Young movie directors with St. Louis roots are currently blossoming in startling abundance—primarily in the nurturing hothouse of the film-festival circuit, but occasionally in the unforgiving landscape of the Cineplex. How to explain this sudden efflorescence of talent? Perhaps it's something in that Mississippi water
James Gunn
Age: 37
Neighborhood: Manchester
High school: St. Louis University High
Universities: Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, and Saint Louis University, B.A.; Columbia University, New York, M.F.A.
Screenwriter: Tromeo and Juliet (1996), The Specials (2000) (screenwriter and actor), Scooby-Doo (2002), Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004), Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Writer-director: Slither (2006)
Given his lengthy and diverse screenwriting résumé, James Gunn could legitimately be classed among the elder statesmen ofSt. Louis–born filmmakers, but he didn’t make his full-fledged debut as a director until last year, with the delightfully horrific comedy Slither.
Although the road would prove circuitous, Gunn made the first tentative steps toward his eventual career while growing up in Manchester with his “very Roman Catholic” family, a highly traditional nuclear unit of an attorney father, a homemaker mother and six children (five boys and one girl). “I started making films when I was 11 or 12 years old,” he says. The first—a clear precursor of things to come—was a Super 8 zombie film that starred the Gunn brothers, who all now work in the entertainment industry. “I remember Sean getting eaten, and we made these fake intestines and blood coming out.”
During his years at St. Louis University High, he was distracted by other interests, including listening to and playing new-wave music. “Once that came into being,” he says, “it became my complete passion.” Gunn briefly detoured back to movies by attending film school at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in the mid-’80s, but because of multiple artistic pursuits—acting, music, movies—he never found an academic focus and was booted after two years. After returning to St. Louis, Gunn concentrated on his music, but when his songwriting partner returned to school, he decided to discontinue what he calls his “rock-star aspirations” and finish his own college education.
At Saint Louis University, Gunn discovered his true calling during a class with the late English professor Al Montesi. Assigned to write a 30-page play, Gunn vividly remembers the reaction of his fellow students: “We started reading it, and everybody was laughing. That moment was when I became a writer. That was really when my change occurred.”
Initially, Gunn thought his interest in storytelling would manifest in novels, and he entered the M.F.A. program at Columbia University. Although he eventually succeeded in getting his thesis project, The Toy Collector, published in 2000—to excellent reviews—by that time Gunn had gotten “sucked into the film industry.” While at Columbia in the mid-’90s, Gunn had applied for a summer job–type position at New York City–based B-movie producer Troma. “I thought it would be a fun place to work, maybe file some papers,” Gunn says. “But I went in, and [Troma head] Lloyd Kaufman found out I was a writer. He offered me the job of writing Tromeo and Juliet.”
Gunn not only wrote the film, a punkishly extreme riff on Romeo and Juliet, but also ended up running the production, including uncredited direction. “It was another moment like the Al Montesi classroom,” he says. “I loved the feeling of being on a movie set. I felt comfortable. That was when I decided, ‘This is where I belong.’”
Gunn eventually became the company’s head of production, but he was also writing his own screenplays at night. One of those scripts was The Specials, a superhero comedy that proved a pivotal work in his career. “I got everything through The Specials,” he says. “Today you have viral videos. Well, The Specials was a great screenplay for me because that acted virally. I gave it to one person, who gave it to another, who then gave it to another, and suddenly everybody in Hollywood had this screenplay.”
Because of the intense interest The Specials generated, Gunn moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1998. “At the time I truly had no money,” Gunn says. “I was living off my Discover card, taking cash out. But within a couple of months, I suddenly had a shitload of work, and I went from having no money to being fairly wealthy. It was a very strange experience.” Gunn’s personal life followed the same upward trajectory as his professional career. He met his future wife, actress and fellowSt. Louisan Jenna Fischer, at a staged reading of The Specials for investors.
Not every aspect of The Specials was special—Gunn feels the film lacks “the flavor of the screenplay”—but his disappointment was allayed by the writing work that resulted: Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) offered Gunn a Fox pilot, and Warner Bros. hired him to adapt Mad’s Spy vs. Spy for the screen. More screenplays quickly followed. “I got Scooby-Doo because Warner Bros. really liked my script for Spy vs. Spy—just not enough to spend $150 million on this weird screenplay,” he says. The success of Scooby-Doo, in turn, led to a sequel, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, as well as Dawn of the Dead, which opened at No. 1 on consecutive weekends in 2004.
