We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Michael Kellman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Michael below.
Michael, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
I learned by doing, and I really believe that’s the only way to learn. You can read about basketball all you want, but until you’re out there practicing free throws, you aren’t getting any better at playing it. I got a little bit better with every script I wrote and every short film that I made. With filmmaking especially, you have to <i>make</i> the mistakes to learn from them. There’s only a small number of the many classic pitfalls you can avoid by listening to the advice of others. For 90% of those pitfalls, you have to fall victim to them yourself to avoid them in the future. I could have sped up my learning process by making more films and doing so earlier in my life. I made my first short at about sixteen, and didn’t make another until I was nineteen. If you want to learn fast the best thing you can possibly do is make project after project. Get all the major mistakes out early. I dropped out of film graduate school to make my first feature because I realized I was only learning when we were making something, and I could simply do that on my own. One skill that can be overlooked is editing. If you want to be a director, or even a producer, learn to edit. If you want to be a screenwriter, write. Write fifty scripts – for shorts, web series, television, full features – then you can start thinking about if your writing is any good. Until then, you’re just learning how to shoot the basketball.
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?
I’ve always been completely enamored with stories. My parents would always read me to sleep at night, and as soon as I could read on my own, I did. When I was in elementary school I read all the books in the library on a few topics, and then proceeded to badger the librarian every so often, asking her whether knew books on said topics had come in. The same goes for movies and television. Watching movies together was a big thing for our family, and I was taken in by the screen. I’ve always found it amazing that a story that ostensibly has nothing to do with you as a viewer can evoke such strong emotional responses. It’s such a huge part of what makes us uniquely human. When I was about sixteen I began to think maybe film could be the career path for me, and by eighteen I was sure. I have a particular love for comedy, and in college I was the president of the improvisational comedy group. We did something like sixty shows during my time. I am a writer, director, producer, editor, and sometimes actor. I could find adjectives to describe my work but the only really useful description of it would come from a depiction of it. Watching some of it, in other words. I have a slightly… off-kilter sensibility. A little odd. I’m most proud of the best thing that I’ve created so far, which is a screenplay that I hope to get the opportunity to make someday. I am, at least so far, a bit of a hell-or-highwater filmmaker. Without any institutional support (thus far), I’ll figure out whatever I need to in order to make it happen. This is my passion, an enormous source of meaning for me, and what I’ve dedicated myself to. I care a lot.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
The first thing, and the easiest, is to go see movies in theaters! If people don’t, we will lose them forever. I, for one, think it’s a sad world in which we have no movie theaters. The second is to speak out against AI “art”. AI content will flood the market and continue to do so as long as it’s profitable for the corporations who make it. If there’s one thing that AI should not have control over, it’s art! Art is the thing we humans do to give ourselves meaning! The thing we do once we’re fed and watered. I’m not the least bit interested in a piece of “art” that comes from a server. I ask you: do you want to live in a world where 99% of all art is created by AIs, and only 1% by incredibly niche and therefore expensive artists? Are you not interested in the perspective of someone who has spent twenty years working on their craft? These AIs have been trained on the art generated by millions of human beings, and those people have been given nothing in return. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the most powerful people in the world, who can <i>well afford to compensate others</i>, helped himself to 80 terabytes worth of written human art for free, and when his own engineers raised concerns about whether or not it was ethical he silenced them and did his best to cover his own tracks. I urge you to Google it. This is bad. This is what’s going on. If you have any interest in human art, if you don’t want every song you listen to to be made by an algorithm, please: do not consume AI-generated content. Or if you do, for god’s sake don’t pay for it.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
The meaning that it gives me. I wake up every morning and feel as though I have a purpose: to make something and to improve. I’m someone who dearly needs that. If nothing else, the existence of art proves that humans have an urge to create. I have that urge, and being a creative allows me to satisfy it and, hopefully, have my own tiny effect on others.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @michael__kellman
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@michaelkellman42
