Art should be an extension of you. Learn about the value of originality, being true to yourself, and taking it easy with Gary Alvarez.
Read on what the film process is like, from conception to post-production with this indie filmmaker and CSArts Instructor.
Recently, Matthew Chen (Founder & Editor in Chief) sat down for a Zoom interview with Gary Alvarez and discussed his professional life while working as a teacher and filmmaker.*
*This interview has been cut for clarity and length
Q: What kind of art do you specialize in?
Alvarez: I specialize in film and I am an independent filmmaker.
Q: When did you start filmmaking and when did you become interested in it?
Alvarez: I started making films about fifteen years ago in 2005. That’s when I first started writing my first screenplay, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I had never written a screenplay before, so I decided to take a screenwriting workshop at Long Beach City College.
From there, I really enjoyed the process and I realized, “What if nobody wants to direct my screenplay? I better learn how to do it myself.” So, I took a directing workshop class and I really enjoyed that. Then I realized, “Well, what if nobody wants to edit my film? I better do that, too.” So, I took a post-production class, and I didn’t enjoy that part of it. I’m not a tech-savvy person and I came across a lot of tech issues with the editing program in those days with Final Cut. I realized I didn’t want to do editing, so from there I took about two more years of film production workshops at Long Beach City. When I was done taking all the classes that they had to offer, a friend of mine moved on to study at Chapman University, which at the time was fairly new. She said, “Why don’t you come over and check out the campus and maybe decide to enroll?” So I went to the campus which was over in the city of Orange in Orange County and I was just blown away by what I saw. It looked like a mini studio. They had sound stages, they had foley stages, they had a motion capture room, they had a state-of-the-art stadium seating theatre.
I was just blown away as someone who was thinking about transitioning into that field.
So I applied and I got into their Master of Fine Arts; their film production program with an emphasis on directing. I did that for three years and I graduated in 2012 and I’ve been working professionally as an independent filmmaker since then.
Primarily as a writer/director, but out of necessity, I’ve had to learn how to produce stuff because the nature of independent filmmaking is that a lot of times you have to wear multiple hats. I am producing and directing a feature documentary right now and for that project, I had to invest in my own camera equipment, so I had to learn shooting and editing as well. I kind of do a little bit of it all in terms of production, but what I enjoy most is writing and direction.
Q: Do you think you could tell us more about your experience as a teacher?
Alvarez: Before I was making films, I was a teacher for about ten years. I started off teaching history. I love history, and when you think about filmmaking and history, people don’t make the connection: “Well, how do you go from teaching history to making films?”
Well, history’s just one long story, and filmmaking is telling stories in pictures.
When you think about it that way, it made perfect sense to me. I come from an educational background and when I went to film school, I couldn’t teach full-time anymore because film school’s a full-time commitment, although I was working 8-3 P.M. and going to school after that. Once I graduated film school, I decided I needed to focus entirely on that and so I stopped teaching for a number of years, really not considering ever going back. Then, I met this producer at a party through a mutual actor friend of ours. He was the coordinator of a program called the Youth Cinema Project, and basically, they were taking this program through the Latino Film Institute to underrepresented schools in Orange County and Los Angeles County. Schools that were predominantly black and brown students, underserved, underprivileged, and pretty much just neglected overall. The goal was to teach them literacy through film. I did that for three years, and then I left to focus on this documentary that I’m currently working on. I saw an opportunity to teach at the California School of the Arts. I applied because I was curious since I heard about the school when I was still the Youth Cinema Project. At the Youth Cinema Project, we as instructors travelled to different schools in LA and Orange County, so we didn’t really have a home campus, which is one of the differences that I do like about CSArts. That’s how I came to be at CSArts.
Last year was my first year, I had a narrative production and a documentary production class and I really enjoyed being in that environment with these exceptional students, who are themselves very creative and very productive. I think the other big difference between when I was teaching before and now is the school environment is completely different. The CSArts campus is very open and supportive and embracing of the LGBTQ community, which I had never experienced before on a campus-wide level. I came across students who identified as such and they were proud. Some of them are still trying to figure out what their identity is, and it takes me back to my days of being a teenager, trying to figure that stuff out, so I try to be supportive as I can in terms of keeping that dialogue open and making them feel safe like they can talk about whatever they feel like talking about in their class. But I also like to foster their creativity.
Teaching and film are my biggest passions and teaching [film] is the crossroads of both.
I want to inspire my students to be creative and to express themselves, and that’s something I did not have much of growing up. In school, I did not have a film class, unfortunately. Had that been offered to me, I probably would’ve gotten involved in the film much earlier. But that’s okay, you know, I don’t hold any resentment or bitterness towards that.
