We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Oliver Caspersen. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Oliver below.
Oliver, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us 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?
On a film set you don’t know what’s going to happen from one moment to the next, something could come up and bite your ass in any given moment, something you never even saw. But you have to be at ease with that fact. And you have to just get on with the act. You may experience some magic, it may all seem like hell, but afterwards, when all is said and done, you may find some magic up there on the screen, you didn’t see on the spot, when you were shooting on location or on the set. You see, a certain inexplicable alchemy happens, like magic. This is where the creative pursuits differ from developing technology or the sciences perhaps where things may seem more abstract, more intricate, more detailed, and yet they are actually simpler. I recently read an interview with a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur who had gone into filmmaking and he actually said something along the lines of tech being easier than making films, that filmmaking is actually very humbling. And it is, extremely humbling. With actual filmmaking, there is no room for egos. I learned that too, as I ate defecated artifacts everyday on set, metaphorically, mostly. Then distributors will burn you if you’re not careful. I thought I was being careful after four and a half years of work on my western FEAR BLOOD & GOLD. Then the sales agent took me for a ride, promised a theatrical distribution (unfortunately I didn’t get it in writing), all manner of things, said it was in Cannes when it wasn’t, all for them to release it, redubbing all the main actors with different actors themselves without telling me, and not even informing me of the release until two months after the fact when I inquired, and I directed the thing, produced it, spent almost five years on it. Then got squat from making it. The con artists in the sales game. If you are curious about the film, check it out free on my youtube, the “director’s cut”. Don’t waste any resources on seeing it any other way, the filmmakers will receiving nothing, nor will the cast (who got overdubbed without even the director’s permission, or even consultation, in the first place). After that lark of an experience, I did a cartoon based on Donald Trump’s first four years in office, called AGENT ORANGE. Not pro Trump or anti Trump, but just an honest look at his time in office in cartoon form, after I started posting trailers for it, I started getting death threats. I mean, it’s not even anti Trump. And don’t those people making the threats realize they’ve only been emboldened throughout their lives to be who they are because they came up in a land of liberty, not a dictatorship. Same reason I cartoon about a king-to-be, I guess. I learned from the process of making that film to just let go all preconceived ideas of what a film should be and let the film “make itself” as it were. If you trust in the process, a film will find its own way, what it wants to be, and be much better for it, if you can get out of your own way while you’re serving the film, the process. So that film’s not getting released. Now I’m partway through the shoot of a film called BLOODLANDER about the reality of nonhuman intelligence and the multidimensionality a lot of humans deal with, sometimes tragically in this world. It’s about a man who lives as a video game coder in one dimension while being an F35 fighter pilot who engages in aerial skirmishes with UFOs much like the recently released Pentagon footage of such encounters by various kinds of military pilots. This is mixed with the day-to-day reality of how some people deal with non-human intelligence infiltrating their personal lives and affecting them in certain ways, sometimes on the periphery, on the very outskirts of consciousness. Anyway, I try to stick to light subjects in my movies. As Bertold Brecht once said, All things can be achieved, all forms of emotion, all moods, via shades of lightness. I think that extends beyond acting into all things we do as people, and if we remembered this and that this life is more in the nature of a dream than some kind of bizarre reality, we’d all be a lot freer and better off. This is what all true art at least tries to explore, and at best tries to establish, I think.
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’ll do my best. I’m nobody and nothing from nowhere and everywhere. I blow in and away with the wind. Some have called this “fly by night” but I don’t really know. No, I’m not sure what that means. At least, in relation to this. There are so many misunderstandings in life. No one can truly understand anyone else. Who can see through another’s eyes? Perhaps some of the mystics who meditate in the Himalayas in Nepal and Northern India. And when they’ve reached that stage of enlightenment, I’m sure they’re more than aware that nothing so transient as anything in this world is actually “real” in the true sense of the world. Beyond that? When people say they know someone, does that more or less mean they know certain boundaries of behavior and action the person will limit themselves to in any given moment? Do these kind of people change? Aren’t we always changing? This mind, “me”, appears like a kaleidoscope of dreams projected onto a holographic screen before “consciousness”, but what even is that? What does it mean? Personal identity: this body & mind studied film in London, really as an excuse to travel Europe and collect mind impressions of an enigmatic, senseless world. I learned America doesn’t make sense at an early age. Our culture, our traditions, all nonsense at best, but traveling I learned that while America may be likened to an insane sick child with a machinegun and the rest of the world knows it, they don’t make a whole lot more sense than we do to begin with. Their nonsense is just older, different. I’m not great at describing all this. For more specific and well-defined utterances, I would refer you to Henry Miller, specifcally, what I consider perhaps the greatest of all literary lights, his beautiful SEXUS. What a book? My granny introduced me to him, and he is surpassing. I’ve never encountered a mind on paper quite like that. He transcends everything. He was one of the few I could say attained true mastery of the world in one lifetime, and if you don’t believe me, read SEXUS. I dare you. He, as few actors have since, turned personality into an art form. Humphrey Bogart may have done this on the screen, so may have Marlon Brando, or Fanny Ardant, or big Jack Nicholson (specifically in THE LAST DETAIL or THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS). Being exposed to these forms of surpassing art, whether in the form of acting or words on some pages, this informed my world view, informed the challenges I would take to try and discover a kind of mastery. I may never achieve it, I certainly haven’t to date, but to play in the fields that these masters played in. To see what they encountered, the challenges they faced, the ways the may have had to interact to get along and do their thing. There has been nothing more inspiring. Read that book, see these movies, they can open new worlds for you, if you’ll let them.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
