We recently connected with Monty Miranda and have shared our conversation below.

Monty , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

Somehow since graduating from the Journalism and Film School at the University of Colorado, I have made my living as a director, producer, and writer of feature films, television, documentaries, music videos, and commercials or promo/ads.

This is the only way I have made a living. From day one, I have never had a job outside of this profession. Some stories in the creative or entertainment worlds may reference an early “day job” that enabled them to pursue their passion. I am blessed in that my day job has always been as a director / filmmaker.

At the University of Colorado, I had an epiphany that filmmakers / directors had to come from somewhere…why can’t this be me? I also learned at age 19 while interning on my first movie set that no matter how great a “crew” person I was, I had to be focused on directing my own work or I would never be a director or filmmaker. I somehow knew early on that due to the fact that I had less than zero connections in my choice to become a director, I would have to create work for myself. This is something I still do today.

Another positive path I took while at the University was that I knew that so many people in creative careers started with the aforementioned ‘day jobs’. I was deathly afraid of becoming stuck in one of these ‘day jobs’. My thought was that if I could learn to make TV commercials, that this would be an excellent way to also learn how to become a better director. A great commercial can tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. It can be funny, sad, and make you think, so I saw these effective narrative commercials as simply a short film. If I can direct commercials at the beginning, this would be an excellent path forward.

My journey was such that I am indebted to these words of advice, ‘One step at a time.’ Had I seen the full picture of what had to happen to complete this vision, I would have become completely paralyzed. This is true for directing my first movie and getting it released theatrically, to booking my first TV commercial project as Director, Writer, Producer.

Immediately following my graduation from CU – Boulder, I rented an office inside a post-production facility and started my first production company. Now I just had to find a job to direct. That’s one step.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am going to start by sharing my micro bio that appears at the top of my web sites and also appears in all of my pitch decks.

SXSW and Cannes Award-Winning director Monty Miranda directs and produces movies, series, commercials, and documentaries around the world. He has worked with such talents as Daryl Hannah, Noah Wyle, Spike Lee, Tony Hawk, Anthony Davis, Danny Trejo, music artists from John Mayer to Dead & Co and even US Senator John Hickenlooper. Miranda has directed television and feature films across the US as well as internationally. When not directing, Monty can sometimes be found behind another camera shooting photos for the glossy pages Vogue to the not so glossy pages of Deadline Hollywood.

My work is driven by a good story. This is my goal on every project; this is what compels me to create motion pictures from WILD HORSES and NASA ASTRONAUTS to BANK ROBBERS. The connective thread is story.

FILM, FILM, and TELEVISION WORK directed by Monty Miranda

‘SKILLS LIKE THIS’ (Best Narrative Feature Film SXSW)
Dark Comedic Drama

’24 SEVEN’ (originally released as THE INSOMNIAC)
Psychological Thriller starring Danny Trejo and John Heard

‘AMERICAN MUSTANG’
Documentary on the history of WILD HORSES in North America, narrated by Daryl Hannah

‘ADOPTABLE!’ (Miami Best of the Fest, Best Mockumentary)
TV Series Mockumentary comedy with Scott Lowell and Noah Wyle and many more

‘TWITCH’
The first original TV series on video games released in 1995

Forthcoming work from Director Monty Miranda

‘STARGAZER’
Documentary featuring NASA Astronaut Col. Eileen Collins, the first female shuttle commander

The film tells the rise of historic NASA AIRCRAFT, L-300 and The Kuiper Airborne Observatory, credited with discovering the rings surrounding Uranus, to its final days at NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER as PLANETAGS preserves the FLIGHT DECK and key elements of the aircraft for Aviation prosperity.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

A huge reward for me is the meaningful connection with an audience. My favorite works of art or film can and do not always fall into the area of the most commercial mainstream or popular works. In my opinion, the very best art many times may be divisive, so when I inspire or connect with a viewer and my work really connects with them, this is the greatest reward.

Another amazing, albeit more selfish, reward is my experience in the creation of my work. When I begin a project, I dive deep into research and begin to live in the world of which I am creating. You can imagine that these stories can and will go anywhere, and the world in which I am living, during the creation and my shooting life, is very close and directly related to the story I am telling.

