintain that the biggest obstacle to artists with regards to society, at least here in the U.S. is the anti-intellectual approach people take towards absorbing the creative arts. It’s a huge problem here in America especially. So much of mainstream creative media is geared towards the lowest common denominator, and we have this weird dynamic where audiences both condemn the nature of that creative media, but simultaneously perpetuate its dominance by spending their money on consuming it. It’s like how people know fast food is awful for you, but they eat it all the time anyway despite our country’s awful health statistics. People complain about studio remakes and sequels and how Hollywood is out of new ideas, but those same people will pay $17 a ticket to go see the 11th Fast and Furious movie. Many people look at independent and auteur films as pompous, anything with an intellectual angle is disregarded as pretentious. You can observe this phenomenon across virtually any artistic discipline though – film, music, painting. And unfortunately because U.S. culture has so much influence all over the world, the same problems can be found elsewhere.

Back in the 60s American cinema was at kind of a tough cross roads in regards to what audiences wanted, and a lot of the business was losing money. Then along came those auteur maverick directors like Scorcese, Dennis Hopper, Kubrick who helped usher in a new appreciation for unique artistic vision in the movies. But at the same time, the audiences embraced it and put their butts in the seats for that kind of thing, so the studios allowed those filmmakers to work. People flocked to see stuff like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Easy Rider, or Taxi Driver. Most agree those films wouldn’t be made today, which is a shame. If people want art in our world today that isn’t cookie cutter and mediocre, they need to open their collective mind a little bit and perhaps ‘take a walk on the wild side.’ The creative arts is a two way street, people need to give themselves over to it a little bit and stop eating at McDonald’s.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I think for me it’s always been about expressing myself on my own terms and trying to connect with those who I can identify with, who have something authentic to share from deep within. That’s always been a tough crowd for me to find.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.fulltweedjacket.com
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL4goiF3RDM
• Other: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/baphomet_mountain