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

Nathan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

Reckless Mercy is a feature film that we completed in November of 2024. However, the original concept for the film was mapped out in 1989 in a notebook while I was in college. I had wanted to write a story to pay homage to my friendship with a guy who had recently entered my life and made a huge impact on me. The story was about a psychologist who is charged with entering a jail in an attempt to get an alleged murderer to open up and talk to his pubic defender. The film’s central question was whether or not you could forgive someone for murder. The story didn’t get past about 20 written notebook pages, though, and it sat in my trunk for years.

Fast forward to 2023, I was speaking with Drew Adams, a former video student of mine who was now in film school, and I asked if he would be interested in working on a new film with me. He asked what sort of story, and I told him to go through my junk drawer to see if there was anything that stood out to him. He pulled out this story from 1989 and said he was interested in it. I was beside myself, because since the writing of that original story I had now lived through a lot of what that story was about.

In 2009 my 10-year-old daughter, Meah, was murdered by my ex-wife’s new boyfriend, who happened to be an EMT with the local fire department – someone charged with saving lives. It shattered my world and left me unable to continue working in film for a period of 12 years, as I took custody of and raised my two surviving children. Shortly after the man’s trial, in which he was sentenced to life in prison, I encountered a song on the radio by J.J. Heller, titled “What Love Really Means,” and it unexpectedly left me feeling compassion and sorrow for Meah’s killer. Over the next few years I worked through learning how to forgive him for what he had done, and in 2015 he wrote me a letter from prison apologizing for killing her and asking me to forgive him. I wrote him back and told him that I had.

Now, in 2023, I was holding this story in my hands again. With fresh eyes and a genuine understanding of the subject matter, I went back to finish writing the screenplay. Many of the original elements remained intact, but the dialogue was now informed from many of my personal experiences, thoughts, and feelings as I dealt with this difficult topic. I assembled a crew of college film students to run the set, and I oversaw the production of the film during the summer of 2024. Writing the screenplay had been cathartic for me, but actually hearing the lines spoken on set was jarring for me. There were days in set when the difficult feelings I had experienced resurfaced, and I had to work through them all again. By the end of the production, though, I would say I was a positive experience shooting the film and getting the message out to the world – that forgiveness is possible, and it is liberating.

We have screened the film for a number of live audiences, and every time we have received an overwhelmingly positive response. People have come up to me afterwards and have expressed a desire to forgive someone who has hurt them deeply, and for me this makes it worth everything I went through to get the film made. It has gone on to be selected a a number of film festivals and is now streaming on Amazon Prime Direct.

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 life has seemed like a crooked road with unexpected twists and turns that have hijacked my dreams. However, looking back on it all now I can see a straight line to a fulfilling career that I could have never conceived on my own without these major life events.

I began as a film major at Ohio State University in 1988, but in the middle of the program the university decided to dismantle the program. At the same time I was feeling the call to the ministry, so I changed my major to French to become a foreign missionary. However, after 7 years of preparing for the mission field my daughter Meah was born with special needs, and her health prevented us from leaving the country. I used my knowledge of French to begin teaching at a high school, and I also began delving back into independent film. I co-wrote a movie with a college friend, titled “Parchegona,” and we released it in 2002. I held a screening of it at my school, and the administrator was so impressed that he asked me to begin teaching a video class the following school year. From that point on was a French/Video high school teacher.

The next film I worked on was “In Other Words,” about a deaf boy and a blind girl who fall in love. I had planned on shooting the film myself, but I met a distant cousin that year who owned and operated a semi-pro camera, and he was doing such phenomenal work with it that I stepped back and gave him the reigns to the project and simply worked as a producer. It was new territory for me, and I learned a lot about what producing entails. The film encountered many delays, and although we had begun shooting it in 2004, we didn’t wind up with a workable edit until early 2009.

That same year I wrote A Story For Winter, a film to honor special needs children like my daughter, Meah. I planned to shoot it that summer, but just four months later Meah was killed, and I had to put my life on hold. Over time I attempted to get the project off the ground again, but I could never get the funding that I felt I needed. I had all but given up hope on ever shooting the movie until a number of incredible things all converged in 2020. First, Drew Adams (who worked with me on “Reckless Mercy”) turned in a video project that looked incredible, and he hadn’t borrowed the school cameras, so I asked him what he had used. He told me he had done it on his iPhone. I was unaware that the camera technology had advanced that much, and I realized that it was possible to consider shooting my feature film inexpensively on the iPhone. Secondly, another student turned in a music video that starred Adam Ashton, an amazing young actor also from our school, who seemed perfect for the lead role. Thirdly, I contracted COVID-19 that year at the age of 50, and I experienced an existential crisis – I wasn’t getting any younger, and I wasn’t promised tomorrow. If I were ever going to shoot the film, now was the time. In 2021 I picked up my iPhone 12 and shot A Story For Winter with a volunteer cast. The entire film only cost about $3000 to shoot, and it looked better than anything I had previously produced. We submitted it to Amazon Prime Direct, and I was shocked when I learned that it had been accepted. It opened a whole new era of filmmaking for me.

I immediately began developing “The Name of the Sun,” and this time I decided to use a number of students who had graduated from my high school and had gone on to various colleges to pursue degrees in the performing and technical arts, including Adam Ashton from the previous film. I had intended on producing and directing the film, but Adam was proving to be an incredibly talented young man who had the desire and the gift to co-produce and direct the film himself. I began stepping back, as I had done on “In Other Words and took on the role of producer. It was about this time that the sum of all of my life experiences began to converge. I realized that if I had gone to Hollywood in the 90’s to pursue filmmaking my career would not have been as fulfilling as this. Also, if I hadn’t trained for the ministry, I would have never approached filmmaking in this manner – as an outreach to young filmmakers to help them establish their careers. It all finally made sense.

And that is what PRAUS Media is – a non-profit that seeks to tell stories of significance that positively impact our world and to provide emerging filmmakers with experience in shooting film and video productions. Colleges give students the opportunity to shoot shorts, but I am able to give them experience in shooting a feature film. This is something that will be posted on Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) and something they can list on their resumes to help them get a head start on their careers after graduation.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My first two films were slasher films, shot when I was in high school. I killed just about every member of my family in those films, and at the time it was a lot of fun. However, early in my college days I began to reevaluate my purpose in life and what I was going to contribute. There is already so much darkness in this world, and I decided that I would never add to that by shooting another horror film. My films would all end with a positive message of hope. This has driven my creative journey ever since the early 1990’s. However, I don’t believe everything should be as whitewashed and saccharine as a Hallmark movie. Our recent films have addressed some very dark topics in a very gritty manner, but in the end they still offer a message of hope.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

As most young filmmakers do, I had dreams of winning an Oscar one day. I watched the Oscars religiously every year and even wrote an acceptance speech as my final project for a college speech class. My desire to win awards continued for many decades after this, but within recent history I have had to reevaluate the importance of awards. As we began completing our feature films and putting them up for film festivals, it struck me that the purpose of these events was to get our work out in front of other filmmakers in hopes of receiving their approval and possibly winning an accolade from them. However, in private screenings of our films, the audience member reactions were positive, and the feedback that I was receiving from them was noticeably more impactful. I began to realize that the films didn’t need to reach festivals as much as they needed to reach an audience. I am not discounting the benefit of participating in festivals, and we still do, but my focus is more on gaining the positive reactions of an audience than accolades from my peers.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.prausmedia.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/prausmediafilms/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NJWeidner
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan-weidner-8bab0b46/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@prausmedia9874

Image Credits

All photos taken by myself.