We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Duncan Smith a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Duncan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Alright – so having the idea is one thing, but going from idea to execution is where countless people drop the ball. Can you talk to us about your journey from idea to execution?

When I come up with an idea for a film, generally there is a mood or emotion that wants to be expressed and it is incumbent upon me to find a genre that best expresses that thought. I can’t be precious about any single scene or sequence. Even if I really like something I’ve come up with, I need to be able to cut anything or let it go if it won’t help tell the greater story. In filmmaking, script is king and it doesn’t matter if you have the best performances in the best looking and sounding movie, if the script isn’t honest, the audience will be able to detect an inauthenticity within the work.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I took a rather traditional path to filmmaking by going to film school and making movies with my colleagues there. Although I don’t believe the film school route is necessary for everyone wanting to be a filmmaker, I found that the environment suited my learning style quite well. It was a great place to incubate thoughts and ideas while learning the cinematic grammar with people who were interested in the same kinds of storytelling. Finding your voice and your style is essential to filmmaking and that can take a lot of time and trial and error. Knowing the basics of cinematic storytelling is one thing but learning how you want to wield it is another. I found a love for genre subversion and wanted to master straddling a line between genre and expectation. They say you should write what you know, being interested in film history and the studies of different genres and sub-genres, I decided that was my way into exploring what I wanted to explore. Cinema has a dreamlike quality that is unique to itself. There’s a removal from reality that only this art form can bring. Wether the project is a film or a music video, I enjoy taking the “cinema as a dream” approach and contorting it into genre stories in which the dreams can feel more like nightmares. I’m still interested in a sense of humor but I typically allow it to find its own way into the work. The world is funny and I tend to find humor in almost anything so if I remain truthful to myself as an artist, the humor finds its way into my work without me demanding too much of it.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

During the lockdown in 2020, I had just graduated college and wanted to make a small movie with a few of my friends from film school. We wrote a horror script and were fortunate enough to be allowed access to my parent’s garage for the shoot. Initially on paper, the film was a very serious and straight forward horror film that was initially meant to serve as an exercise in the genre. We shot about half a day and were looking over the footage at lunch when we realized we couldn’t stop laughing at the footage. It wasn’t bad, it was just simply something different than we thought it was. Right there we had a choice, we could continue forward and try to force the tone in an insincere way or we could lean into what felt right. The comedy was working in conjunction with the horror and we found the more abstract we went with the film the more steady it felt. I’m pretty happy with that movie and I think a big reason it works is because of that adjust we made early on.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Filmmaking to me has been a pool that has never gotten shallow. I’ve gone deeper and deeper into cinematic concepts and I’ve not even scratched the surface. It is still in its relative infancy as a medium and it feels to me like the greatest form of expression in the modern era. There have been other mediums I’ve explored but filmmaking has never lost its spark to me. I enjoy knowing that I will never know the full potential of the art form. The collaboration involved is infinitely rewarding when you have a group of passionate people working to tell a story and express themselves as a single unit, it is at its most exciting.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: duncansmith.mp4
• Twitter: @duncansmith_mp4
• Youtube: Duncan Smith
• Other: Also on YouTube under the page, Moon St is a web-series I co-created and directed episodes of.