We were lucky to catch up with Chase Korzep recently and have shared our conversation below.

Chase, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

I started really young on movies. My favorite memories are going to Hollywood Video and picking something out. I was excited by the characters and the action sequences, so I started writing.

I came in second for a writing contest in elementary school for a story I’d come to realize was the building block of the Hero’s Journey. I absorbed it wholly from movies. I didn’t even think writing movies was an option until college, so I wrote short stories because I wanted to be a novelist.

Film school came and I knew immediately I wanted to direct. I wanted badly to work with actors, to be behind a camera, to edit a scene together. I wanted every part of the process, I was so in love with it.

I consumed every book, every video, every class, every featurette, literally anything that would give me insight.

All of my heroes’ biggest advice was to just get out there and make something. I wish I had the guts to experiment and make something awful much sooner than I did.

Chase, 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?

I’m a feature film director. I moved to LA from Vegas right after college and I’ve been creating, on what feels like an entirely new level, ever since. There’s something about this place that makes creativity skyrocket.

I’d like to make my name in epic, adventure, and family movies. I love audience pieces. Producers are happy because they’re marketable. I’ve also been learned the art of making days on time and (sometimes under) budget, which also makes producers happy.

Currently, I’m most proud of a short film I made detailing an epic desert journey for treasure. I’m excited to enter that into the festival circuit. In the meantime, my core team and I are developing multiple features that we’re extremely excited to share. I very much look forward to the next few years.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

One of the biggest topics in the country right now is the disappearance of the middle class. Hollywood’s a great example. It seems like a large part of the audience’s interest is held by $200M+ budget movies.

And I get it. If we’re looking at the history of the industry, they undeniably hold a place, but some of the greatest movies of all time are movies with modest budgets. Pick a movie from the last generation that everyone holds. I’d bet it’s not a huge budget movie.

People love people. People watch movies to relate to other people, to understand themselves a little better. The big budget movie is killing the middle man and it’s robbing audiences of opportunities to experience something genuine. I think we got a little carried away with the allure and the best way to return is for more studios to take a chance on a smaller movie and market it for audiences to actually know it exists.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I think the biggest lesson I had to unlearn was depending on someone else’s opinion. I really had to learn to be proud of a thing because I liked it, not because someone else also liked it. I have a close circle of people whose opinion I trust, but on what I create, what matters is that I’m happy with my work. I think that’s a universal truth of artists, but it can be a real hill to climb. And sometimes you slide back and you have to be strong enough to say definitively, “I like this thing. And that’s enough.”

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/chase_korzep?igshid=MmIzYWVlNDQ5Yg==
• Letterboxd: https://boxd.it/CPBJ
• IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm14513831/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk