We were lucky to catch up with Isabel Custer recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Isabel thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
Taking risks is essential to being an artist.
There’s the obvious financial risk because it’s difficult to make a living off something whose value is difficult to determine in any consistent way.
Then there’s the creative risk of saying what you want to say even if it will shock, offend or rattle some people, perhaps even alienate you from people close to you.
Beyond those two more obvious forms of risk, there’s the added risk of continuing when something has proven to be a failure. For example, once you have a commercial failure, the next project carries more risk with it than the last. So it’s not just one finite risk that you need to take, it’s many, over time, repeatedly that leads to success in art and in life.
I can’t stress enough how important this is, or how little it is taught in schools.
In science, you repeat the experiment until you achieve a desired result, but these experiments’ result don’t directly affect your livelihood or sense of self the way our projects do in art.
In business, people try big and fail almost as a badge of honor. Why this same bravado doesn’t carry over into art I have yet to understand.
This is why my first feature “Success en tu Life” is about a woman who is an artist who fails, and who dares to dream bigger after that. It’s my moralistic tale for women and youth.
Risk, Fail. Repeat.
Repeat until you achieve the desired result.
Isabel, 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?
From very early on, all I did was invent stories and perform them. As soon as I could write, I wrote them. As soon as I could carry a tune, I sang them. I wrote, sang, choreographed and even drew detailed costumes. When I was 16, I decided I would devote myself to making films. Fortunately, in school and in extracurricular activities, I was allowed to discover all these disciplines. This obsession with movies brought me to Tisch School of the Arts where I studied Film Production. My goal then, as now, was simply to keep inventing stories and get actors to bring them to life on film.
Since then, I have made short films, music videos and a feature documentary. I have done everything from managing the production of a feature film to script supervising in advertising, to doing motion graphics for music videos. All the different disciplines on a set or in post production are important to be familiar with, and it’s handy to have them in your arsenal, but the goal is to specialize. I have been sought out to produce and I certainly have produced my own work, but I’m most happy writing and directing actors.
The reality is that “gigging” in filmmaking is precarious in its intermittent nature but it does provide some necessary respite for developing your own projects. When we create, we are fulfilled but the dream isn’t fully realized until we share our work. As creatives, we always seek the feedback of an audience, and that brought me to the creation of a film festival where I live in Key Biscayne, Florida. The pandemic helped us all realize the importance of shared physical experiences, such as going to the movies, and it also made me realize that what I didn’t have immediately around me, I could bring to my community.
We created the Key Biscayne Film Festival in order to serve the community, to showcase movies that reflect the locals’ cultures, such as the Caribbean and Latin America, and their languages, such as Spanish and Portuguese. The benefit would then be two-fold: to strengthen our community through quality cultural programming and to serve the independent artists who are seeking an audience.
If there’s one main lesson that I have learned by being on the board of the Miami Film Lab, a non-profit whose goal it is to help Miami’s filmmakers make a living from their craft, it’s that there are many gifted filmmakers in Miami and its surrounding cities whose work never gets the airtime it deserves. The main reason behind this is that the major film festivals have ceased to serve independent artists. Festival programmers notoriously pass films from their festivals on to others, bypassing filmmakers who submit their films on an open call, believing that their film will find its “home” in a specific festival.
We want to bring back the true meaning of an open call, and find the films that are great quality and need to be seen. Furthermore, we have narrowed our festival categories to Islands & Oceans to reflect our geography. The festival will feature films from Island cultures and their diaspora, as well as films about world oceans, their flora and fauna. In this way, we will mix fiction and non-fiction, with common themes weaving throughout the program, with the added benefit of creating a plastic-free sustainable event on our island.
Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
When I was at Tisch film school, I wish I had realized the value of all the like-minded people that surrounded me. I should have understood that the priceless part of Tisch was every single student that I encountered, instead of creating the stories that obsessed me with blinders on, focusing only on what I created and working with whomever we were assigned to in a class.
Today, as I meet people who are fresh on their journey, either in film school or recently graduated, I can’t stress enough how important this network is, and I don’t mean your connections to people who will invest in you, although that’s important too. The greatest asset you have is your imagination, your unique vision of what you can offer and that’s what’s at stake today in Hollywood. The strike over actors’ and writers’ rights versus insidious AI is real and well-founded. But not everyone’s imagination and what they have to offer is the same and that’s why the creative network is so crucial.
I would tell every film student or person who dreams of being in the movies today: make friends with other creatives and work with each other. You’ll make something greater than you every imagined that way.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
I have two missions that overlap. The first one stems from an intimate perspective on depression and mental illness because I grew up around so much of it and experienced it myself during adolescence. Today, I don’t suffer from it. It has been over 20 years that I have felt any negative mood that I couldn’t overcome on my own, but the loss of taste for life, joylessness and lack of self-confidence are all things I’ve experienced. Even more drastic and crippling forms of mania and depression I have witnessed firsthand, therefore, my goal is to bring people hope and joy through film.
The second is the nature of violence in film. People believe that seeing violence on screen is “just a movie” but many neurologists – like the brilliant Dr. Sood – have recognized that watching or even hearing someone suffer creates the same reaction of suffering in the spectator’s brain. Even before Dr. Sood, I knew this to be true. So many fiction films have tried to recreate horrors of the past as a “lesson” and I firmly believe that the violence depicted does not bring anything positive to anyone. In fact, I don’t even believe that you can deter someone from violence with violence. I believe that only the opposite is true and effective.
Ultimately, laughter and hope are my weapons. They’re also my fuel.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://kbfilmfestival.org/
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/kbfilmfestival/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/key-biscayne-film-festival/
- Other: https://filmfreeway.com/KeyBiscayneFilmFestival
Image Credits
All photos by Isabel Custer Key Biscayne Film Festival logo by KBFF