Artist Statement

               

"The course of our lives can be changed by such little things. So many passing by, each intent on his own problems. So many faces that one might easily have been lost. I know now that nothing happens by chance. Every moment is measured; every step is counted." 
- Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948)

      I first announced my intention to be a filmmaker in a homework assignment for my ninth-grade French class. (It may not have been the optimal platform for such a declaration but it was a start.) To my dismay, few people in my high school took my love for film seriously; instead it was assumed that I would be a writer. While it is true that I am working on my first novel, filmmaking is the career that I want most fervently to pursue.

     I believe that beauty is visible everywhere. There have been writers who were capable of articulating the magnificence of the world by means of elegant prose – Angela Carter, Carson McCullers, Muriel Barbery, Stefan Zweig – but my goal is to be able to express both the written and visual components of storytelling. I want to blend images, words and music into as perfect a union as I can create. (Much like Quentin Tarantino, I often come up with ideas for scenes by listening to specific songs.)

     Since I have too many favorite directors to name all of them, here is a truncated list: Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Jacques Tati, Vincente Minnelli, Woody Allen, Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau, David Lean, Tim Burton, the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Max Ophüls and Mikhail Kalatozov. Although some – particularly Wilder and Minnelli – excelled in a multitude of genres, each was and still is a master of his craft.

     My experience with the filmmaking process is limited, so I hope to change that over the course of the next few years.