Goal or mission. Hmm. Good question. I never thought about it like that. That’s like when I was younger and people would ask me if I’m happy. I wouldn’t no what to say, but the truth: I never thought about it that way. Happiness was never a concern of mine. Not something to aim for. Does that mean I’m happy already? Maybe. Am I interested enough to try to find out? Not really. Discovery would be the mission on a film set. Finding that tone or rhythm that becomes the vibration of the place-time-people you’re interpreting on the screen. And not necessarily finding what you’re looking for. You can start by not looking for things, in other words: you know what isn’t working and you eliminate those things and delete them by calling cut and shooting it again after saying why it’s not working in whatever terms you can that you think will be intelligible, hopefully, to the others you work with. Often inexperienced cast or crew will read this as either insecurity or “not knowing” what you want (which is true, but that isn’t the wrong way of doing it) or not knowing your job. But I believe the best films are found serendipitously. The writer-director’s job is to set up situations among people which allow for the most serendipity to happen on screen, in the edit, wherever. It’s the one time, saying “I don’t care what happens” actually works out best (as long as you know when IT’S NOT what you want. Then when the magic happens, you say “AHA! There it is. That’s what this mythical animal is trying to be. Really, when we’re seriously directing, we’re sussing out ghosts. We’re finding their contours. We’re discovering an invisible intelligent entity that’s talking to us, trying to reveal itself, but this being can be tricky, and will remain ever elusive, mysterious, but we’ve got to coax it just enough. It was like, I remember reading a recent article in the Guardian (British paper) about Francis Coppola making his magnum opus called MEGALOPOLIS. Some of the crew questioned whether he’d ever made a film before, whether he had any idea what he was doing. They said he’d go into his trailer and smoke grass (Peace, good Francis, if you’re reading this!) and then he’d emerge hours later, not knowing what he wanted. But this is how it’s done. This is how the best directors do it. This is mastery. Feigning confidence and acting like your film came out great because you went there knowing exactly what you wanted and willed it that way…? That’s all clever marketing, but it isn’t real. So, I guess my answer to this question is: my mission is to throw away all planning for how to shoot, how scenes should go, and find it all when I get there. It takes real stones to do that, true brass cojones, but you know there aren’t really that many great directors out there, fewer and fewer, I believe. And this is the singular reason cinema is dying on the vine. There really is no other reason. In his seventies now, Jim Jarmusch may have been the last great director. Why? I ask you.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Henry Miller, I think, don’t quote me on this, had a sign hanging over his typewriter that said “F- everything” or something along those lines. I think just waking up everyday, taking a first breath and then all the breaths after that, against my better judgment, feels like resilience enough. That and everyone else telling me I’m doing everything wrong all my life. But I keep doing it wrong. Perhaps I’m just wrongheaded. But I wouldn’t trade that for anything. In my view, with my attitude in life, I’ve experienced things I never dreamed because my attitude toward life has always been (1) it’s a dream and (2) what Henry Miller’s sign said over his typewriter. You want me to share a story. My life in sum reflects that. I’ve been told I don’t care about money by my friends and family, only to get sued by them when I suddenly appeared to have an abundance of money right after that. This is when I learned the utmost importance of not talking about money, whether you’ve got it or not, let them speculate. Money turns people ugly. Of course, if you’re Larry Ellison flaunt it. No one can touch you if you’re Larry Ellison. Then I was accused of thinking I was a genius because I may have gotten money in ways they thought weren’t possible. I’m not a genius. I’ve just got some imagination and I like to use it. I certainly haven’t “made it”. I’m just a bum. I’ll always be a bum. Whether I’ve got $16 million or I’m in debt $16 million or I’m Scott Free with nothing (the ideal state in my mind), I’ll always be a bum. Having finished the Trump cartoon and feeling some success and gratitude for the Apple gadgets I used to make it with, I wrote Tim Cook (billionaire CEO of Apple) a brief note expressing my gratitude for these different do-dads he oversaw the making of. I didn’t expect a response, but I wanted to write him. And he wrote me back. I was walking on air for a week because I thought “Tim Cook, gee, now there’s someone…talking to little old me.” I guess that perhaps illustrates some of the resilience of my wrongheadedness. My resilience is in maintaining that life is just a dream no matter how hard it tries to fool me otherwise.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm8487586
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oliverlander26/
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- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliver-caspersen-253640255/
- Twitter: https://x.com/oli43443
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCNEtgsr_-RBnmRGhD4RaAGw
Image Credits
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