Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Hunter Whaley. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hunter, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
After graduating from film school, I was determined to continue honing my craft and generating my own projects. With a script already written, I began a crowd-funding campaign that unfortunately came up short of the budget goals. Of course I was disappointed and sorry to set aside a script which I had a lot of passion for, but I knew that given a little time I could figure out some other project–something smaller scale–to make with the sum that was raised.
I sat on the funds for several months, weighing my options, trying to find the right pivot. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic came along and put the brakes on almost everything. I lost my job, but my determination to make something was never greater. During lockdown I began revisiting some scripts I had written the previous year. One, called “Perestroika”, told the strange story of a British counter-intelligence officer waiting out the Cold War in Berlin. I sent it to one of my closest friends and collaborators, a director of photography, who expressed enthusiasm about the story and the visual potential. But how could we possibly make a Berlin period piece, set over several decades, on a shoestring budget? It seemed as ill-starred as the last project . . . until we jokingly suggested “doing the DOGVILLE version”, referring to the Lars von Trier film shot completely on a sound stage with minimalist sets. Suddenly, it wasn’t a joke anymore, but a new direction that satisfied both the creative and the financial elements we had been wrestling with.
I immediately set to work reimagining the script. Instead of a “real” Berlin, the story would take place in an imagined Berlin recreated in an empty warehouse. Digging back into my theater background, I looked to the work of Beckett and Brecht to reshape my spy thriller into a highly stylized, brazenly theatrical piece of dream logic. The project was retitled “Der Platz” and soon pre-production was underway with a team of close companions, other friends and artists hungry to create during the doldrums of lockdown.
It wasn’t long before I secured the perfect location, gotten for a song; an office building, in the middle of sweeping renovations when the pandemic hit, left completely gutted and empty. Over the next few weeks, this abandoned warehouse was transformed into our personal studio. Day in and day out, myself and my friends worked to build each of the “locations” by hand; a cafe, a dingy hotel room, and, most challenging of all, a section of the Berlin Wall sixty feet long and twenty feet high. My father worked in construction for much of my childhood, so combined with my frequent contributions to the set design of theater productions in high school, I had the necessary know-how to cheaply and safely assemble the sets, some from scratch and some from repurposed flats we scavenged from other wrapped sets. It was extremely rewarding, as exhausting as it was energizing.
We all put a lot of sweat and tears into the preparation so that when it came time to black out the windows and shoot for four days, production was a breeze. My DP and I had storyboarded every shot precisely ahead of time, lacking the time or money for experimentation or “winging it”. This made for smooth, logical days. Every member of the crew gave their all, the cast turned in exemplary performances across the board, and when we wrapped and triumphantly tore down our Berlin Wall we all felt satisfied with the work we had done. It was an incredible experience for me as an artist and filmmaker, creatively nourishing and a much needed confidence boost. The disappointment of the past project melted away, proving to myself that even with limited resources and hardly any money I could mount and successfully execute a production outside the safety net of film school.
“Der Platz” was shot in 2021 and completed in 2022. It went on to garner dozens of accolades at short festivals, including “Best Experimental Drama” at the Sugar Loaf Film Festival and “Best Experimental Short” at the Manhattan Film Festival, as well as winning awards for its cinematography and sound design. Though I’m always looking ahead at the “next one”, I am still deeply proud of “Der Platz” and everything I learned from it.
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.
For as long as I can remember, my sole passion has been storytelling. I was born and raised in Grand Junction, a rural town on the western edge of Colorado. Completely enclosed by mountains on all sides, Grand Junction was an idyllic if hugely isolated place to grow up. I was movie-obsessed from a young age and was writing stories the minute I could string along a few words to make a sentence but there was very little opportunity for film in Grand Junction and any semblance of “film culture” was nonexistent. Without an outlet, my creative passions took me first to theater. Starting from age 5, I was a fixture of children’s community theater, specializing in middle-aged authority figures (almost always wearing extravagant hats). As an introverted only child, theater was a safe haven, a place I could really express myself. Theater and creative writing sustained my passions all through my youth but my real dream was, always, to make movies.
