We recently connected with Martin R. McGowan and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Martin, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I’ve written and directed three projects since 2016, and the most meaningful has either been the first project, Abigail (2018), or my most recent project, Ava (2023).

My first short film Abigail was started as a sort of bet to myself. I’d been interested in filmmaking for years, and in 2015 after a homeless program, graduating high school, and a major living shift, I had saved enough money to buy a camera. Abigail was the project that I wrote in that tumultuous time, and while it’s not the best film I’ve made (it’s actually the worst, by default), I have a soft spot for it, and I think the ambition and joy behind it is commendable.

The most recent project, Ava, is something else entirely. While Abigail was a short that was written from a place of emotional and literal isolation, Ava was a film that started as a story by my wife. When she brought it to me in 2018 or so, I spent a year mulling it over before committing at the end of 2019 to write it, and shoot it in 2020 as my “debut feature”.
Obviously nothing was shot in mid-2020, but I had already cast the lead actresses by March 2020, so we ended up having an additional year to change the characters around to better fit the actors, and by July 2021 when we finally shot it the shooting went so smoothly that we wrapped 2 days early. The film was shot for about $200, in 10 days, on a script that I wrote living in the house that my wife and I bought right before the world shut down. it doesn’t get more emotionally resonant than that I think.

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.

My name is Martin R. McGowan, I’m an American filmmaker based in Reading, Pennsylvania (pronounced Redd-ing, not reading), and in 2023 I premiered my first feature film Ava to a small, but sold out crowd of friends, teachers, and a whole lot of complete strangers. By the time Ava finally screened, I had spent 2.5 years with it in various states of watchability on my laptop, during that time I was unemployed, then employed, and dealing with the financial and emotional fallout of the pandemic, but by the end I was just really really tired.

I’m a writer/director, so Ava had been with me since at least 2019 when I finally started to write, but really it had been with me since I met my wife, who originated the idea, and she first told me about it. We just celebrated our seventh anniversary so at this point the idea for Ava should at least be in 2nd Grade.

I’ve only recently gotten over the feeling of pretentiousness that comes with calling yourself a “Filmmaker” while working a day job. A coworkers young kid once asked the very pertinent question while Ava was being made: “If you make movies, why do you work here?”
Good question. But also ouch.
I decided to call myself a filmmaker with confidence because, despite where I get the money to pay my mortgage, I have made films, and I will continue to make more. The title is a function of what I’ve done, and what I aspire to do, not what my bank statement says.

Throughout my relatively quick life (I’ll be twenty eight shortly after writing this), I’ve experienced fairly severe and consistent poverty, instability at home, outright homelessness, and the repeated collapse of established family dynamics.
That sucks, and it still hurts, but it’s a fact of my life now. What I’ve learned from that is a sense of empathy, and a sense that these painful things that happened to me are not to be put up on some pedestal as “achievements”, nor are they to be tossed aside and buried. They’re to be accepted, and acknowledged, and then I move forward with those facts about me. I’m not sure what I want to be known as, but I know I don’t want to be someone defined by things that happened to me, but by the things I did. I think Ava is my best work, my most ambitious, and the most naked. There’s a lot of me in there that may not be obvious (the main character is a 17 year old girl, I am not either of those things), but they are there. I’d like to be remembered as a filmmaker, rather than defined by what has been done to me.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Since I was a kid I’ve been pretty isolated, usually by choice. Even now, I don’t have a very long list of friends or close acquaintances, even if we count my four siblings. Outside of filmmaking, I’m usually completely silent. Which is all fine by me. That being said, the ability to write a film, then to wrangle together a team of incredible collaborators who take these initial ideas and bring them to places I could have never brought them to, gives me a profound sense of community that I don’t get usually.
To then take that finished work, and be able to see it as not just “mine”, but “ours”, and then have a crowd react to it the way you’d only ever hoped? It’s a high I’ll be chasing for the rest of my life.
You haven’t lived until you’ve heard 150 people laugh in unison through bittersweet tears at a DILF joke you wrote three years earlier.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Up until VERY recently, I had planned to shoot my feature film follow-up to Ava this summer, 2024., and had begun casting and moving full speed towards that goal. It was sprung on me suddenly that that wasn’t advisable, at least if I wanted to do it that way I want to do it. In order to raise a budget, and get the location, and all that other stuff that comes with sustainably producing a feature film, even a low budget one, we need time, and something to show.
Ava is that thing we can show, and now we need the time to show it.

After the premiere we began submitting Ava to select film festivals across the US and a few internationally. No one knows if we’ll be accepted to any, but if we want the next thing to be great, this is where we’ll find the people to make it great.

This is the first time since at least 2016 where I haven’t had a project to roll into, and while I’m sure it’s good for me, it’s also thrown me completely off balance. I have no idea what I’ll do with 2024, and in a way that’s exciting, in another it’s very, very scary. Right now I’ve started working on a short film, my first in six years, and my goal is to try and get it made in a completely new way (for me). I don’t know what it’ll be, or if the film will ever be released, but it’s a great change of pace to be making something without the pressure of making it a feature.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://linktr.ee/mrmfilm
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mrmfilm
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MartinRMcGowan