We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Philip DuDeVoire. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Philip below.

Alright, Philip thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career.

As I grow and learn about the industry and the career path I’ve chosen – which intersects with other industries in unique ways – I find that critical thinking is at the center of how every project gets done. Yes, there are standards and practices, guidelines and precedence to adhere to, but the magic of filmmaking is stored in knowing when to ask the question that someone else wouldn’t. When to take one step closer to the line without stepping over it, and when to admit you lack understanding and need to seek guidance from more informed professionals.

I think the American Education system quashes these feelings early on, to the point where students are afraid to ask questions, which stifles critical thinking. Maybe it’s the environment more than the system, but I suppose I believe the system creates the environment, so pick your poison.

The people in my life who I see as having found, or chasing success, are the ones who are willing to raise their hand when no one else would and say “But what if we tried this?”. They raise their hand knowing that they may be ridiculed for what they say, but they also know that they may have the slim chance of solving a problem that has alluded the rest of us. I think that concept of being ridiculed for a bad idea paralyzes people, and it makes them sit in their seats, happy to ride out being wrong with the crowd, instead of being right on their own.

Of course, I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t know what overhaul could happen that would make every child and teacher suddenly forget their instinct to hang with the pack, and instead be willing to throw caution to the wind in search of critical thinking. But I think support is how we start.

And I don’t mean the version of support that offers affirmation for every original idea. I mean support in the form of honesty, accountability, and trust to be told when you’re right, when you’re wrong, and how to tell when things fall between those lines.

I know you’ve heard this part a thousand times lately, but the way our education system is currently structured is focused on one thing: getting kids to college. From the day you start school, until you graduate, the whole system is built around binging information for a test, and then forgetting all that information the moment the test is over, so you can begin to binge for the next test. And we hold onto pieces of information, but most of it falls by the wayside. But if you do this, for 13 years, you can go to college, which is supposed to set you up for a job in the real world. A job that is becoming harder and harder to get, even with a degree, and all the while, we learn nothing about the real world, but suddenly we’re released into it.

So people go looking for a system that is familiar, the one they’ve been trained for their whole lives, and they find that there are actually all these other systems and ways to find success, but they have a 17-year investment in a previous system and it’s hard to let that go. That paralyzes people, and they get stuck.

And maybe it’s not the education system’s fault that that person didn’t realize sooner that they were on a track that only offers one stop. But when you’re told everyday for 17 years that the reason you need to do your homework is so you can do well on a test, so that you can go to college, because that’s the only way you can get a job, is that really on the 14 year old who is just trying to follow the rules?

Of course, the system can’t be 100 percent broken. I admire those who can go through the system and succeed, and do well, because I do believe it has the ability to give people stability and comfort. But stability and comfort does not lend me the opportunity to chase the things that I want to achieve.

This is clearly a long rant about something I feel deeply about, but here’s why: I was not a good student. I loved learning, I loved discovering new things, but the learning and discovering and passion I found, didn’t fit into the box that public school offered. Which made me feel like there was no chance for success in my life. So I had to go searching for it elsewhere, while also keeping up with a system that was moving in a different direction than I believed was beneficial to me. Somehow I went to college, not because I believed the learning in the classroom would be a benefit to me, but because it offered me a way to get close to the thing I always loved: filmmaking. And it did help me get closer to what I wanted, as well as offering me the opportunity to study things I cared about, instead of some random topic I couldn’t relate to.

It was a big risk, but it’s the path that I saw as the most feasible at the time. The town I was in wasn’t going to allow me the chance to advance in my career the way I hoped, and college is what I had been trained for, working toward, and offered me a way into a larger market (and a 4-year buffer from a real world I wasn’t ready for). And somehow I made it through. I missed a lot of days, leaving early for internships or going on shoots out of town (where the real learning was happening), but somehow I snuck across the line with a handful of debt and a general disdain for the idea of being an “Alumnus”.