During the same period, Gunn co-starred with Fischer in her mockumentary LolliLove. Although she’s since risen to stardom in NBC’s The Office, when they married in 2000, Fischer was working as a receptionist. Gunn urged her to quit and focus on acting. He describes LolliLove as a way for Fischer “to stay creative, to do something filmically while she wasn’t making money. LolliLove was great for me, because I had gotten so swept up in the big studio films and the bureaucracy and the business side, I forgot about the grit of down-and-dirty filmmaking.”
Although working with a budget considerably higher than that of LolliLove, Gunn decided to stay slightly gritty by making Slither. “I was offered millions of dollars to write a screenplay because I had two movies in completely different genres come out at No. 1 at the box office,” Gunn remembers. “I knew at that moment that I had the freedom to get done whatever I wanted. I knew I wanted to direct, and that was the time to do it, so I wrote Slither right after I was done with those two movies.”
Slither, which Gunn describes as a “strange mix of horror and comedy and just plain eeriness,” proved a difficult sell to audiences because of its tonal shifts. But the critical notices were glowing—the L.A. Weekly called it “a crack social satire” and “the most sensationally scary-funny creep-out movie since Gremlins”—and Gunn remains pleased. “I’m very satisfied with the end result,” he says. “The movie really does match what was in my head, for the most part.” Slither fans can look forward with gleeful anticipation to another horror film Gunn’s currently prepping for 2008 release.
AJ Schnack
Age: 39
Neighborhood: Edwardsville, Ill.
High school: Edwardsville High School
University: University of Missouri–Columbia, B.J.
Writer-director: The Heir Apparent (2005 short)
Director: Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns) (2002), Kurt Cobain: About a Son (2006)
Growing up in Edwardsville, AJ Schnack persistently pressed his older sister, Lori, to take him out to the movies. “We saw movies together all the time,” he says. “Sometimes we would see several movies a weekend, and occasionally, if I liked a movie, she would even stay and watch it with me twice.”
Despite Schnack’s fascination with film, he didn’t immediately pick up a camera. Instead, he became deeply involved in theater in both elementary and high school, citing his years with the Edwardsville Junior Theater, led by the “larger-than-life” Brad Hofeditz, as particularly key. Schnack directed several plays in high school and wrote, produced and directed a pair of theatrical works in college, but he opted not to pursue performing on stage or film. He enjoyed acting, Schnack says, but “there was a sense that that was too hard—there didn’t seem to be a path from Edwardsville to Hollywood.” Instead, he enrolled in the broadcast-journalism program at the University of Missouri–Columbia, serving as a reporter and anchor for KOMU (Channel 8).
Frustratingly, the TV work that Schnack found his best—“almost vérité” pieces with no reporter stand-up or narration—received little support or encouragement. Schnack belatedly realized that he had two instincts—“to do things very visually” and “to study a subject in depth”—that would go unfulfilled in TV news. “So pretty late in college, a few weeks before I graduated, I just decided I wasn’t going to pursue journalism and I was going to move to Los Angeles and try to get into film. At that point, I knew I wanted to be a director.”
Schnack managed to land work immediately on his arrival in L.A. in 1990, albeit on a game show, The Challengers. He spent two years wandering the game-show wilderness before realizing, as he puts it, “I had to get on the path toward doing things I liked.” Two months as an unpaid volunteer on an American Film Institute thesis film finally helped him blaze the trail. Because of his work on the AFI project, Schnack landed a job as a production assistant on music videos, and that in turn led to a stint as the production coordinator at a music-video company. Schnack’s work on the AFI project paid another major dividend: Through the director, he met his future wife and filmmaking partner, Shirley Moyers. Eventually, Schnack was hired to start a music-video division at the commercial production company where Moyers was working as in-house production manager. After two years at the firm, Schnack and Moyers—who married in 1997—opened their own music-video company, Bonfire Films of America.
Bonfire had a successful five-year run in music videos, doing work with such bands as Cake, blink-182, the Fugees and Cypress Hill before the record companies slashed budgets in the early 2000s. With business dwindling, Schnack finally committed to his long-deferred dream of directing, first with the fiction short Might As Well Be Swing, then with the feature-length Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns). An entertainingly innovative documentary on the off-kilter alt-rock band They Might Be Giants, Gigantic successfully played the festival circuit and ultimately opened in theaters in more than 40 cities. “It was a pretty amazing experience for a first film,” Schnack says. “It went, in many ways, better than we could have hoped.”
