me

highlighting an intangible quality, optimism, and what that could mean.

So for this advice, I want to kind of go, I want to double down in the other direction and be really pragmatic and practical.

Those three things are the following.

I would say, number one, self-education is so important.

And I want to highlight the word self in that.

Of course, there's so much value in going to an incredible film school like USC or so many of these other great film schools.

And so you did it, and you have an Oscar-winning cinematographer to prove it.

Um, how should filmmakers plan out their strategy when it comes to film festival planning? Maybe, I don't know if you guys can talk about experiences with projects that you've brought to fests or, or just talk generally.

This is kind of a cliche answer, but I do think the strategy for planning a film festival debut for your movie really starts with you even ID'ing on your movie at all.

You wanna be aware of, like, market trends and, and what's selling and what's not.

I'm not saying that you should only write movies you think are gonna sell.

Of course not.

Write something that's ori- original to you and that's specific to you.

But it, it is gonna help you, it is gonna be helpful for you to be aware of trends.

Mm.

The weirdest thing about movies is, like, people are buying something, and they dedicating two hours of time to something that they haven't seen yet, you know? They've seen snippets, or they heard something about it, or they maybe read a thing or heard, you know? And that's like a, you know, as an adult, when you got kids and a, and a job and shit, that's a big commitment, you know? You know what I mean? So, so I wanna, um, I wanna deliver for them, you know, um, uh, something exciting and something that's worth their time.

Yeah, I mean, I was gonna speak about that, too, 'cause, 'cause in the course of making...

I mean, I would say thinking about the audience is genuinely, like, 90% of our job, right? 'Cause, 'cause once we've read the script, like, we've seen the movie already, and we just have to now deliver that to someone who's never read it or never experienced it.

And on this film in particular, Ryan would literally talk to us about that vision.

Like, we would have meetings where we're trying to sort out a scene or, or challenge, and our, our aim was never, like, "Well, maybe if we do this, we'll get an, an Oscar nomination." It was literally never that.

It was always Ryan saying, like, "Imagine it's, like, date night, and, like, the, there's a teenager who's nervous about, you know, whether or not they're gonna hold the hand or, of their, of the boy or girl they're with." Like, he would literally paint this picture to us.

And, and, like, there's the new- the newborn parents who, like, have dropped the babysitter.

[laughs]

You know what I mean?

Yeah, I mean, I really relate to the idea of brute forcing it because I don't love this expression, but, like, what we always do is, like, we go, like, gun to your head.

Don't think about it.

Don't deliver.

Just, like, you have to give an answer to overcome this problem, and it's usually a bad one.

And oftentimes there's a lot of prefacing, like, hey, worst idea ever, but what if? But I think the scary part about creative blocks that, like, We don't often hear about is the like indecision that comes with it of like if we're trying to accomplish a story beat, for example, and like it's like there's no way that we can pull this off because if we pull it off in this way, the movie becomes unrealistic or it's wrong for tone or like whatever other issues it causes.

There's always like a fear of like, well, should we just be doing this thing instead? But if we could pull this off, it would be so amazing.

So that's the one

thing yet, yeah.

I was so shocked by this.

I was like, let's make a sequel.

And this one was about like a young Armenian girl who's like trying to date and the parents are like, no way.

Like it was just all the usual fun stuff.

And that also went kind of viral.

There was such a demand for more of these videos.

And I'm looking forward to working on a project with you that forefronts joy or magic in some kind of way.