In ways, I’m grateful to the system, as it offered me a way into what I wanted to do, but primarily, I believe it’s broken. I believe I was lucky to find my path in the nonsense. I was lucky my parents told me not to believe everything I hear, I was lucky to have a TV Production teacher in high school who encouraged me, and I was lucky to have a sister who has a better head on her shoulders than I do. I think the system teaches you how to work a 9-5, but if that’s not what you want, the only way to find your “thing” is to go searching for it.

Even if you don’t know what it is yet, just start looking. And don’t be afraid to ask questions that might seem silly.

That’s where the magic is.

Philip, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Hi there,

My name is Philip DuDeVoire, I’m a filmmaker living and working out of Nashville, Tennessee. I moved up to Nashville in July of 2019 from Tampa after graduating from college, just about 8 months before the bottom would fall out of all of our lives.

I’m 26, so I think I’m near the front edge of when kids started getting cell phones. My parents got me one because they worked a lot and I spent a lot of time running around my grandmas neighborhood and it was an easy way to find me. At some point the iPhone 3 came along and I suddenly had a camera in my pocket at all times. My friends were really into parkour at the time, and I was no good, so I would film, which I suppose is the earliest that making videos became really tangible to me.

My parents tell me that I used to run around with the VHS camera as toddler, and I don’t remember that, but maybe it’s true.

In 8th grade I got involved with a church that had a lot of live production going on, so I ported my burgeoning video skill, and my love for sports broadcasting into being at church every weekend. Learning about XLR’s and live streaming and hazers.

I did that all through high school, with the hope of being a sports commentator someday, since I never hit a growth spurt and being a pro baseball player was out the window.

In college, I got into the music scene and pretty hard out of the church scene in Tampa, and would tour with a band in the summers for a couple weeks at a time. I dove deeper into graphic design to help me with making titles and logos in an attempt to expand my skills outside of just the camera. Eventually I came across a production company in Tampa called “Diamond View” where I came on as an intern and got my first taste of large-scale commercial production. That’s where the ball really started to roll. I never imagined that making TV and movies was in my future, but this gave me access to the edges of the entertainment industry, and it solidified in me a hope to one day make large-scale productions.

Through my connections at the studio and access to gear, I began shooting more legitimate music videos, while at the same time getting valuable experience as a Production Assistant or Grip or Production Coordinator, slowly finding what part of the industry I fit into best.

I was able to simultaneously hone my taste as a Director on smaller music projects, while learning the ins and outs of high-budget commercial production. And that’s kind of still my approach today.

Being a Director is about having ideas, being able to communicate those ideas, and then being able to put a team of people together who can execute those ideas. The only way I can wrap my head around being an effective director is by understanding how my decisions effect every other person’s job as a result. There is a ton of freedom in creating stories, but filmmaking has its limitations, just like anything, and for me, the only way to understand the limitations is to experience them first hand, as a member of the crew.

I make most of my living as an Assistant Director, which is essentially the Director’s time-piece, as well as the main communicator between the Director and Talent. It’s an exciting role for me to work in, because I get to see how other Director’s work, how they approach covering their script or idea, and how they put a crew together that can most effectively achieve their goal. It allows me to get my reps in on set, without having to carry the project from start to finish, while getting high off the fumes of another Director’s motor.

It’s been really inspiring for me, so in January 2024 I will be going into production on my first short film, with the hope of submitting it for festivals come springtime.

When I’m not Directing/AD’ing I work freelance as a Stage Manager for an LED volume in town, which is essentially the new version of green screen. It’s similar technology to “The Sphere” in Las Vegas, but optimized for filmmaking. The company is a sister company to Diamond View, with a location here in Nashville.

Filmmaking is my bridge into the world of all the things I love. It’s given me the opportunity to travel all around the country and see places I never thought I’d see. If you told me when I got my first iPhone that I would have the chance to work with the Atlanta Braves or that I would spend 4th of July in Malibu and the in Manhattan, there is no chance I’d believe you.

