We were lucky to catch up with Daniel Pico recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Daniel, thanks for joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

How did you learn to do what you do?

When I was growing up outside of Chicago, I found myself always playing make-believe in some way. Whether it be with my friends inventing a storyline for us to follow as we roamed the woods on the weekends, or with my toy guns defending the perimeter of my back yard from an imagined enemy. I was just playing as kids did in those days without a screen in my hand 24 hours a day to keep me occupied, and trips to the movies were special because my father was a notorious penny pincher and waited for movies to end their first run and go to the dollar theaters, so when the rest of the world had seen Spaceballs I had to wait 10 weeks after its release to understand the schwarz jokes my friends were already repeating on the playground. But my father’s frugality had its upsides as well, he was one of the first people I knew of to have two VCRs and with every trip to the video store my father would copy the movies putting at least three on each VHS tape creating a large video library that we had access to 24/7. So, I could not only see a movie once and return it, I could in some cases watch a movie repeatedly until the tape broke. So I had access to contemporary movies and anything my parents would tape off of cable. There was a mom and pop video store that opened up around the corner from my house and one summer they offered a special movie pass for $20 a month and you could take five general titles out at a time. This was heaven for me, a kid who hated summer sports for the most part and would love to do nothing but watch movies everyday that I hadn’t seen. There was no internet at the time, and the only way to know who made what, were the credits on the back of the vhs box. So if I wanted to know what movies Sydney Lumet made I had to read the boxes and memorize which movie he did and then reference them later, when I was in a mood to watch one of his movies. The whole time I was watching these movies I was starting to learn the ins and outs of storytelling, what kind of lighting I liked, the kinds of performances that moved me, and ultimately what directors liked most. Looking back now I must have been insufferable to my friends who really just wanted to play video games and collect baseball cards, where I couldn’t stop talking about the movies I’d seen and which cinematographer’s lighting style worked best in close ups.
In highschool I joined the theater kids and acted in plays and even directed a little in acting classes with the other students. By that point I’d started reading plays that were totally inappropriate for my age group; Eric Bogosian, David Mamet, and Sam Shepard were some of my go-tos. Imagine a 15 year old trying to direct a scene from Mamet’s Oleanna where a feminist student is beaten by her conservative professor, in a high school drama class. But for all of my failures I was learning how to tell actors how to move on a set, what motivated a movement, and how to actually read a script, break it down, and convey to others what I wanted. I can’t say I was good at it, but I wanted to be and kept trying.
I started making movies with my brother on Christmas morning 1988 when under the christmas tree was a PXL 2000 camcorder from Fisher Price. Part toy, part camcorder it recorded very grainy black and white images and sound onto high bias audio cassette tapes. Needless to say the Lazer Tag set we received was now a prop in our first movie. My brother and I continued to make movies together all through our formative years, mostly horror rip offs of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre where I had made a Leatherface mask by sewing old socks together with a wig from another halloween mask, and chainsaw fashioned out of piece of wall molding and some small pieces of wood nailed together to make a box and a blade. When I played Leatherface I’d make the chainsaw noise with my mouth under the mask. But in my teen years I started making original movies with the high school’s video equipment and learned to edit while helping with the news broadcasts at the school. I then heard that Columbia College Chicago was offering a high school summer program where I would make black and white 16mm silent films for 8 weeks, thankfully I was able to attend and met my first real mentor Ron Pitts who was teaching our class. Ron Pitts had been a documentarian and director for commercials and television for several decades. He was the first director to really explain what scene design was, and the importance of a reveal as a tool in the director’s storytelling kit. Years later I would drop in to say hello to Ron, and after nearly two decades he could still remember the one minute film I made in his class. Eventually I would attend Columbia College Chicago as an undergrad and through film school I made various films and learned a great deal about the language of cinema. But, it wasn’t until I got out of film school that I felt like my education really began. Not just getting on sets and having a rude awakening of how things actually worked, but having to manage limited resources in the indie world made me a more creative director. My first taste of that was my thesis project that had some backing from the school but ultimately was up to me to both finance and organize, and I was beyond ambitious. I had written a short film called Two Days in Limbo, a world war two suspense/drama about a medic in the last days of the war in Europe who is wounded and left for dead in a bomb crater just feet from a German machine gun nest after an ambush wipes out his squad. Aside from some equipment the school provided, everything else was on me. I ended up putting together a 30 person crew, complete with a makeup fx department to handle the many effects I’d written into the script, a costume department to manage all the period accurate costumes I’d organized, and even a pyrotechnics professional to blow things up. All this took a level of managerial skill I did not yet possess, and the first days on set were some of the roughest days I’ve ever had on a film set. The scale of it all overwhelmed me and I spent less time on the actors than all the details of costumes and props. But despite my own self criticism we made our ambitious five page day all while shooting 16 mm film and dealing with a non working bathroom in the forest location. At the time I didn’t realize it, but being a director is mostly about empowering those around you that you chose to be there to do their jobs, and micromanaging has no place on a set that big. As the shoot went on, the crew and I felt more comfortable with each other and in the end when we shot our ambush scene filled with explosions and some very technical make up effects we’d hit our stride and the rest of the shoot although not without challenges got a lot easier. It was a tough lesson to learn that as the director you were not responsible for everything on set that went right, but you always had to take responsibility for what went wrong. Leadership was the lesson I learned in those eight days of filming, the technical skills were a thing I’d picked up long ago just watching movies and making dozens of short films. If you want to direct motion pictures, you have to be fearless but not reckless, and surround yourself with great people and you will always succeed.

Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process?

I think if I had to do it again I would have been less afraid of moving to Los Angeles earlier. There were lots of opportunities I missed out on in the early years of my career to connect and establish myself in the industry. I opted to stay in Chicago and that had its advantages too, being a bigger fish in a smaller pond allowed me to get a reputation as a talented filmmaker, but money and opportunity are generated on the coasts.

What skills do you think were most essential?

Being able to work with people is the most important skill I think to have on a set. Film sets are filled with a plethora of personality types, and managing all those people is an invaluable skill.

What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

For everyone in the film business there are obstacles to learning more, most notably for me it was challenging my perceptions of what film is and can be. When I graduated from film school I had a head full of technical knowledge and a fair amount of confidence. I thought I knew what I was doing after a few successful projects on the festival circuit but I really needed to get out into the business and sing for my supper to pick up the necessary skills to survive. I think also focusing too much on the craft of filmmaking and not on living life is an obstacle to overcome for many dedicated filmmakers. We need to know about life, and have close relationships outside the film industry, otherwise what are you going to make movies about if don’t know anything about life? Life experiences today inform more of my work than any film class I took. Even on a show like RZR which was a huge sci-fi TV show I co-wrote and directed an episode of, I found myself calling up family history of being in the bail bond industry when an actor asked for some backstory about a character. Having those interests outside of filmmaking, and investing in those around me made better at telling stories that people can relate to.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Daniel J. Pico Is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago with a BA in directing and screenwriting. He has been shooting films his entire life having made his first movie at the age of 8.

Daniel has directed two theatrically released feature films “Common Senses”, and “Farewell Darkness” which won three best feature film awards in the international film festival circuit. Additionally, Daniel has directed more than 85 short films, music videos, commercials and documentaries, including 11 episodes of several popular TV and web series, garnering over 40 independent film awards and nominations for his work.

Daniel is the founder of Pico Blvd Entertainment, a production company who’s core is focused on independent cinema. Not only is Dan a maverick director, he is an accomplished editor and has worked in several major capacities in film, from producing multiple feature films, to first assistant directing several multi-million dollar features films around the world. His short film “Reasonable Doubt” recently debuted at the short film corner at the Cannes Film Festival – Marche Du Film 2024.

He also co-wrote the Gala Films/Exertion3 series “RZR” and served as a Co-Producer, Editor, and Director of Episode 6 “The Blood Dimmed tide” the show is streaming in the Gala Film Network and is nominated for a 2024 Primetime Emmy Award.

For the Last 10 years Daniel has been operating the Independent Film Workshop, and online series of filmmaking courses that aim to pass on the language of cinema to the next generation.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding aspect of being a filmmaker is going to a theater watching the audience react to my movie. When I get the emotional reaction intended from them, it’s the greatest satisfaction.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My goal is to keep growing as a storyteller, when you stop learning and experimenting you fall into stagnation and that’s a terrible place to find yourself.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.danieljpico.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/picoblvdent/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.pico
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/picoblvdent/
• Twitter: https://x.com/DanielJPico
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DanielPicoblvdent
• Other: The Independent Film Workshop https://www.facebook.com/IFWFB

Image Credits

Darrin Van Gorder 2023, Pico Blvd Entertainment 2024