“There’s a typical way movies are made that I know nothing about,” admits
Casey Neistat in this interview with
Design Indaba. But the indie filmmaker is undeterred; in fact, it is his greatest strength.
“I was never taught the right way to make movies, which forced me to find my own path and figure out my own way of getting there,” says the New York-based filmmaker.
Neistat never went to film school. He dropped out of high school at 15, had a son at 17 and became a “professional dishwasher”.
Things began to change after he “maxxed out his credit card” to buy an iMac that he could edit his own movies on.
Now a
TV commercial director, Neistat has become a YouTube sensation making movies that reel in upwards of 12 million views. While he has made a series for
HBO – a reality show called The
Neistat Brothers starring his brother and himself – he prefers the honesty and accessibility of YouTube.
His process, he says, is to start with an idea and then venture out to capture as much real-life footage as he can, often becoming the subject of his movies as well.
"
It’s in the edit that I find the actual movie,” he explains.
His subject matter ranges from
Apple's lack of a battery replacement program for the iPod (for which he first shot to prominence in
2003), to webcam chat site Chatroulette to
New York City’s bike lanes.
He relates to
Quentin Tarantino’s “irrational addiction to watching movies” and is inspired by
Werner Herzog’s dogged persistence – “whatever it takes to make a movie”, he says.
“To tell
a story, you have to understand what it might mean,” he tells us. “Telling a story is sharing an experience, whatever that may be.”
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Designindaba.com hosts hundreds of videos of speaker presentations and interviews and world design news. Updated daily, its content features the most cutting-edge design thinking and the work and ideas of the world's industry leaders in all the creative fields.
Design Indaba is a multi-tiered platform committed to a better world through creativity. Established in
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Conference, Simulcast,
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- published: 30 Jul 2014
- views: 63317