What I’m trying to say is that now, I have the opportunity to give back the joy of filmmaking to the next generation, so I really enjoy it.
It’s been a tough transition with the COVID lockdown and having to adjust to distance learning. I had never done Zoom before, now I’m pretty good at it. My students, however, are getting Zoom fatigue, and so the challenge now is how to keep them engaged with projects that they want to make. Also, film is a very collaborative process, and so if we were in a classroom, my students would be making their crews and everyone would be learning what it’s like to be on a film set with individual roles. We can’t really do that in COVID, so now all my students are wearing multiple hats themselves. All my students are now writers, producers, editors; they do it all. I’m blown away with them being able to step up to that challenge and I’m looking forward to their final projects at the end of the semester.
Q: What was your experience like going to film school?
Alvarez: I have to say, it was rough, in the sense that I was teaching part-time as well. During those three years, I would teach from 8 A.M. to 3 P.M., and then I would drive from Downey to Orange County. My classes would start at 4 and go to 10, and then I would stick around to do some editing until about midnight, and then I would go home. It was about a thirty-minute drive from Chapman to where I was living in Long Beach. As you can imagine, it was very time-consuming and I don’t mean that in a negative way. It takes commitment, especially when you consider that I was in the master’s program, which I liked since it was three years of just film. As an undergrad student, you still have to take your math and your science classes, and there’s an appreciation for just that, too.
But what I liked about film school is that that’s all we were there for, and being around other film students who were all there for the same reason was exhilarating but also exhausting.
In the end, there were some things that I wish the film school had taught us that would have better prepared us for getting a job afterward, I feel like that’s something that needs improvement.
But going back to the original question of what it was like, it was very exhausting. I made some really good friends who I still collaborate with today, but there were times when it felt very high-school-ish. By that, I mean it felt very cliquish, so very early you could see students would form groups and they would crew together as a unit, so if you didn’t belong to a crew or a group, it was very difficult to get people to work with you and that was very challenging. I made it work with a very small skeleton crew most of the time, and I ended up making about three or four short films while I was there. When I graduated, I slept so much that summer because I had so much sleep to catch up on to get back into a groove.
The biggest question for me in terms of going to film school was the money, and I feel like it still is for most people. Yes, it’s about $150,000 that you’re looking at for a three-year program, so that’s something to consider. When I was accepted into film school- I got into Columbia, the American Film Institute, and Chapman- I started asking around to see if it was worth it.
Everyone but one person said it was, so I decided to invest that money in myself and in my future, knowing that I’d be in debt for a long time.
That hasn’t changed. What has changed is the filmmaking and the Hollywood landscape. At that time, Netflix was a little company that you could get DVDs from in the mail. Blockbuster was still around, Netflix wasn’t what it is now, Amazon wasn’t making films, Hulu wasn’t around. A lot of the digital filmmaking [from today] when I was in film school wasn’t around. I would take those things into consideration. Now, you can shoot feature films on your phone. Now, there are so many other streaming platforms that you can release your films on. I would say that you don’t need a degree to get your job in the industry. I would go if you’re serious about it and you want to hone your skills and network with other up-and-coming filmmakers. But there’s other ways of learning filmmaking and a lot of film production tutorials that exist now that didn’t exist then that you could pretty much learn as you go.
Q: As a filmmaker, what is one of your favorite and one of your least favorite things about being a filmmaker?
Alvarez: In film, there are three different phases, right? There’s the pre-production which involves planning, scheduling, and budgeting. What I enjoy about that is writing the script, working on the script, casting the actors, going location scouting, looking at all of these amazing locations that you can shoot at, and just traveling around. Meeting new actors that I haven’t gotten a chance to work with and rehearsing with them. When it comes to production, which is the actual shooting and the making of, my favorite part of that is working with the acting.
Seeing the actors bring to life these characters that have been living in my head so long and seeing them speak and move is just an amazing experience,
and working with the actors to see what they imagine these characters to be like is just so awesome. As I mentioned earlier, I’m not a big fan of editing and post-production because my brain just doesn’t really function that way. I’d have to say my least favorite part is the post-production aspect, I’m just not a tech person. Although, I do appreciate that without editing, you wouldn’t have a film. You could go out there and write a script and you could shoot it, but without the editors, it’s going to sit on a shelf forever if you don’t cut it. So, I do appreciate the work that editors do, but I’m happy when I find an editor who’s talented, who has a vision that can adjust with mine, and who helps me put together the movie in the end. Out of those three things, those are the things I enjoy the most, but overall I would say that what I love to do is writing. Just sitting down with a piece of paper or my laptop and just writing and creating these characters, these worlds. That part is my favorite.