Gigantic paved the way for Schnack’s highly lauded next film, Kurt Cobain: About a Son. Music journalist Michael Azerrad was an interview subject in Gigantic, and at a subsequent dinner with Schnack, he referenced a cache of 25 hours of taped conversation with Cobain, recorded for his Nirvana biography Come As You Are. Schnack mulled the possibilities and approached Azerrad a year later with a proposal: He wanted to use the Cobain tapes as the basis for a first-person biographical documentary, but instead of supplementing that material with traditional interviews, photos and performances, Schnack intended to shoot new environmental footage in three key places in the musician’s life—Aberdeen, Olympia and Seattle, Wash.—and employ a score that combined new music with songs that inspired or evoked Cobain.
Azerrad signed on, and the resulting film premiered at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, before appearing at such high-profile fests as South by Southwest and Full Frame. The deliberate exclusion of Nirvana’s music and minimal use of Cobain’s image may have diminished the enthusiasm of some potential distributors—the film will finally see theatrical release this fall—but Schnack is persuasively articulate about his aesthetic choices. “I wanted people to think of Kurt in a current context, so I wanted to move him to the modern day,” he explains. “I also wanted to strip away everything that the audience had of him in their minds—Cobain as a rock star or as a grunge, flannel-and-cardigan-wearing figure. In order to take that away, it seemed necessary to withhold archival material from the audience and force them into a different way of watching the film.”
Despite his growing reputation in the documentary field, Schnack still hopes to direct fiction features in the future. In 2005 he shot a commissioned narrative short, The Heir Apparent, for the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle, and he’s currently finishing a dramatic script. “I am pursuing fiction and narrative, and I would be bummed out if I didn’t get to do that,” he says. “But I’d be just as sad about [not pursuing] certain nonfiction things I’d like to do.” That said, Schnack takes a realistic view of his career in film: “When you’re working like I am, which is primarily independently, it’s all about what you can get money to do and what you can convince people to hire you to do.”
Ryan Eslinger
Age: 26
Neighborhood: Chesterfield
High school: Parkway Central High School
University: New York University, B.A.
Writer-director-editor: Madness and Genius (2003), When a Man Falls in the Forest (2007)
If Gunn and Schnack meandered along a few scenic byways before finally directing, Ryan Eslinger roared down the interstate with monomaniacal focus: Only 26, he’s already directed a pair of features.
Born in Alton, Ill., but raised in Chesterfield, Eslinger was always precocious in his artistic pursuits. Introduced to the work of Stephen King and Tom Clancy by his sixth-grade teacher, Eslinger attempted his own novel while still in elementary school. That interest soon mutated into a desire to write and draw comic books, but by middle school Eslinger had started pounding out screenplays. “I’d write a script every summer,” he says.
Although he worked in film at the most basic level by tearing tickets at the West Olive 16, Eslinger didn’t immediately strive to make movies. “I did a couple of shorts, but it wasn’t anything serious,” he says. “I spent most of my time writing.” In high school, however, Eslinger did give himself an early self-education in film editing. Instead of writing traditional reports, he’d assemble a montage of shots from relevant movies—Vietnam films for a history assignment, for example—to create a filmic essay.
While these cinematic “papers” proved slightly baffling to his Parkway Central educators, they nonetheless clarified Eslinger’s career goal. “I knew from that moment that’s what I wanted to do,” he says—so he applied to film school. Accepted by New York University, Eslinger graduated a mere three years later.
While at NYU, Eslinger wasn’t especially prolific, and he dismisses his slim output—four shorts—as “just sort of practicing with an Arriflex 16 mm camera.” But behind the scenes, Eslinger was prepping a long-gestating project of considerable ambition, the feature-length Madness and Genius. “I knew I wanted to make this one movie,” he explains, “so I spent most of my time rewriting and casting that. Then I shot it the summer between my second and third year.”
Madness and Genius vividly illustrates Eslinger’s single-minded tenacity. He actually began work on the story when he was 13, first as a novel, then as a comic book and finally as a script. Eslinger continued to reshape the screenplay throughout high school and college. He proved just as indefatigable in pursuing his lead, Tom Noonan, the arresting character actor from Michael Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter. To win Noonan’s trust, the 19-year-old would-be director volunteered at the actor’s New York–based Paradise Theater Company. After six months, Noonan agreed to star.
