We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Johnny Catalano. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Johnny below.

Johnny, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

Love is mysterious. I can’t seem to figure out how one falls in love with something or someone. I know I love the arts. Art is the reason I wake up in the morning. It makes life bearable.

If someone were to ask me to define art, I think I’d describe it as communication. The communication of one’s existence. Communication of the inexplicable. Cinema, happens to be my mode of communication.

I fell in love with cinema as a viewer and consumer. At an early age, I remember being taken by the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and Golden Age of Hollywood works like GUNGA DIN (George Stevens, 1939), CAPTAIN BLOOD (Michael Curtiz, 1935), and THE MALTESE FALCON (John Huston, 1941), among many others. All introduced to me by my Dad. One of my earliest cinematic memories was watching Michael Mann’s 1992 adaptation of THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. The end sequence (with essentially no dialogue) along the cliffside with the beautifully hypnotic Gaelic score haunts me (in the best of ways) to this day.

Anytime I feel like I’m losing my fire or passion for filmmaking or the art of cinema, I simply return to that scene from THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. I instantly fall in love again.

Johnny, 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?

I’m a filmmaker. Filmmaker is the catch-all term I like to to use. The craft of filmmaking engages with several different mediums and disciplines. I write, direct, produce, market, and the list goes on and on. Cinema is a patient medium. One must fully accept that a film (especially a feature film) could take years to come to fruition.

On top of being a filmmaker, I’m well known the annual film festival I founded and organize, the Catalano Film Festival. It takes place in Miamisburg, Ohio, toward the end of the winter season. It centers around the independent regional cinema being produced in the Midwestern United States.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

Seba Smith said it best “As it is said, ‘There are more ways than one to skin a cat”. There is no “one path” in the film industry, Sure, it’s a hard industry to navigate, but it isn’t impossible. I’ve learned over the years that planning one’s career can be a futile practice. I used to get bogged down by planning every little aspect of my career, primarily basing it off of what has worked for others in the past. As I experienced both success and failure in my career, I learned to fully accept the “uniqueness” of my path.

I didn’t expect to found and run an annual film festival when I graduated from college. In a way, I fell into it. It’s proved to be my most successful venture to date and will most likely be a large part of my legacy as a creator.

Life in unexpected, and most of it is out of our control. Roll with the punches, with grace. As the satirical subtitle to Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE states: “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

Here are a list of books I recommend any aspiring filmmaker read:

-The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story (Sam Wasson, 2023)
-Chasing The Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game (Oliver Stone, 2020)
-Kubrick: An Odyssey (Robert P. Kolker & Nathan Abrams, 2024)
-A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking (Samuel Fuller, 2002)

Here’s a list of my top ten favorite films in no particular order (as of now):

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnnycatalanofilm/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnny.catalano.391
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnny-catalano-358b12257/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/catalanofilm
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJw5taqqXnAW5aEgM4RqSjg