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

Julian, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

How can you choose just one? It’s so difficult, especially since I’m a producer as well as a director.

The two most meaningful projects I’ve worked on recently are No Tomorrow, a Norwegian war film which I produced, and Inkblack, a retro horror pilot I directed.

No Tomorrow is a collaboration with amazing actor/director/writer, Martin Drop. It’s a very emotionally resonant anti-war film focusing on the ground-level story of five soldiers trying to survive, inspired by first-hand interviews anonymously provided by veterans. Working on it as a producer has been a privilege: it feels meaningful not only to bring Martin’s artistic vision to the screen but also amplify these first-hand accounts.

The film itself takes place in a fictional war in the future, where clean water has become a scarce resource; despite the fictional setting, we hope that loosely basing it on the anecdotes that Martin himself gathered gives the movie a weight it wouldn’t ordinarily have. Martin also consulted with a veteran psychologist and various sources (text and visual) to ensure a sense of authenticity. All of No Tomorrow is shot in Norway, where the beautiful landscapes really take center stage; it’s incredible how the movie juxtaposes the horror of war and the tranquility of nature.

I’d never worked on an anti-war film before, and it felt like No Tomorrow really pushed the boundary of what independent low budget cinema could do. War films are normally reserved to bigger budget, studio-produced affairs, and we wanted to disrupt the conventional narrative surrounding the genre.

As a producer, I collaborated closely with Martin to ensure that his vision was delivered in a way, as to be digestible to an audience. Our initial cuts were closer to 3 hours, so we worked with a very talented team of editors, in order to really finesse the final cut into a lean, possibly more impactful 2 hours. I’ve directed long-form content before, so that prior experience was instrumental in informing my contributions to the project. We needed to make sure that No Tomorrow worked as a feature film to an audience, who knew nothing about the project and were watching it with totally fresh eyes.

In the last few months, No Tomorrow has screened at multiple festivals on the East Coast of the U.S. At Queens World Film Festival, we were honored to be nominated for no less than 6 awards. We took home 2: Best of the Festival and Best Director. We look forward to continuing to screen No Tomorrow and bringing it to more audiences.

Inkblack is a passion project, which I’ve been working on for years. We finally have a pilot which I directed that we’re taking around the festival circuit. I love TV, and I’ve been devoted to the horror genre since I’ve been a kid watching the old Universal horror movies.

Taking place in the 1963, Inkblack focuses on Harris, the believer, and Violet, the skeptic, investigating an elaborate Satanic conspiracy which has pervaded their quaint college town. Think Twin Peaks meets The Exorcist. I relish doing it as a period piece since there exists that quaint veneer of safety in nostalgia, but when the horror starts going, it really blindsides you and draws you in its narrative. Audiences tend to remember past periods of time superficially and reduce all their innate complexities, so as a director, I wanted to repeatedly subvert the superficial “safeness” of the early 60s.

For awhile, we were working on Inkblack solely as a script, so it’s been amazing to get it on its feet and actually film the pilot. It would be my dream to continue the series and show more adventures of Harris/Violet. Believe me, we have some ideas on where we want the story to go! Future episodes would more explicitly tie in with social issues, from racism to sexism to corruption to police brutality that we still experience today. The real trick with any period piece is that it’s never just about the time period you’re portraying; yes, you’re showing that time period, but we’re using it to make some strong comments on our world today.

I was blessed as a director to have such a strong team of collaborators working on the pilot. My producer partner, Linh Pham-Santos, really grounded me as a director, allowing me to always be mindful of our future audience in whatever creative decisions I made. The lead actors, Gabe Armentano and Danica Lee Clauser, helped breathe more life into these characters who had previously only existed as black-and-white text. This is not to mention the extensive contributions of cinematographer Maxwell Geoffrey, co-editor Benjamin Goebel, writer Kevin Nittolo, and power duo composers: Hunter Hanson and Tristan Arostegui.

I look forward to bringing Inkblack to the festival circuit and hope you’ll see more to come.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Julian C. Santos. I direct and produce independent long-form content, but I also have a successful career doing commercial post-production. The son of two immigrants, with a Filipino identity rarely depicted in American cinema, I seek to amplify stories with less commonly heard voices: underdogs.

