Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dylan Amick. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Dylan, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
I believe the most meaningful project should either be your most recent or your next one. Part of being a creative is trusting your instincts but also pursuing your individual passion and if you are doing that, it has to be meaningful.
My most recent film was a short called “Return to Tanya” a romantic drama about relationships, memory, and moving on. The story plays out in just over eight minutes but follows an entire year in a relationship; it is both the most ambitious project I have produced as well as the most story-focused project I have led. Part of what made this film so meaningful was that it was a departure from my typical genre of horror. I grew up on monster movies (I will never forget the first time I watched George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” and stayed up all night planning out how I would board up my own home in the event of a zombie invasion), so I have always been a very visual storyteller. “Return to Tanya” still uses a lot of the stylistic choices I have developed as a director: long tracking shots, wide framing, and powerful colors. I had to approach the story with new eyes. Many of my previous films were designed to make the audience jump or squirm, this time I needed them to lean in and see themselves in the story.
This approach started at the level of the script. As a former playwright I am never one to shy away from dialogue, but this story required a soft touch; I wrote and rewrote every scene a dozen times – holding each and every word up to the light and making sure the intention (and the subtext) were crystal clear. Everything I write I create with the intention of producing, but this project had to sit in a drawer for longer than anything I had written previously. The story centers around a couple touring a new apartment, cutting between their first visit and their eventual life in the apartment for several months. This story required one large set piece – an empty apartment that could be filled and lived in. When I first wrote the script in 2019, I hoped to direct it while moving in the summer of 2020 – and you already know how that went. I saved the script, and mostly forgot about it. It wasn’t until my wife and I found our current apartment and found out our leases would overlap by a month that I thought about it again.
With this realization, the timer immediately started. I had to get the project together, film it, and move into an apartment in 30 days. It was a true trial by fire, and it also required me to work with an almost entirely new team of collaborators. It was such an important experience to take the lead on every aspect of this production, to let time be my greatest deciding factor, and to trust my passion for a romantic drama after four years of trying to establish my voice in the horror circuit. As a writer/director, I think one of the most important things for me to say here is that I find the concept of ‘auteurs’ disingenuous – no film is made alone. This happened because I had such an amazing team. My producers were incredible – they loved the idea and they threw their passion and talents behind mine. Creating art, specifically writing, is a lonely endeavor, so every time I am able to rally a team behind shared passion instead of banked favors is a meaningful moment of growth for me. The shoot happened over two days, with a small cast of two actresses and a skeleton crew of talented creatives. Part of what made the project so special is how smoothly the shoot went – even compared to earlier projects with much longer timelines and less complicated set up, this production process was genuinely painless. I think we have to challenge ourselves as creatives to grow and get better in every single experience -whether it is your set or someone else’s. To see myself at the end with a beautiful product, with a crew that felt supported and was eager to work together again, and to know that I was responsible for this was a truly life changing feeling. I was immensely proud of my team and I made sure they knew that, but I was also proud of myself – as an anxious person with incredibly high standards, I don’t say that enough.
The project is currently in post production, and I am so excited to share this project with the world! It has been a lot of work and I have had doubts about how audiences will see my version of a love story, but I am proud of myself for pushing out of my comfort zone and into the unknown. As I explain to friends and in submissions what drove me to produce a drama after a somewhat successful horror short I have had to interrogate my passion. To ask myself, as writers often should, why this story? Why now? What do I need to say? And it was meaningful to find a part of myself that felt lost in my work. To realize that I love horror – not because of a thrill for blood and gore – rather, I love horror because I am a romantic. And that means the most beautiful, the most terrifying, and the most meaningful thing about creation to me, is other people.
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.
My name is Dylan James Amick and I am writer, director, and producer for film and theater.
Originally from Virginia, I trained as a birthday party clown and a theatrical designer. I received a BA in from Virginia Tech in lighting design in 2012. After college, I spent a decade in New York City working on and Off-Broadway, including five years with The Juilliard School’s production department as the Head of Video. I worked as the assistant projection designer for the tony award winning “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” and designed lights and projections for dozens of off broadway shows.
While I love working in technical production, several years into living in New York I missed creating art as opposed to only collaborating on other people’s projects. So I reached out to several other Virginia Tech graduates in the city and we started Critical Point Theater. We created original plays and podcasts for over five years, I directed multiple theatrical productions for them and served as showrunner for our audio The Grayscale Podcast. The show was a monster of the week sci-fi/horror series, in the vein of the Twilight Zone, that explored the intersection of the human experience and the unexplainable. The series ran for 30 episodes and won an award from the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation – a foundation named after my personal hero.
Around 2018 I started experimenting with the idea of moving into film. I was tired of the formalities of theater and the restrictions it put on an audience that had to be physically present to enjoy it. My first horror short, “Clean Cut” played at over 15 festivals, won multiple Best Horror Short awards, and is currently streaming on Amazon Prime as part of the anthology series Discover Indie Film, as well as HiTv. I am currently in post production for my next short film, “Return to Tanya” a romantic drama about memory, break ups, and moving on.
