We were lucky to catch up with Marcus Baker recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Marcus, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
I’ve always been interested in being a creative. I did plays when I was a kid and used to make little movies with my friends growing up. In junior high and high school I kinda switched to music and wrote a lot of songs and played in bands. It wasn’t until high school that I really decided to focus on film. I saw The Dark Knight when I was 15 and I remember just being blown away that a film could not only entertain me but have so much to say about the world we lived in. I became obsessed with that film, and it ended up really becoming the prism through which I dove into reading about film. I was a terrible student in high school, you couldn’t get me to read a book or do my math homework, but I was so intensely curious about film that I would burn through whatever you put in front of me. I used to spend my lunches reading film criticism alone in my school’s annex, which sounds dorky, but it really just helped to grow my love of the medium.
Marcus, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’m a filmmaker based out of Seattle. I write and direct all my own projects. I started working in the film industry here in 2015 before moving to LA for a couple years in 2017. I’d always known I wanted to Write & Direct my own work but I didn’t start seriously pursing it until 2019 when I left freelancing and got a day job to keep me afloat. I made a bunch of little “student” shorts with my friends that year just to get back into the swing of things, before graduating to bigger shorts with my short film “Counterweight.” It played a few festivals in 2020 and one in 2022. I moved back to Seattle in 2020 and kept writing and working on projects.
We shot my most recent project here in 2022, a short film titled “One Hundred”. We’re gearing up for a festival run now. I’m really proud of the film and have (cautiously) high hopes for it. It’s the first time I’ve made something really in-line with what I want to do thematically as a filmmaker. On the surface it’s about a mother asking her daughter for money but if you dig into that at all, you find a hot bed of emotions and contradictions. Which is inevitable when you’re making a tough decision. In this case, it’s a value proposition. The main character, Alex, wants to move out but her mother, Nora, is someone who hasn’t been able to make it on her own. Alex doesn’t want to hang her mother out to dry. But at the same time, Nora isn’t the easiest person to live with. It becomes an issue of trust for them. Does Alex trust that her mother can change? Why?
I’ve had a lot friends watch it and tell me how much it reminded them of their relationships with their parents (which is as much a compliment to the movie as it is a little troubling). So the film certainly forces you to think about what you value in your own relationships and what decision you would make. I don’t think there’s an easy answer. Which is exactly what I want to do as a filmmaker. I want to ask questions without easy answers. I want to force people to think about the decisions they would make and why.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Pivoting from freelancing to a day job was tough. I think starting out, you’re so worried about just staying in the game as a filmmaker (not to mention keeping a roof over your head) that it’s easy to lose sight of your long term goals. I realized a few months after moving to LA that I really wasn’t doing what I wanted to do. I liked working in film, I met so many amazing people, but it was so time consuming working on set or in post production office that I really had no ability to make my own work. I knew I needed to write if I wanted to direct. I knew I had friends who would help me make things on the cheap. So I just tried to lean into those things. I got a job as a barista at Starbucks and just started pumping things out and forcing myself to learn how to make a movie. It was tough. Really tough. It also sucked to lose out on the money of freelancing. But it ended up being so liberating creatively. I don’t think I’d trade that for anything. It really taught me to value my creative freedom first and foremost. The money is never worth it in that trade off.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
Pay them. It sounds simple but anyone who has tried to finance any major task with their own money knows how impossible it is. With film in particular, it’s such an expensive medium to even begin with. Paying actors, crew, locations, equipment. It’s not cheap, even if you find ways to cut down on expenses. I’ve only self financed my work up til now and I’ve had to scrape and save every last dime trying to make the movies I make. I will make none of it back because no one pays for short films. But if I knew that I had access to some kind of funding? That would be a game changer.
We don’t have pipelines for developing artists like they did back in previous eras. Studios used to create Star vehicles for up and coming movie stars and they’d let up-and-coming directors cut their teeth that way. You kind of have that today with TV but again, just getting to that point requires a multitude of connections that is insanely hard to build if you’re not already coming from some kind of wealth. It really affects the quality of the art we get as well as the ecosystem of the form.
We need diversity of all forms in our arts. And the only way to do that, and to create a thriving eco-system for filmmakers of every stripe, is to lower the financial barrier for entry. You have to pay them and fund their work. Otherwise they’ll never get beyond a dusty corner on the internet.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://marcusbakerfilm.wixsite.com/main
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marcusbakerfilm/
- Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/marcusbakerfilm/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/marcusbakerfilm
- Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC-hvlYOh3tGqx1pUqlY-8tg
Image Credits
Kyle Fuhrmann