Brooke Sebold – 7 questions

Our second featured artist is a great one. Up-and-coming filmmaker Brooke Sebold. She’s funny, smart, and creative–a triple threat…

Filmmaker, Brooke Sebold

How did you decide to go into filmmaking?

When I was a kid, I had serious aspirations to become the first female quarterback in the NFL. I threw a pretty decent spiral– all the boys said so– and I was almost always the team captain’s third or fourth pick. I was that good.

After my accident, I went through a few years of physical therapy, but never returned to football. I did, however, become a filmmaker. I just learned last year that a number of our greatest directors– Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, Ingmar Bergman, and John Ford– all discovered film/storytelling while bedridden for extended periods of time. Clearly, I’m in good (and daunting) company.

What was the first film you made?

I made my first movie when I was ten years old. It was a school project for science class featuring my dad as an Australopithecus Robustus. He wore an Alf costume without the mask and was very passable as a neanderthal.

I filmed it with my family’s relatively new VHS camcorder. My mom told me that the camera was too expensive for me to hold myself, so I had to trust her to do the shooting. When we finished, my mom popped the tape into the VCR and I watched it for the first time. That’s what I love most about filmmaking. Delayed gratification. Even now, with LCD screens and external monitors, you still only have a vague sense of what your work will look and feel like projected on the big screen. There’s always an element of unknown.

What are you working on now?

I’ve just begun submitting my latest short, BROTHERHOOD, to a slew of festivals. The film is about Jared, a sophomore in college and in life, who learns that his older brother, Kief, has fallen onto hard times. Jared must face the fact that his older brother is not the hero Jared once thought he was.

I’m also in the midst of writing a couple of feature scripts. One, THE ARCHITECT’S WIFE, is about an architect determined to keep his cheating trophy boyfriend by his side, even if it means destroying the lives of everyone around him. The other, REMEMORY, is about estranged siblings who must confront the horrific moment that tore them apart in order to move on with their respective lives.

If you weren’t making films, you’d probably make…?

and break Guitar Hero world records… or at least, I’d dream about it.

Your artistic philosophy?

A favorite professor of mine (and an extremely talented director) once assured me that every filmmaker wakes to a “raging internal monologue telling us that we’re not good enough.”  My artistic philosophy is to rage back. I’ve always been my own harshest critic, and when I work, I try to silence everything in me that questions my abilities and talents; I have to trust that my work is not only valid, but important.

Artists that inspire and/or challenge you?

In no particular order:
Ang Lee, Cristian Mungiu, Woody Allen, Kenneth Lonergan, Alan Ball, David Lynch, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Charlie Kaufmann, Ira Glass, JT LeRoy, Ingmar Bergman, James Shamus, Tom Kalin, Todd Solondz, Lisa Cholodenko, Lynne Ramsay, Amy Sedaris, Michelle Citron, Kimberly Pierce, Stanley Kubrick, Miranda July, Todd Haynes, Julian Schnabel, Eric Mendelsohn, Jamie Babbit, Gus Van Sant, Jamie Travis, Matthew Tyler, Rebecca Volinsky, Christina Anderson, Ron Toole, Stan Brakhage, William Eggleston, Mitch Epstein … and so many more.

09 resolutions

My resolution is to embrace my failures. They’ve informed my work far more than any of my successes.

Brooke Sebold is a documentary and narrative filmmaker currently based in New York City. In 2007, Brooke, and her film collaborators, Todd and Benita Sills, completed their first feature length documentary, RED WITHOUT BLUE. The film captured the singular relationship between two identical twins as one transitions from male to female. RED WITHOUT BLUE received over twenty audience-choice and jury awards, and screened at 200+ film festivals, universities, and museums all around the world. Brooke’s films have garnered glowing reviews from Variety, The SF Chronicle, The LA Times, The Guardian, The Seattle Times, The Advocate and dozens of other publications. Her work can be seen on PBS, the Sundance Channel and Current TV, where one of the pieces she edited was nominated for an Emmy. Brooke is currently a Dean’s Fellow in Columbia University’s MFA Film program.

Please visit www.redwithoutblue.comfor more information about Brooke’s feature documentary. The film is available for purchase at www.indiepixfilms.comand for rent at netflix, and video stores across the country.