I am in such a fortunate place in my life, and none of this was nearly as simple as it sounds on paper. It’s a lot of almost giving up, failing, hating this industry, losing friendships, and making the wrong decisions. But it’s also my source of hope, inspiration, and healing. I love telling stories, and I’ve found where I fit in in the world. I don’t believe this to be specific to art either, I just believe it’s in being true to the thing inside you that stirs your heart when you think about it. I hope that everyone is able to find what pushes them. Whether they be an engineer or electrician or mechanic, I think being able to chase your passion is the most important part of living a life that rewards you, because boy, can things can hard.

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

As a professional, I’m very goal-oriented, and as much as that sounds like a line from my resume, it’s also the truth. Primarily because I find it hard to know how to advance if I don’t know where I’m going. My goal for a long time was to get out of Florida after college, and then figure out how to work in film & music, but I hadn’t really banked on either of those things happening, so when they did, I found myself a little lost on how to set my next benchmark. Covid threw the idea of “goals” into the air and shot them down for me for a while too, and I found myself stagnating, and losing ground on where I wanted to be. Whether that ground I lost is real or imaginary, that feeling of losing ground did help me get back into the rhythm of moving forward.

I watch a lot of sports and find that no matter the sport – whether it be individual or team – momentum plays a huge role in the outcome of a given day, month, or season. One swing, one kick of the ball on a hope and a prayer and you may go from a 5-game losing streak to a 9-game winning streak, and vice versa; maybe you’re the team who gave up the walk-off homerun, or the game winning goal in the 90’+5′, but either way you end up searching for how to get the positive momentum pumping. The same is true with this funny little industry. You may work for 5 weeks straight, feel very fulfilled, see all your friends, and turn a great product around, and then all of a sudden you haven’t worked in two weeks, you don’t have any jobs on the horizon, and it all starts to quickly close in. It becomes a really hard hole to get your brain out of, especially when you see other folks working when you’re not…But it always turns. The jobs always come back, and that’s when someone else has their slump, and is watching you, wondering why they’re not on set. It’s a mental battle, but if you can figure out how to continue making progress during those slumps, it’s much easier to find peace. Goals help me to do that.

Long term I want to be Directing/Producing HBO-style miniseries’ in the style of “Chernobyl ” or “True Detective”. Movies are great too, and I think that’s most Directors’ dream (and still kind of mine too), but I was raised by the TV and was always fascinated with how it was made, so I have some kind of extra affinity for the medium.

Short term, I am working to make my first short film with my good friend and collaborator, Shane Sackett, in the hope of then making a second and third short. Shane and I had a short called “Greye” fall apart in January of 2023 and we have spent pretty much this entire year working toward being involved more heavily in as many narrative projects as possible. Getting to see how other filmmakers get their shorts finished, and being a part of helping them make it a reality has given me a lot of perspective on my approach and expectations for myself.

“Greye” is the story of a complicated relationship between a mother and her young daughter, and it is on the backburner for now, with hopes of making a couple of smaller shorts first, working our way up the ladder to make it in the most effective way possible. Shane and I are very attached to the idea, and don’t want to rush into making it, because we have set big goals for it, and believe the film will suffer if we try to force it to happen. It was a hard decision to make, but we would have been more disappointed in wasting time, money, and resources to make something that wasn’t up to our standards. So we pushed pause a few weeks before production last year. I honestly believe it was for the best, and will only allow us to get to know the universe of the story in a more complete way by the time we make it. So we moved on from Greye, knowing we needed something before “Greye” was really a possibility.

So we set our next goal, and we now have our first short going into production, “Rx”, about a pharmacy delivery gone awry. We recently met our funding goal of $5500 on Kickstarter and will start production on “Rx” in January of 2024, exactly one year from the days that “Greye” was supposed to shoot, with hopes of sending off to festivals in the spring! Which I suppose is a lesson in goals themselves:

We had this goal to make a short in 2023, and it fell apart, because it just wasn’t right at the time. So we reevaluated and set a more realistic goal, and we’re closer to making “Rx” than we were to making “Greye”. All the while “Greye” is still there, as a big goal, further down the road, being built slowly in the background while we level-up our resources to make it in a feasible way. “Rx” would not be happening if not for failing to reach our goal of making “Greye”. It was a gut punch at the time to not go into production in 2023, but just like every gut punch, was a blessing in disguise.