It wasn’t until I hit high school that I first got a taste of directing. I was extremely active in my high school’s drama department both on stage and off. Freshman year my drama teacher introduced the first ever student-directed One Act Festival. In addition to directing, students were encouraged to submit original work. I wrote an original one act (short play) and directed it for the festival, my first time on “the other side” so to speak. I fell in love. Here at last was the position that really suited me. My one act was awarded the top prize that year, and the next year I directed another original that won the regional all-school competition. Concurrent with this I began to devour films at an alarming rate, taking weekly trips to the public library and leaving with as many DVDs as I was allowed to take. The Colorado mountains that had boxed me in all my life were obliterated by Fellini, Kurosawa, Bergman, Tarkovsky, on and on. Cinema expanded my mind beyond the valleys of my upbringing. I became a cliche; the dreaming kid ready to shake off the dust of his hometown and see the world.
I kissed Grand Junction goodbye the first chance I got and moved lock, stock, and barrel to New York City to pursue my dream of being a filmmaker. I made it into NYU Tisch and fell head over heels for the city. There was plenty of struggle and anguish, adversity and failure, and even seriously considered giving up the ghost and heading back to Colorado, but I soldiered on through three years of undergrad, honing my skills and making life-long connections with friends and collaborators.
Nearly nine years after coming to New York, there’s still nowhere I’d rather be. Struggles continue, no doubt about it. I remain outside the so-called “industry” but continue to write screenplays, collaborate with others, and direct my own short films when the time is right and the money is decent. Filmmaking is my polestar, guiding me through a half-dozen odd jobs I’ve worked just to pay the bills and keep me here, keep me writing and creating. In addition to writing and directing, I started editing in film school and continue to work as an editor in a freelance capacity for friends and clients as well as keeping gainful employment with a retro TV network. My small town upbringing has made me hungry, adaptable, and not afraid of rolling up my sleeves to get the thing done, see the thing through. My career–whatever that means–has perhaps not taken the shape I expected it to as a starry-eyed undergrad, but I keep working, keep trying, keep pushing. My passion for storytelling and filmmaking burns on.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
A difficult shift to be considered “actionable”, but society must untangle creative expression from economic motivators. While the archetype of the “starving artist” exists for a reason, and some artists even attribute high creative output to the pressures of living paycheck to paycheck, I think more often than not finances (or lack there of) hinder creative expression. Barriers and limitations often lead to worthwhile art, but commercial stresses limit the freedom of artists. It effects both WHAT they create and HOW it is created. In our capitalist society, every impulse or act of creation is immediately something to be commodified. Our “time” has become so precious and money so scant that every moment we’re not profiting is a moment wasted in the eyes of the marketplace. This puts too much pressure on artists, who may be too anxious to really take chances or develop their own idiosyncratic voices and will instead pick safer, more digestible routes of expression that have a more reliable financial gain. This is particularly true of filmmaking, which is perhaps the artform most entangled with finances and commercialism. Production companies motivated solely by profit will be less likely to fund unique voices or “big swings” and artists are less likely to create such projects knowing the difficulty of getting them made. “Selling out” is a bygone taboo, but the anxieties still remain; what is motivated by art, and what is motivated by profit? A thriving creative ecosystem cannot exist under such conditions. Financial stresses could be somewhat alleviated by greater resources for artists at any level of “professionalism”, such as more endowment programs, and a more meaningful emphasis on art for art’s sake in our culture.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
Something that I have struggled with all my life as someone with dreams and ambitions is the mirage of goal-setting and result-based thinking. Having goals is great, but often the expectations we create for those goals cannot live up to reality, even when our goals are achieved. For me, it has always been on to the next thing, on to the next thing. This kind of goal oriented motivation certainly served me well in an academic environment, but in the larger reality of creative pursuits it is a pitfall waiting to cut your legs off and burn you out. In the short years since leaving film school, I have faced numerous rejections, failures, pivots, and been forced to adapt, to reflect, to re-examine. It’s all too easy at this nascent stage to fret about the future, the state of one’s career, and professional goals. You get so wrapped up in thinking ahead that by the time you get there, if you’re lucky enough, the feeling is hollow; you’ve already moved on to thinking ahead about something else and months, maybe years, have streamed by all the while.
Personally, this has been an extremely difficult adjustment for me to make. I realized that in pursuit of my “goals”, I wasn’t giving myself any space to actually enjoy the fruits of my labors, to take pride in how far I had come. More and more, as glib as it sounds, I strive to enjoy the journey rather than the destination, putting my energies into the processes of the present rather than some distant imagining of a future that may or may not become manifest. Goals are still important, ambition still spurs me forward, but forward-thinking should never forsake the present moment. Otherwise, so much will be missed and fly by unappreciated.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hdwhaley/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hunter.whaley.5
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunter-whaley/
- Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user51928375
- Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/hdwhaley/