We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Connor Copeland a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Connor, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
Probably the most meaningful project I’ve worked on is my first short film made in New York, “Nice Knives”. I made it with my friends on a shoestring budget and we were surprised when it actually got into short film festivals and has given us a little bit of momentum in our careers. But outside of that, I was just proud to make something that felt unique to me. I felt I had created something with a strong sense of my own voice. Ultimately the most meaningful thing about it was that I had achieved some small part of my dream, to be a filmmaker and be seen by other artists as one.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I’m from a small town in Texas. Nothing about my environment incentivized or facilitated a passion in the arts. My dad was and is a firefighter but there was some private creative part of himself that he passed on to me, so if there’s any reason as to why I make films, it is probably a genetic one. It must be hard-wired into my brain, why else would I choose such a thoroughly unprofitable career path? My time spent creatively is working on short films to be made on the cheap and writing screenplays that I must one day hope could be made.
My writing often has it’s roots in the south, and more specifically Texas, but as a now liberal New Yorker my perspective of my home is both critical and sympathetic. Most writers working professionally grow up on a coast, and so for that reason my heritage is one of the things that makes me the most unique.
I never desired my work to have any defining brand, other than that it feels honest and personal to myself. I have no desire to categorize anything I ever make. Inevitably, I gravitate toward certain subject matter or forms of storytelling, but that’s mostly accidental, I just make the next thing I’m interested in.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I moved to New York City after I graduated college in December of 2019. I had never been anywhere remotely close to the city before and the only person I knew there was my roommate, who attended college with me. I didn’t even pick out the apartment myself before I got there. Then, about a month after I moved, the pandemic hit, and I lost my day job doing A/V at Mount Sinai hospital. I waited out some of the storm back home in Texas while my roommate moved out entirely. I could have just stayed in Texas and moved to Austin or something, but I still felt New York was the best home for my career so I moved back in August of 2020, when the pandemic was still very much not over. My explanation for my determination is simply that I feel I have nothing better to do with my time than do the thing I most want to do.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
We can see a healthy model of artistic support in the U.K with their governmentally funded theater. In London, you can see world class productions of some of the greatest plays ever written for less than a dinner in New York City. Artists must be financially supported without the expectation of a returning profit. The only institution that has that kind of cash is a giant government, or maybe Amazon if they actually cared about art.
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