Shot in 18 days on high-definition video for $20,000—money Eslinger saved from “jobs I worked growing up” at Best Buy and Wells Fargo—Madness and Genius was a stark black-and-white drama about a group of hyper-intelligent but emotionally dysfunctional college students and an eccentric professor. Eslinger not only wrote, produced and directed the film, but also edited, created the sound design, and composed and performed the music. He cut the movie in his dorm room during his third and final year at NYU, finishing the sound in St. Louis after graduation. Premiering at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival—one of the world’s most prestigious—Madness and Genius went on to play more than a dozen fests.
The film failed to secure a theatrical release and remains unavailable on DVD, but Madness and Genius earned lavish reviews and secured the then–22-year-old writer-director representation from the William Morris Agency. After working the fest circuit, Eslinger moved to L.A. and took meetings about various commercial projects but kept coming back to When a Man Falls in the Forest, a script he started the day Madness and Genius finished shooting. “Eventually,” he says, “I just sat down and decided I’m going to make this.”
Sharon Stone proved the key element in making that happen. The actress had seen Madness and Genius on her agent’s recommendation and approached Eslinger to write a script based on her own premise. He took the assignment—it remains a work in progress—but Eslinger also asked Stone if she’d be interested in the intriguingly complex female lead in When a Man Falls in the Forest. When she took the role, the project quickly moved forward.
An intentionally opaque, measured study of the affectively crippled, When a Man Falls in the Forest tempers an overall bleakness with dark humor, quirky dreams and guarded hope. The pitch-perfect cast includes Dylan Baker, Pruitt Taylor Vance and Timothy Hutton, whose devastating, finely nuanced performance ranks among his best. When the film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, initial reviews treated it unkindly, but Eslinger believes some of the aspects that drew criticism—a discursive narrative and an avoidance of explicit psychological explanations—are among the movie’s strengths. “I really believe that movies have the opportunity to be a little more ambiguous, a little more subjective than they currently are,” he says. “My favorite movies are the ones that let you be an active player in them.”
Eslinger, now back in New York, still resists the “mathematical” approach of the three-act structure in favor of developing an original vision. While viewing “as many different types of movies as I possibly could,” Eslinger says, “I didn’t want to fall into the trap of making the same thing that’s always been done, so I was a little bit worried about watching so much film that I’d just want to re-create the movies that I’ve already seen. I wanted to keep it a little fresh so I wasn’t just copying other people.”
He needn’t have worried: Even at this early juncture in his career, Eslinger appears too uncompromising an artist to ever serve as a simple technician working the Hollywood Xerox machine.
Michael Sarner
Age: 35
Neighborhoods: Creve Coeur and Ladue
High school: Ladue Horton Watkins High School
University: University of Southern California, B.A.
Producer: Express: Aisle to Glory (1998 short)
Director: In the Crease (with Matt Gannon) (2006)
Michael Sarner has followed a distinctly nontraditional route to directing, working primarily on the business side of the film industry. “During my first 10 years in L.A.,” Sarner confesses, “I never really considered making a film. I always wanted to produce, and that’s what I was focused on.”
Although Sarner’s interest in directing is relatively recent, his love of film dates back to his youth in West County. “One of my earliest memories was the day my sister was born,” he recalls. “I was three-and-a-half, and I remember going to the hospital with my father and grandfather. We went to Denny’s for breakfast and then to Dumbo.” Disney cartoons exerted a particularly strong pull on Sarner. His family vacationed at Walt Disney World’s Contemporary Resort, and in the hotel’s arcade was a “tiny, tiny theater” that would play the studio’s classic animated features. The moment they’d arrive, Sarner says, “I would run to the back of the arcade and find out what was playing. It was like an obsession.”
Attracted by the “bright lights and fast pace” of Los Angeles, Sarner attended the University of Southern California, but he majored in political science, not filmmaking. His time in L.A., however, familiarized him with “the intangibles of film”—the agencies, studios and players—and when he graduated in 1994, he decided to try the movie business. “I knew I wanted to be a producer, so I said, ‘I’m going to go work for a producer.’” As he flipped through the Hollywood Creative Directory, his eye stopped on the Mount/Kramer Company. “I called them up—it was my only interview—and I said, ‘I’ll intern for you just to get my bearings.’”
After six months as an unpaid intern, Sarner was rewarded with a position as producer’s assistant to Josh Kramer on the company’s New York production of Sidney Lumet’s Night Falls on Manhattan. “I just wanted to know everything there was,” he says. “I would go to the set early, and one of the producers would say, ‘What do you want to know about today?’ He would place me next to the cinematographeror the grip, and I would watch them for a couple of hours to figure out what they did. It was a really great learning experience.”
