{"id":762,"date":"2014-08-13T02:19:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-13T02:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ninjagirl.net\/?p=762"},"modified":"2016-09-14T14:40:10","modified_gmt":"2016-09-14T14:40:10","slug":"phil-leirness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ninjagirl.net\/ja\/phil-leirness\/","title":{"rendered":"Phil Leirness"},"content":{"rendered":"

PHIL LEIRNESS<\/strong>
\nWriter-Director-Producer-Cinematographer-Editor of THE LADY KILLERS<\/p>\n

1. \u00a0How did you become a filmmaker?<\/strong>
\n\"Phil_Leirness03\" I’ve always been a storyteller.\u00a0 When I was a little boy, I wrote short stories in a spiral notebook.\u00a0\u00a0 I fell in love with theatre at an early age.\u00a0\u00a0 I was always writing and performing in some capacity, in some medium.\u00a0\u00a0 It wasn’t until seeing Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire just prior to film school, however, that I knew I had to be a director.\u00a0 Der Himmel uber Berlin is a love story about the heartbreaking yearnings that bind us all together in the silences of our own individual personal despair and it’s an epic of the human heart full of the most nourishing truths about what it means to be human.\u00a0 To this day, I’m motivated to discover whether or not I am capable of such an achievement.<\/p>\n

2. \u00a0You’ve been living in Los Angeles for a long time. Do you think it’s important to live in a place like L.A. in order to build a filmmaking career?<\/strong>
\nHere is a quick list of my favorite directors:\u00a0 Robert Altman, Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, John Cassavetes, Michael Powell (especially in collaboration with Emeric Pressburger), Werner Herzog and Akira Kurosawa.\u00a0\u00a0 Of those, only Cassavetes lived and worked in Hollywood and there was never a more independent, un-Hollywood filmmaker!\u00a0\u00a0 In some ways, living in Los Angeles makes it easier in that you’re surrounded by people, companies, facilities and services interested in motion picture production.\u00a0 On the other hand, it becomes very easy to get trapped talking about making films, rather than actually making them because there are so many people who would rather discuss than create.\u00a0\u00a0 Also, because it’s such a factory town it’s quite easy to become disconnected from the wellspring of your creative impulses and from the very joy of creating in the first place.
\nTo me, the critical thing for any artist is to realize that the most important story you are telling is the one you are telling with your life. Are you living the story of your life in as artful a way as possible?\u00a0 In order to do that, one most go where they feel most deeply connected with their humanity, where their soul will be most nourished.\u00a0 It doesn’t matter where that place is, if a true artist lives there, the art will find a way.<\/p>\n

3. \u00a0From where do you draw inspiration?<\/strong>
\nI usually draw inspiration from one of two sources, either from my love of people, from the bittersweet knowledge of how precious, fragile and fleeting our lives are, or from things that make me angry\u00a0 and my desire to see how those things actually serve us as human beings.\u00a0 Despair and rage, those are the two bedrock energies behind the creative impulse.<\/p>\n

4. \u00a0This is the 7th Feature Film you have directed and they all boast great diversity in terms of the age, gender and ethnicity of the cast.\u00a0 Has this been by design?<\/strong>
\n\"Phil_Leirness02\"This goes back to finding inspiration from the things that make me angry.\u00a0 Growing up, many of my best friends were Asian-Americans, and it seemed strange that all the heroes we looked up to in American movies were white, that most of the people in those movies were white men.\u00a0 That was not an accurate reflection of the world as I knew it.
\nI also became aware of the controversy that would always surround a white performer being cast in a part that had been written for a “person of color”.\u00a0 It occurred to me that the reason for such controversy was because that doorway of opportunity did not swing both ways.\u00a0 Performers of color would almost never be considered for roles that had seemingly been written for white people.\u00a0\u00a0 Fortunately, I believe that is starting to change and I feel good about having been a part of trying to change things for the full twenty years of my career.
\nOur strength is in our diversity.\u00a0\u00a0 The more people from different backgrounds, of different life experiences, can express and contribute their uniqueness, the stronger society will become, the stronger and more humane our species will become.<\/p>\n

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