Goals are how I structure my life, and they’re important to be able to look back on retrospectively, knowing you achieved something that you set out to do. I think we need that as people. I think we need to know that we got up yesterday for a reason, and that it wasn’t all just wasted. Everyday we make little steps that we don’t even realize we make. We step right over used-to-be big goals unknowingly. We are so often ignorant to the completion of our goals, and I think the only way to really feel fulfilled is to be present in achieving the things we set out to do. No one else is going through the ups-and-downs with you, and no one else is going to tell you that you reached your next goal, so you have to be present and find comfort in knowing you did something you didn’t think was possible.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

I’ve talked about this in other parts of the interview, but it’s something I’d like to expand on, because I don’t come from a filmmaking family, and it’s hard to know where to go and what to do in order to start to establish yourself as someone worth hiring when you first get started.

Currently, I make my living in essentially two ways: as a Director, which involves a huge amount of dedication and time to a specific project/idea, and as an Assistant Director/Production Manager, which normally requires working the production day(s) of a shoot and a couple of days on the front/back end, but with much less ownership of the project.

The reason I mention these roles and their distinctions is that I am mainly going to talk about my “reputation” in regard to being a peer to other crew members, and not as a director or project-lead.
The film industry is (for the most part) filled with specialized workers, and those workers do their specific role, and when it all works cohesively, all the specialized roles are filled with the right people, at the right time, working in harmony, like a beehive. And the big question is “how do you become the right person?”.

Which is a daunting question at first, because the first time you step on a set it just feels like mass chaos to someone who doesn’t see how the chaos will eventually lead to something worth putting on camera. People are swinging around big lights and carrying tables and bringing in staging, or cameras or catering, and it all has to find a place and you simply feel in the way of it all. And you kind of are in the way of it all. Everyone is on a little quest to get their part of the puzzle done, and they’ve all put that part of the puzzle together 1,000 times before, just in a different building on a different day.

Camera people meticulously build their cameras, lighting people run their power and throw their fixtures up on stands, production hastily searches for a printer and somewhere to put snacks before someone asks where breakfast or the bathrooms are. And that’s when you go “Oh, the bathroom is over here”, and you kind of find your place. For that day, you’re the guy who knows where the bathroom is, and people will point you out and say “that person knows where the bathroom is”, and all of a sudden you have a cornerstone to build on. It starts that simply, and then it snowballs from there.

Then you become the person who knows where the elevator is, or where to park, or what time lunch is at. And then one day you’re the person who plans all of those things out, and you’re going to locations before the shoot even happens to figure out where the power is, and what time lunch is, and where the bathrooms are, and you realize you accidentally wound up in charge.

At least that’s kind of how it went for me, but that’s how it starts and from there, you find your taste. You figure out if you prefer rigging, or shiny lenses, or working with talent, and then you hone in on that thing, and you leave those other departments to be filled by the people who are naturally drawn to them. There are a million jobs on set, and not all of them are inherently “creative”; some are technical, some are business-ical, and some are a little bit of everything. But all of them require creativity in the problems that need solving. And if you do it enough times, and watch enough smart people solve problems, you’ll have a catalog of solutions for problems you’re sure to come across again. And then you just keep building, and you earn people’s trust, and you show them that you care about their safety, their department, and the members of their crew. From there reputation builds naturally and you find a group you like working with, and then it’s all about staying relevant.

Building a working-reputation in this industry simply requires you to be present, be aware, and recognize that most of these people are going to work, and their work happens to be on a set somewhere. Not everyone you come across would give everything to be part of a movie, many of them have been a part of dozens, and this is just a job for them. It’s 1 blip of a day they’ve worked a thousand times before, and all they want to know is where the bathroom is. So help them out and they may throw you a bone, because people don’t require much more than being treated with dignity and respect. Which we all mess up sometimes, but then you recover, and you keep moving forward.

Contact Info:

• Website: phildude.com
• Instagram: @phildude

Image Credits
PhilHeadshot taken on iPhone by Tanner Grandstaff All other images are from Phil’s music video or photo archive