Sarner returned to L.A. after the production wrapped, resuming his job as an assistant at Mount/Kramer, but he grew increasingly restless and used a three-month producer’s workshop at UCLA as “sort of my excuse to leave.” After the workshop proved a bust, Sarner and another St. Louisan, Stephen Goldstein, decided to gain experience by producing a USC graduate film, Jonathan Buss’ comedy Express: Aisle to Glory, which eventually won a student Emmy. Sarner then bided his time temping at Disney before receiving a call from his old boss at Mount/Kramer, who was starting a foreign-sales and production company. Invited to Cannes to help presell a film going into production, Sarner “wound up doing the festival circuit for about a year and a half.”
Mount/Kramer ultimately folded, but Sarner landed a job in 2003 at United Artists, where he stayed until 2005, when the studio was sold to Sony. Sarner started in acquisitions: “I was the grunt. I would go screen all the films first and then report to everybody: ‘Hey, this is a really great film, you need to watch this.’” He worked in that capacity for a year and a half, but when the members of UA’s small marketing department took new jobs, he recognized “this great big void, and I saw it as my way to move up in the ranks.” Shifting into marketing, Sarner worked on campaigns for such films as Coffee and Cigarettes, The Yes Men and Hotel Rwanda.
When the sale of UA was announced in 2005, Sarner had several months to consider his future before the doors were shut. “If I’m ever going to make a movie,” he told himself, “this is the time to do it.” Intrigued by a Sports Illustrated article about an amateur pond-hockey tournament in New Brunswick, Sarner toyed with pursuing a documentary on the subject. He changed course, however, when his boss at UA serendipitously mentioned that her husband, Matt Gannon, was considering a documentary that would follow a youth-hockey team in Long Beach to the U.S. Nationals.
Sarner contacted Gannon, and over the phone, they formed a directing partnership. Once the hockey team’s cooperation was secured, the pair quickly moved into production, filming 180 hours of footage without screening a single frame during the shoot. Setting up shop afterward in the UA conference room, they began a six-week process of watching dailies—but halfway through, the studio officially closed. Rather than relocate, Sarner and Gannon continued sneaking into the room to finish the initial viewing of footage. “I went down to see a friend of mine in MGM distribution,” he says, “and he looked at me and said, ‘Sarner, you were laid off two weeks ago, and you’ve been here every morning at9 a.m. Give it up. It’s over.’”
Over for United Artists, perhaps, but just the beginning for In the Crease, the inspiring documentary that the first-time directors fashioned from their mass of material. A frequently moving chronicle of the California Wave’s pursuit of the 2005 16-and-under championship, the film deftly combines the personal stories of the players and their families, the often-poignant recollections of NHL pros and the developing drama of the U.S. Nationals.
As the film neared completion, its creators opted not to pursue a theatrical release, instead deciding to go direct to DVD. Finished in time for the Christmas 2006 selling season, In the Crease became the No. 1 sports DVD on Amazon, selling 12,000 copies in four months. “Within about three and a half months, our investors were paid back, the filmmakers received their deferred fee, and everybody was in profit participation,” says Sarner. “It all really worked out.”
The partners plan to use a similar template to document other youth sports, but Sarner isn’t limiting his future filmmaking options. “I’d like to do everything,” he says. “With a couple more docs under my belt, I’ll try to tackle the feature world. I see these documentaries as my training ground.” And like the California Wave, he hopes the practice pays off in the Hollywood equivalent of the big game.
Brian Jun
Age: 27
Neighborhood: Collinsville, Ill.
High school: Metro-East Lutheran High School, Edwardsville, Ill.
Universities: Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Webster University, B.A.
Writer-director-editor: Researching Raymond Burke (2002 short) (and actor), Steel City (2006)
For Brian Jun, the road west to Hollywood began on the East Side—in Alton, where he was born, and Collinsville, where he grew up. “Everybody rode their bikes and played soccer,” he says. “My dad and I played catch in the yard when he got home from work. We used to watch Cardinals games. It was a great, fortunate upbringing.”
Jun had a childhood interest in film, but his appreciation for movies—and the arts generally—deepened at Metro-East Lutheran, where art teacher Daniel Raedeke “really opened my world up.” Raedeke introduced Jun to filmmakers such as Kubrick and Hitchcock, encouraged him to appear in school plays and helped motivate him to start writing. “At the time, I didn’t understand that I was being changed so much,” says Jun. “But looking back, I realize that was a very enlightening period.”