Q: What was a major setback in your career and what did you learn from it?
Alvarez: After I graduated from film school, I got really sick, physically sick. I’m not going to go into the details, but it was really a brutal illness. It put me out of commission for about two years, and during those two years, I wasn’t able to make a film or write or do any of the things I loved doing in terms of my career. And so, there were moments where I didn’t know what was going to happen. You know, here I had invested six years of my life making films, three of those years in film school. I had a master’s I could be proud of, but the uncertainty of what could happen next was very daunting. I didn’t know if I was ever going to come back to a set and to direct. There were moments of self-doubt.
Am I going to be able to get through this? Am I going to be able to write another script? Am I going to be able to write another film?
I was able to recover physically by getting some rest and doing what my doctors told me to do, and eventually, I was able to heal. But then, I had to take care of mental health. I wasn’t being creative or productive for two years, and so now I had to get my mind back into work mode. My imagination wasn’t working like before, and to mentally prepare and get back into that groove took me a while, too. I’m happy and grateful to say that I was able to get back not only to where I was before but to even exceeded where I was before. I wouldn’t call it a comeback, but I was able to regain what I had lost and then some. I’ve been more creative and productive in those six years after I became ill than I was in the six years prior to getting sick.
The big lesson I learned from that is to always believe in yourself, and don’t give up. You know, it sounds kind of cliché. I remember as a teenager, hearing adults say that all the time, and I was like, “Ehhh, sounds like old people talk,” but when you get all these grays and you think to what your parents and old-timers tell you, they say it for a reason because they’ve gone through it. They’ve come out on the other side, and they can share their wisdom. Don’t lose courage, don’t lose your faith, whatever that faith may be. Think positive, because thinking positive does help. Just trust that things will turn out better. Recently, I had a discussion with my students. They were going through a rough patch, too, collectively. They reminded me of a quote by one of my heroes, John Lennon. I shared it with them because it meant a lot to me when I was going through that rough patch, and it goes like this:
“Everything will be okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
That’s something that helped me, and I shared it with my students since a lot of them are going through rough patches themselves with the COVID lockdown. Some of my students are near the fire zones, so they had to physically flee. Some were dealing with that, and deaths in the family due to COVID, and they were just feeling really stressed. So, I reminded of that quote, to not worry and to keep moving forward.
Q: What kind of general advice do you have to give to young people who are pursuing art as a career?
Alvarez: Number one, I would say you can make a career out of art. It is difficult, but I think part of the gratification that we get as artists is that it’s not easy, and the struggle is part of the sweetness and the victory. I know, when I was growing up, my parents are immigrants from Mexico and they wanted me to be a lawyer or a doctor, and that pressure is still present from parents now, on my students. I’m grateful that my parents gave me some space to explore a creative career.
What I would say is that if you have a passion for the arts, explore that passion, find what it is exactly that you love to do and do it as much as you can. Focus on it. If it brings you joy, then keep doing it.
Don’t get discouraged when you get rejection. That’s another thing to, as an independent filmmaker. Applying to all these programs and all these jobs, and the competitions fierce. Rejection is a part of the process, and don’t take it personally when you do get rejected, it doesn’t mean your work sucks. It just means that perhaps this job wasn’t meant for you. Always look for the silver lining, because there’s always a silver lining if you look for it. So, don’t let the rejection get you down, keep being yourself. That’s another thing. Don’t give into the pressure of conforming for the sake of being accepted. A lot of the great artists of all time, they weren’t accepted during their time. Like Vincent Van Gogh, he died broke and now his paintings are selling for tens of millions of dollars. Sometimes that happens. When I say be yourself, be original. Don’t follow the trends, you know you have all these artists that are super hot, but who’s going to remember them ten years from now? They’re just going to get lost in the trendiness of the moment. I would rather be an artist that inspires other artists to be themselves.
Also, I would like to share with your readers something that I share with all my students. Read a book called The Four Agreements, it has the power to change your perspective, and they’re very simple.
1. Be impeccable with your word
2. Don’t assume.
3. Don’t take anything personally.
4. Always do your best.
You do those four things on a daily basis, and life just seems a little bit brighter.
It’s not going to be perfect, because the world’s not perfect and we’re not perfect, but you start to live on a more spiritual level and you will find things at that level that you can’t find anywhere else.
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