We recently connected with Corey Kupfer and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Corey, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
The genesis of my hopeful next feature film, This is Adam, came from the festival tour for my first feature film entitled Seven Days, an anthology film where one actress plays seven women across seven stories. I engaged in deep and encouraging conversations with audiences about, among other things, gender roles, mostly surrounding how I, being born a man, could write for not one, but seven women. I discussed my reluctance to write male characters, and my disinterest at the time, for the masculine never equated to safety for me, while the feminine has been a refuge. Man’s closed down, dishonest nature does not reflect the kind of films and characters that excite me, films rife with emotional transcendence. But between the making of Seven Days and its festival run, I finally came to terms with my own deeply hidden troubles, and sought help. So when these conversations came about, I carried with me a gift I didn’t have when I made that first film, the gift of awakening into a new life thanks to the emotional and mental health exploration that remains a mainstay in my life today. And so, as Q&As went on, I began hearing a calling. That unmistakable feeling when something new is inviting you back into the creative process. It was a calling to write about men, and to help them, as I needed help. This is Adam is a story that takes place at present, and the characters suffer, as we suffer; but it is a story that offers a new perspective. A perspective diminishing the individual, everything a result of everything that came before it. A perspective honoring the balance of masculine and feminine. A perspective that shows energies connecting all our lived experiences.
Among years of deep, dedicated spiritual and psycho-therapeutic practice, I returned to a defining moment in my eighth grade summer, scene set at my uncle’s bar closed for a bachelor party my father brought me to. I was submitted to what I now understand to be sexual abuse, in fits of drunken laughter and more disturbingly, pride, as I “came of age.” Taking the time to let my young self know exactly how I was wronged was the primary object of this intervention into time past, but before leaving my memories behind and returning to the present, it was the turning to my father that was the true awakening. I looked at a man, looking down at his barely-teen son in contact with a woman’s body for the first time, and I saw his father, my grandfather, a man who parented by weaponizing fear, who betrayed my grandmother so frequently her primary partner became a bottle that took her life decades too soon. The wound in the pit of me was overtaken by the pain of empathy. The trauma of that day, among others, has had life-altering effects; but nothing I’ve perpetuated compares to standing by and doing nothing—nay, encouraging one’s own son to have his innocence stolen right before their eyes, when that boy wanted nothing more out of life then than the innocent fantasy of loving someone (movie lover that I always was) like Jack did Rose (cue Celine).
It took thirty-five years of hiding behind layers of armor—created to protect myself from the harm attracted by expressing myself outside of the toxic masculine blueprint—to finally come to terms with my deep unhappiness, self-hatred, guilt and shame. Most men will take their burden from the cradle to the grave, as it were. Anyone who harms another needs to be held responsible; but if there is any possibility of future peace, and the reduction of such harm among us, it is in recognizing the cyclical nature of trauma, and accepting those (of all gender-identities) who perpetuate toxic masculinity as victims themselves, as we all are, and provide a safe place to ask for help. This is Adam, above all else, is a celebration of that asking for help, as heroic. A defining moment for mankind. A new beginning.
Corey, 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’ve been an artist at heart as long as I can remember, with the commitment to film happening somewhere around eighth grade. My path began with an undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I was led there by an athletic scholarship, only to find what must have been among the best film programs in the world for fostering the burgeoning creative. We shot 16mm film on World War II-era cameras, following the dogma of Nathaniel Dorsky’s Devotional Cinema, which was that program’s unofficial “Bible.” Creative flame alight, I went on to NYU’s MFA program at the Tisch School of the Arts to combine that creativity with a craft and knowledge that I could actually mount a large scale production with. Years later, and now living in Los Angeles, I exist in a somewhat bohemian state, collecting paychecks freelance as an overqualified and underpaid commercial director and producer, all to serve the purpose of supporting myself, sometimes just getting by, while keeping a flexible schedule so I can develop my personal feature films.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
In every artist statement I’ve written since my first gallery showing in 2007, I’ve stated that “I’m not interested in showing an audience what they already know to be true.” Today, as we live in the crescendo of social posturing, where your acceptance can be earned with a protest selfie, or by repeating the social media collective’s social-political generalizations, and lost just as quickly for stirring discord on the status quo with ideas over the fifteen-second limit, it’s never been more important for artists to step out from the infantry, and lead in creating the images of the future—as has always been our charge to do so. We are watching the pendulum swing frantically between past and present, young and old, masculine and feminine, toxic and divine, science and spirit, left and right, black, white, gay, straight and the like. We must recognize the trauma resulting from these constructs as very real, and make space for everyone’s happiness and safety, especially those traditionally oppressed, knowing the swings will take time to get though; but we must also keep our artistic minds looking beyond the surface-level, beyond the finger pointing, divisiveness, and short-sighted politics, to an idea of a livable future.
Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
After a decade living and working in Los Angeles, with one self-funded feature under my belt, a dozen-or-so festival laurels and awards to its name, the institutional support I’ve garnered in the wake is the equivalent of an “attaboy.” If you’ve done any level of networking in the entertainment industry, you’ll know all too well the copy-and-paste sentiment of so many, the assurance and promise, though unwilling to reach a hand themselves, that you’ll “make it” in the end. I have never asked or expected much from the film industry; in fact, I defend it. It at least lives up to its promise of being a business full-stop, and I appreciate honesty. The thousands of dollars spent on film festivals, screenwriting contests and the like, the hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans, by myself and thousands of others without the finances to do so, took me years to see the growing futility of. Fact of the matter is, save for an extreme minority who by luck or otherwise slip through, what twenty years ago was building your career up from one decent short film, now is expected to be of feature length, and have already proven itself independently. As I’m sure you can surmise, save for the aforementioned minority, that model favors one economic class of people; and somehow during a time of much-overdo institutional affirmative action, we’ve gratefully lifted a small few, yet found the entire artistic community a forgotten minority to the business.
The greatest resource we have at our disposal is each other. The influence of social media, having us exist as islands of ourselves, is destroying the concept of artistic community, everyone trying to live up to a model of independent success for the sake of an imaginary audience, while sacrificing a tactile one within interpersonal relationships. The flaws in the industry model for finding quality talent is highly complex, greatly flawed, and out of our control. If we hope for our messages to compete with nepotism, the independently wealthy, and the like, we must do it together.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.goldenmilefilm.com
- Instagram: goldenmilefilm
- Linkedin: coreykupferfilm