If I am telling the story of the WILD HORSE, no doubt I will be living in that world, so I may be living as a Western cowboy on a ranch in a bunkhouse. If I am telling a dark story with murder, my experience is dark, and I have to, in a sense, live this bad, scary life. Given that my work has taken me around the world in telling these stories, I have lived as a king, while filming in Florence, Italy, telling the story of how to experience the very best vacation. Then, the next project, I am living as a roughneck on the road, crashing in an outbuilding in a sleeping bag with no mod cons. Every day, every project is different. These are all valid and enlightening experiences that I learn so much from. I have found myself with people in the most challenging life situations, and I get to work with and know a NASA ASTRONAUT, the first-ever female space shuttle commander. I get to work with the very best, most talented people one day, and then the next, I am working with people with no breaks in life and are faced with daily life challenges. I am thankful for all of these experiences.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

RESILIENCE

In my experience, nothing better illustrates this question than the process that led to the creation and release of my first feature film. This experience also showcases this ‘One Step at a Time’ process that I continue to use. A process that works partially because it keeps you naive along the way. Had I known the insurmountable tasks and success I had to achieve to make it across that finish line, which in this case, would be the theatrical release of a movie that I directed, I likely would not have started the journey. The “One Step…” gives you blinders. I helps focus. I had a dream since starting film school to make a feature film that would be released theatrically and make its way onto televisions around the world. I had success in the TV commercial world, but despite the similarities, the two worlds work much differently from a business sense.

I had very few connections in the MOVIE WORLD. I did not know where to even start. I forced it down to the barest necessity to get started. This was the fact that I needed a screenplay. Okay, this is STEP ONE. Then I needed a PRODUCER, a producer who would handle the business end in procuring money to get a movie made. This would be STEP TWO. Now that I have a screenplay and a producer, I learn that our screenplay is not strong enough, so I now need to create a better, stronger, filmable screenplay. Working with the writer, we need to solve some plot and character problems, this is STEP THREE. Next up, money, how do we raise money? This is a lot of money. The movie is an indie, but it is still needs a lot of money. Okay, STEP FOUR is raise the money. My idea was to make a movie trailer for this non-existent movie. This trailer needed to be so good and strong that once people with money, saw the trailer, they would want to see the movie and learn that the movie did not exist. If I could be successful at this, then and only then, would they be compelled to put money into our proposed movie. STEP FIVE is to make an amazing movie trailer. STEP SIX is to get this movie trailer in front of people who have the money to put into the risky endeavor of independent film. Fortunately, in about a month, my trailer attracted the eyes of a known ARTIST MUSICIAN who pledged to invest. Now we had a lot of the money, but we are still on this STEP FOUR: raise money. Fortunately, the remaining monies came within a month of our first pledged investment.

We had the full budget. We were GREEN LIT in our little indie world. I am not going to include the thousands of steps needed to make the movie; from location scouting to casting, so I am going to simply call making the movie STEP EIGHT, shoot the movie. Part of which includes filming this movie in just 17 days. A large portion of my past experience makes this seem impossible. I sometimes have three days to shoot a :30 commercial. This is nuts. Of course we figured this out, somehow… and after some amazing luck and some even more amazing hard work from amazingly talented people, we got the movie shot. STEP NINE I will call “edit the movie,” and we did this by working pretty much non-stop for some four months. This includes using very specific music and songs that I had chosen to serve as my score or soundtrack. Many of these songs were by artists I had grown to love that were new and starting their journey, but some of these songs were big, with bigger record labels attached…I will get back to this.

In an effort to more quickly end my tale of resilience, I am going to editorialize my steps in outline.

TEN – get accepted into a top-tier film festival
ELEVEN – get into said film festival competition
TWELVE – sell out all screenings during the festival
THIRTEEN – win a top-tier film festival award
FOURTEEN – get on the radar of film distributors
FIFTEEN – sell the movie to a distribution company that will release it theatrically, during the worst financial crisis since the Depression that was knocking out independent film distributors faster than home loans
SIXTEEN – license all music handpicked for officialrelease, in perpetuity. Somehow I was able to do this with luck, a lot of emails, favors from friends of friends, pure stubbornness, and many, many emails.
SEVENTEEN – with a budget of about five dollars, package and market the movie for release theatrically.
EIGHTEEN – Package and market the movie for cable, streaming, and broadcast distribution.
NINETEEN – Let’s start working on a foreign release now…

This, I believe, provides an overview to the steps and illustrates how I leaned into the “One Step at a Time” process. Had I known all of these steps necessary to successfully make my way to the finish line, I am fairly certain I would have been stopped in my tracks.

When making your first movie, NAIVETY is golden.

I am going to close with an answer I once gave to a successful doctor who was just dying to make movies. He had passion, money, and he wanted to make this feature film. He asks me, ” How do you get a movie made?” After some thought on my experiences, my recall from the books and stories I have consumed, they all had a vastly different path, but they all had one thing in common, in fact, there was only one common denominator. My simple answer was, “Don’t Quit.“ I have no better answer today.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://montymiranda.com/
• Instagram: @montymiranda
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/monty.miranda
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/montymiranda
• Twitter: montymiranda
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@StrummerBlack
• Other: https://bombshellpictures.com/

  Official Company site

Image Credits

First photo with Noah Wyle Scott Lowell
Last photo Monty and Directors Chair Deepicka Mehta