I got my degree at New York University’s Tisch Film program. My first feature at the age of 21, The Last Christmas Party, toured the festival circuit and was picked up for distribution . Since then, I’ve continued directing and producing. I recently directed a horror pilot called Inkblack and produced a Norwegian anti-war feature film, No Tomorrow, both on the festival circuit.

In both my directing and producing work, I try to find stories that subvert conventional narratives surrounding mainstream cinema, while remaining accessible to audiences.

I create humanist stories of characters struggling to do the right thing when they’re incentivized to give up. This expresses my struggles with belief, faith, and identity: a never-ending, Sisyphean tug of war. Despite an outwardly cynical worldview, I hold an optimist’s heart: a secret romantic.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

It’s funny, when you first start filmmaking, you have no idea what you can and can’t do. Your imagination is limitless. To paraphrase Orson Welles: Citizen Kane (one of the greatest films of all time) was only made because he didn’t know people’s conceptions of cinema’s limitations and ended up, in his ignorance, innovating so much of what makes great cinema today.

When I started making films in high school, I had ambitious ideas for noirs and period pieces, but over time, I tempered my expectations by focusing on work that was more down to earth. I thought kitchen sink dramas were the only things you can make on low budgets.

This is not to disparage down to earth dramatic indie films. My first feature, The Last Christmas Party, was a very grounded ensemble piece about six college students trying to find love at one very hectic party over the course of a seemingly never ending night. Nonetheless more recently, I feel closer to my inner high school filmmaker, with eyes wide open eager to create ambitious projects.

Inkblack, the retro horror pilot, I directed was thought to be impossible. It’s a full length episode as well as a period piece. For that reason, we spent so much time looking at it as solely a script, impossible to be made unless we got seriously large-scale funding. Yet in finding true collaborators who believed in the project and bringing in key lessons learned from the experience of making Last Christmas Party, we created the pilot which we can now freely show people on the festival circuit. Inkblack was a dream I thought impossible made a reality and it was a joy to see it not as a PDF in black and white text but rather a pilot to be experienced by audiences on screen.

No Tomorrow followed a similar ethos. It was an anti war film made independently that I produced. I was so impressed by the scope of writer/director/actor Martin Drop’s vision and what the film was able to achieve. It stands as a truly impressive feat that I hope audiences will enjoy on the festival circuit. Like with Inkblack, there were a lot of naysayers who said it couldn’t be done, yet the movie is finished. I believed in Martin and I’m proud that we kept pushing the boundary of what we could do.

Technological innovation has played a great role in this. Consumer grade digital cameras have gotten better at lower price points, LED lights allow you flexibility you didn’t have before with crew sizes, and sound gear has gotten simultaneously smaller and of higher quality. I keep my eye on developments in technology because they inform how far I can push my filmmaking.

Lest we forget, Breathless – the core 1960 film that started the French New Wave – only became practical because of changing technologies. We live in an era where every year brings an abundance of new filmmaking tools, and any filmmaker must necessarily keep up or be left behind.

After all, we’re always striving after those passion projects— that which we could not have hoped to achieve yesterday.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Films are magic. 24 frames a second played in sequence to emulate motion, they transport audiences to both far off and familiar worlds to experience the journey of amazing characters. Watching movies is a wondrous experience and one that’s stuck with me since I was a child. It was only natural in loving movies that I wanted to make them. As a producer, I facilitate getting talented artists’ visions realized to the screen; as a director, I put my own dreams (and nightmares in the case of my horror work) up on that screen.

Filmmaking introduces you to a host of collaborators- artistic allies in the mission to create cinema. I could not have possibly imagined how many cool visionaries that I might meet along the way. There are so many stories out there, and independent cinema is a wellspring to which I return again and again to hear new voices, see new tricks and learn new things about the world.

I don’t think my wonder for cinema will ever go away and I hope that it’s the same way for audiences out there.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://juliancsantos.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_technicolor_julian/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julian-carlo-santos-59a780118?
• Other: No Tomorrow IG: https://www.instagram.com/no_tomorrow_film/

Image Credits

Frozen Fjord Productions (No Tomorrow)
Luna Light Pictures (Inkblack)