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

Thomas, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What were some of the most unexpected problems you’ve faced in your career and how did you resolve those issues?

Becoming a filmmaker wasn’t always on my radar as a career choice. All I knew was that I loved doing it. Whenever I watched movies as a kid (and still now), I felt these powerful emotions. I would get chills, feel sad, get pumped up during an action scene, laugh, etc. I daydreamed about these emotional scenes at school, creating new ones in my head (usually when a good song was on the radio). Then my parents got a VHS camera and I discovered I could create those moments. I could move the camera in a certain way and play a certain song in order to express a specific emotion. Years later when it came time to choose a profession, I didn’t realize that filmmaking was in the cards for me. I chose to become an actor but eventually floated back to filmmaking. It was always in me and always will be. The day I decided that it was going to be my profession was liberating and freeing, yet I wasn’t prepared for the emotional roller-coaster the profession would take me on.

I don’t believe people talk enough about the mental toll filmmaking has on you. Maybe a line or two here and there about it being difficult and needing to get past those moments, but that is a dramatic understatement. I believe this oversight is one of the biggest reasons most student filmmakers change professions directly out of college. I don’t want to take anything away from other professions with this, there is a reason I’m not in the medical profession or heading into a courtroom tomorrow to defend a client, but I believe that filmmaking is mostly quantified by the end result, and not so much for the process it took to get there. It makes total sense, we make the movies and that is what the majority of the population will see. They see the end result. My goal in writing this is to shed light on something unexpected for me as I embark on my first feature film.

This fall we’re slated to begin shooting my first feature film that I wrote last year and will be directing. Since then I’ve done several short films. With every film, there are ups and downs of course. One day you’ll get a phone call that the production designer of your dreams loves the script and wants to do it, and in that same day your producer will tell you that the perfect location you secured has a new owner and they don’t want you to film there. It’s all about rolling with those punches and making the best movie possible. It’ll feel like everything is constantly falling apart every day, but you somehow work it out in the end and the movie gets made. Going into it with the mindset “the world doesn’t want this movie to be made” can sometimes help prepare you for the gauntlet you’re about to run through.

This finally brings me to my main point. When I decided to do this, I knew all this was coming. I knew making a movie was close to a miracle. What I didn’t know was how much faith I personally would lose. This might be a point of contention, but it is shocking how many days I thought to myself “I wish I never started making this movie, it sucks, everyone is going to hate it, the crew already hates it, what am I doing here.” You’re constantly told by your professors or your heroes, “If you don’t love doing it every step of the way, leave.” A mindset is built up that you have to be head-over-heels in love with movies in order to make one. I do believe that is true, but I think there should be a clause in there that says, “There are going to be days that you hate your own project”. You don’t want to go to set. You lie in bed at night imagining the movie in your head for the 1,000th time, but this time it looks like a hokey piece of trash you don’t want anyone to see. The movie sucks. For a feature film, this seems to occur on a much higher scale, but you absolutely cannot tell anyone you are feeling this way, you need to save face.

Then the next day, you watch the actors read the scene, and all that goes away. Your faith is restored. You’re reinvigorated and you start having new ideas, getting your head back into that free and creative space. Then the next week the cycle happens all over again. For me, the key right now is awareness. Being aware that these feelings are absolutely common when creating something personal and putting your heart out in the open is the first step in getting through these days. There can be other helpful things like listening to the playlist you created while writing the piece or stepping away from it and going to a museum. Filmmaking is hard, and if you don’t believe in it every single step of the way, there is nothing wrong with you or the production. Breathe and just take it one day at a time.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m a film director born in Brooklyn, but raised in North Carolina where I graduated from UNC Greensboro’s BFA Acting Program. Utilizing my acting training and chasing my true passion, I later attended USC’s School of Cinematic Arts’ Film and Television Production Program.  The films that surface from me typically deal with some sort of struggling family, and the intricacies within them, yet with a twist of the fantastical.  Growing up in North Carolina filled me with a sense of magic and wonder in folktales and science fiction. Using film as a medium, I strive to meld the world of my complicated, blue-collar, Italian American family with magical realism.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

First off, I don’t believe there is such a thing as a “non-creative”. Creation is simply the act of bringing something into existence that wasn’t there before. Military Operations are creative. Football plays are creative. I feel like lawyers might be some of the most creative people on the planet with the ways they maneuver the judicial system. I believe the separation doesn’t lie in “creative” vs “non-creative”, but rather in the outcome of that piece. One type of person creates in order to achieve the goal, while the other creates to express themselves. The business executive needs to create the best proposal so the merger benefits both sides and the shareholders are happy. Their creation is out of necessity. Others create music because they feel it in their soul and it needs to come out. We’ll call the former “The Achiever” and the latter “The Expresser”. Both create, just for different purposes. The main thing I struggled with, is the fact that both sides without a doubt need each other. I am an Expresser, hands down. I have never understood the other side. It’s never computed for me. Now I’m realizing, that I need Achievers, and they need me. As I get into the business side of filmmaking (something I’ve purposefully avoided), I learn that it’s the Achievers that take your creation and put it out into the world. They are a mandatory step for Expressers to help them spread as far and wide as possible. This works both ways. Achievers need Expressers. They need creations to fit their end results. In the end, learning that both sides speak the same langue but just have different motivations, could help bridge that gap between the two worlds.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

Stop hacking creative programs in school systems. The kids are going to be imaginative no matter what, but giving them resources at that level will help cultivate and craft those imaginations so they don’t spend so much time debating what field they want to go into later in the middle of college. Artistic fields such as music, theater, dance, etc. I believe, are equally as important in the education system as Trigonometry class. Some people use that Trig knowledge and go into fields that it applies to. Some people go into Dance, which Trigonometry doesn’t have a realistic application. In Elhi, we are just learning about who we are. Why are we only developing the people going into Math, History, Science, and Sports? Society can start considering the Arts as equally serious fields as the others taught at school and begin to cultivate talent and respect early on. People think those fields don’t matter, but I for one would never want to live in a world without Music, Movies, Books, Logos, Fonts, Clothing Designs, pretty much everything of emotional value in this world. I can’t imagine if Mozart was forced to do multiplication tables.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thomasmendolia.com
• Instagram: @thomasmendolia

Image Credits

Jon Graham, Carolyn deBerry, D.C. Lutz, Alexander Atienza