Jun’s interest in drama led him to consider acting as a career, but as he immersed himself in the work of playwrights, his focus changed: “I realized that acting is great, but as a writer you can really create your own opportunities.” He dreamed of starting a company like Chicago’s Steppenwolf—but the transitory nature of theater troubled him. “While a play is great, it comes and goes,” he says. “Movies are here forever. I love the notion that I could create something that would outlive me. All these small realizations cemented into, ‘All right, I need to become a filmmaker. It encompasses everything.’” He made his first when he was just 16.
Jun used that self-described “awful” work when applying to film school—and was disappointed when rejection letters arrived from his preferred choices. He compromised by attending SIU Carbondale, which allowed him to make films immediately rather than wait till he was an upperclassman. Although he directed several Super 8 films and his first 16 mm short in his freshman year, Jun soon concluded that Carbondale’s emphasis on experimental work and documentary was a poor match for his sensibilities; he transferred to Webster University.
Jun’s thesis film at Webster, For Jimmy Brown, proved a turning point. After graduating in May 2001, Jun moved to L.A. and entered the film in the L.A. International Short Film Festival, where a rep for Fox Searchlight Pictures saw it and recruited him for Fox Searchlab, an incubator for young filmmakers. The program provided $3,000 for a short, which was intended as“a calling card for a feature.” For the project, Jun approached John Heard (After Hours, Home Alone) with a full-length script and asked whether the actor would appear in a short, Researching Raymond Burke (not the archbishop), which excerpted the screenplay. Heard agreed to appear if Jun promised to cast him in the feature version. Jun, who also co-starred, returned home to film the short in Alton in January 2002, but the hope for a feature version remains unfulfilled: “To this day, John asks me when we’re going to do the other film. It’s probably never going to happen.”
In recompense, Jun wrote a role for Heard into a new script, Steel City, a sharply observed drama about a troubled family in a decaying small town. “He was the first person I sent it to,” Jun says. “He called me and said, ‘Let’s do it. I don’t care if we have to shoot on digital video for $5. We have to do this movie.’” Jun had already raised just under $100,000 in Alton, where the film was eventually shot, and Heard’s manager placed the screenplay in the hands of Your Half Pictures, which quickly signed on as the production company.
Jun shot the film in an efficient three weeks during winter 2004 and then edited for three months in “a tiny, tiny office in Hollywood.” After submitting the finished film to the Sundance Film Festival, Jun returned to a far more mundane life as a forklift driver at a cable-and-wire company, the last in a string of unglamorous rent-paying jobs in L.A. that included hotel bellman, telemarketer, massage-appointment booker and valet.
Because the competition for coveted Sundance slots is so fierce, Jun had dismissed the idea of an invitation as unrealistic. But two days before Thanksgiving, he received a call at work from producer Ryan Harper, who excitedly informed him that the festival had requested the director’s phone number. “Lo and behold, I get home, and they say, ‘Your movie is in dramatic competition,’” remembers Jun. “That was by far the best moment of my life.”
Jun describes his January 2006 Sundance experience as mind-blowing. “It’s huge. It is out of control. It’s such a sense of validation—you feel that all this hard work is really worth it.” Not every aspect of the fest was ideal, however: Despite uniformly excellent reviews, the movie failed to find a distributor. “Months went by, and I got the post-Sundance blues,” he says. “I got so depressed, so sad that more stuff wasn’t happening with my movie. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t do anything.” Steel City eventually received a limited theatrical opening in major U.S. cities in spring 2007, and Jun has long since lost his after-fest funk. He fully appreciates the opportunities Sundance has offered. “It amped up my credibility as a filmmaker like you wouldn’t believe,” he says. “I haven’t made another movie yet, but a lot of doors opened.”
One of those doors led to his current project, a script for a biopic on the late musician Jeff Buckley, who died young under odd circumstances and continues to have an intensely devoted following. Producer Michelle Sy had read a Steel City review out of Sundance and approached Jun with several projects, including the Buckley film. Jun was intrigued and took the job. The screenplay is near completion, and although Jun is attached to direct, he’s willing to sacrifice that role to ensure the movie is made. “A lot of actors want to play Buckley, big actors who can get movies made,” Jun explains, and his relative inexperience might create anxiety. “I’d love to direct it, but we’ll just have to see.”
That combination of hard-nosed realism and principled commitment seems to be one of the filmmaker’s defining traits. “I’ve yet to be tested,” Jun says. “Anyone can make one movie. I don’t really feel I’ve broken in that much. I’m still hungry. If I’m in the position to make my next film and I have to forfeit everything, I’ll do it, because I’m that passionate about making films.”