My scripts have been finalists in Stage 32’s Search For New Blood, Screencraft’s True Story & Public Domain Screenplay contest, and NYC Midnight’s Short Screenplay contest; my work has been celebrated by numerous contests and film festivals including Hollyshorts, the Austin Film Festival, the PAGE Awards, Screencraft, and more.
In 2020 I moved to Los Angeles with my biggest fan (my wife) and my biggest critic (my cat).
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
The most important thing a society can do to support artists and creatives is supply funding and make it available to artists for creative projects. Full stop.
There are cultural ideals and philosophical choices that can also help, but the biggest threat to our industry is the wealth gap that allows the privileged to thrive while forcing out new voices. It is the initial and most universal gatekeeper in our industries. It is worth acknowledging that there would still need to be consideration for the policies and ways in which this money was made available but it has to be there first. The United States has an embarrassingly low National Arts Endowment, and exponentially raising it is a great place to start. Julia Anne Morrison is one of the most important collaborators of my life and regularly challenged my views – my conversations with her and the work she continues to do with community-focused performances shaped a lot of the artist I am today. When we were working together at Critical Point Theater I will never forget a story she shared about attending a fund-raising and project financing workshop in Europe; the moderator started their speech with a blunt admission – none of what she was about to cover applied to making art in the US because as country, the US seems to only support for-profit art. When we support that decision as a country, we are all but admitted aloud that our culture is meaningless – even to our own nation.
Outside of those with celebrity status, we do not respect art or artists in this country. And it starts at the same place I did, in underfunded public schools. A thriving ecosystem for artists starts with childhood access to art – classes, performances, museums. If you do not see these things, they are easy to dismiss as luxury or even a waste of resources. Humans have learned so much about the past from the art that has been left behind, and it is sad to realize how little thought we put into what we as a modern society are leaving behind.
Furthermore, we have to create and support smaller communities within our larger ecosystem. Like someone trying to be physically healthier, a healthy artistic community has to question what we consume. Where does the money from your ticket sales go? To the artists or their financiers? This has been the hardest part of adjusting from the New York Off-Broadway theater scene to the Los Angeles Film scene. In New York, there is a feeling that you need to be in the theaters. You need to see and support smaller shows not just for the artist but because it will make you a better artist. I tell anyone who asks me, there are only two ways to get better as an artist: 1) Make more art 2) Consume more art. Supporting our fellow artist is more than donating to a kickstarter, it is thinking about smaller films. Just as you should not view The National Art Gallery as the entirety of art and paintings, we cannot let mainstream distributors and chain theaters dictate the entirety of the film industry. We have to think big and act small. Short films, independent films, arthouse cinema, independent publishers, black box theatre, even Youtube projects like video essays and direct to consumer films contain some absolutely astounding work. We have to make room for these projects, not as a favor or an opportunity to pat ourselves on the back, but as a real option for consuming stories. It isn’t that these stories deserve to be told – they very much already are and have been for some time. They deserve to be seen. They deserve our consideration.
I think pessimism is too easy, so I choose to be hopeful about our future. But it is worth saying, even more than twice, that the best way to create a thriving ecosystem of art is to provide resources for our community of artists. And that is money. Here is what I hope is an appropriate metaphor: We will not end homelessness with more awareness or harmful policies, we will end it by providing people homes.
Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?
There are so many important things I have read, this is a very hard question. I think reading is so underrated as part of the creative process, I really think it is just as important as meeting other people and experiencing different ways of life. It’s actually a cheat code to do both.
From my background in theater and my time in college there are a lot of books and plays that shaped my goals as a creative. Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed was one of the first texts that really captured my imagination, which is ironic since so much of his work was built on Bertol Brecht’s idea of removing ‘magic’ from the theater. Peter Brooks’ The Empty Space is one of the first things I think most theater majors read, and it still lives rent free in my head. I am always trying to ask myself, is this ‘cool idea’ the unholy theater I have been warned about?
But after cheating and naming three other books, I would actually say the most important text I have read in my life is Antonin Artaud’s No More Masterpieces – it was the most impactful and conveniently also the shortest. A nine-page chapter from his book The Theater and its Double is a manifesto for the constantly next generation of creatives. A common worry I have heard among my creative circles is the question – how do I say something new? Artuad encourages all of us to throw that question out the window. Who cares what has been said previously? The masterpieces of the past mean nothing to our modern times. That does not mean you can’t appreciate them, but it discourages you from putting them on a pedestal. The text reminds all of us that the most important part of creating art is rising to the challenge of describing how our modern moment feels. I think about this chapter so much as our industry becomes consumed with reboots, reimagainings, and ‘safe’ IP bets. I always tell people that I am the opposite of nostalgic. To quote another wise guy, “’Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.”
I struggle a lot with feelings of hopelessness and inadequacy; I question if writing stories does anything besides make me feel better. Not only the challenge of surviving in the creative industry, but also questioning if this is worth doing – could my time be better spent? No More Masterpieces is an important part of my life philosophy because it reminds me that it is. It reminds me that artists owe a debt to the unpredictable and cruel world we live in – someone needs to record this. Someone has to speak up and put words to the feelings we can all relate to. It doesn’t matter if someone has said it before, it needs to be said by us now, in our words, for our world.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.dylanjamick.com
- Instagram: SeeDylanWrite
