(Highlights) MARIAN MACGOWAN

(Highlights) MARIAN MACGOWAN

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Executive Producer of Television, Feature Films & Documentaries
Hulu’s The Great starring Elle Fanning & Nicholas Hoult

As a filmmaker, what you are selling and your primary asset is yourself, so the clearer you are about yourself, the clearer you can “play yourself”, the more effective you’re going to be in expressing the ideas that you are particularly gifted to do. So that clarity of voice is as important for a writer or a director or producer as it is for a performer or a musician or anybody else. You want to find the best version of yourself and that is about recognizing when those moments of clarity are there and when they are not.

MARIAN MACGOWAN

MARIAN MACGOWAN

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Executive Producer of Television, Feature Films & Documentaries
Hulu’s The Great starring Elle Fanning & Nicholas Hoult

As a filmmaker, what you are selling and your primary asset is yourself, so the clearer you are about yourself, the clearer you can “play yourself”, the more effective you’re going to be in expressing the ideas that you are particularly gifted to do. So that clarity of voice is as important for a writer or a director or producer as it is for a performer or a musician or anybody else. You want to find the best version of yourself and that is about recognizing when those moments of clarity are there and when they are not.

(Highlights) CHRIS DERCON

(Highlights) CHRIS DERCON

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Museum director, curator, and cultural producer at large, Chris Dercon is the President of the Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais, an umbrella group of national museums in France. His career in major cultural institutions across Europe spans several decades. From 2011 to 2016, he was director of London's Tate Modern. He has been program director of MoMA PS1 in New York, and has served as director of the Witte de With Center of Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and Berlin's Volksbühne theater. He is also a presenter, writer and maker of cultural documentaries.

Chris Dercon · Documentary Filmmaker · President of Grand Palais RMN · Curator (Highlights)
The Creative Process Podcast · Film, Culture & Society


(Highlights) HARRIS YULIN

(Highlights) HARRIS YULIN

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Emmy & SAG Award Nominated Actor & Director with roles in Ozark, Billions & Scarface

I really know theater because that's where I started. I went at it in a very haphazard way. It was not orderly at all. I didn't go to a proper school or anything like that. I did a little bit of studying here or there...Jeff Corey (and at one class in New York) someone said something that helped me a great deal. And then I just learned by doing it.

HARRIS YULIN

HARRIS YULIN

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Emmy & SAG Award Nominated Actor & Director with roles in Ozark, Billions & Scarface

I really know theater because that's where I started. I went at it in a very haphazard way. It was not orderly at all. I didn't go to a proper school or anything like that. I did a little bit of studying here or there...Jeff Corey (and at one class in New York) someone said something that helped me a great deal. And then I just learned by doing it.

(Highlights) DANIEL HANDLER a.k.a Lemony Snicket

(Highlights) DANIEL HANDLER a.k.a Lemony Snicket

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Writer

I think what is most exciting is that it is a very passionate readership. You never love a book the way you love a book when you are ten. And I think to be a part of that sacred space and that kind of sacred exchange between a reader and literature is very exciting.

DANIEL HANDLER a.k.a Lemony Snicket

DANIEL HANDLER a.k.a Lemony Snicket

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Writer

I think what is most exciting is that it is a very passionate readership. You never love a book the way you love a book when you are ten. And I think to be a part of that sacred space and that kind of sacred exchange between a reader and literature is very exciting.

MASTER SHI HENG YI

MASTER SHI HENG YI

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35th Generation of Shaolin Masters
Headmaster of the Shaolin Temple Europe

Just getting to know what is Buddhism, which is the foundation of every monastery. The Shaolin Temple is in the core, first of all, it’s a Buddhist monastery and when you are starting to read about Buddhism, one of the key sentences, in the beginning, is: With your thoughts, you are creating the world…So it’s very rarely clearly stated that it is the thoughts that are creating the world. Nevertheless, if you are now looking at the practices that the Shaolin Temple offers, that is quite physical. There is a lot of physicality in there, so you might think but why are you saying with thoughts you create the world, but you have so many different physical activities. It is because if you want to have mental freedom. If you want to approach freedom, you cannot just approach freedom by doing things or trying to chase freedom. The freedom that we are looking for is the type of freedom that is derived and that is very closely related to its counterpart, which is very hard restriction or very hard structure. So if you want to experience what freedom is, look at the restrictions of your life.

(Highlights) ANTE CHENG & MATTHEW CHUANG

(Highlights) ANTE CHENG & MATTHEW CHUANG

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Cinematographers Ante Cheng & Matthew Chuang
Blue Bayou starring Justin Chon & Alicia Vikander

The search for identity is something I think everyone goes through in their lives. It’s a constantly evolving answer. I think all of us can relate to the sense of belonging and what is home. Alicia Vikander’s scene was memorable to me. One of the rare times I cried while operating the camera.

There’s not really many stories about people who look like me in Australia, so I was just making films. How do I be invisible in a way and transcend whatever I’m shooting? It wasn’t until I came to the U.S…it was the first time I had to think about me being Asian and my experiences and how does that relate to what we’re telling in this film.

ANTE CHENG & MATTHEW CHUANG

ANTE CHENG & MATTHEW CHUANG

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Cinematographers Ante Cheng & Matthew Chuang
Blue Bayou starring Justin Chon & Alicia Vikander

The search for identity is something I think everyone goes through in their lives. It’s a constantly evolving answer. I think all of us can relate to the sense of belonging and what is home. Alicia Vikander’s scene was memorable to me. One of the rare times I cried while operating the camera.

There’s not really many stories about people who look like me in Australia, so I was just making films. How do I be invisible in a way and transcend whatever I’m shooting? It wasn’t until I came to the U.S…it was the first time I had to think about me being Asian and my experiences and how does that relate to what we’re telling in this film.

YANN MARTEL

YANN MARTEL

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Novelist

It's interesting to me that the West has been shaped by two works of fiction, The Iliad and The Odyssey and the Gospels, which are prehistoric artistic works. The West has two feet. They're both fictional feet, and after that we started being rational and reasonable.

(Highlights) JOHN BENJAMIN HICKEY

(Highlights) JOHN BENJAMIN HICKEY

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Actor and Director

If you are thinking about too much, you're probably not doing it right. Some nights you do it and you're just like, that just felt like it was ten minutes long and I just was on cloud nine. What was I doing? A great, great American actor George C. Scott had a great quote once, he said, "Every actor worth their salt has one good show a week and spends those other seven shows wondering what they did that made them so good that night." And nobody knows. If you could figure that out and if you could bottle that then, of course, everybody could do it.

JOHN BENJAMIN HICKEY

JOHN BENJAMIN HICKEY

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Actor and Director

I've been so fortunate to work with such great actors over the years. Laura Linney, Joe Mantello and the entire company of The Normal Heart, Nathan Lane, who I consider one of my great educators. He was a real mentor to me. He was such a professional and he was so devoted to the character and worked tirelessly to make the character in the show as good as it could possibly be. Nathan never ever did it sitting down. He's always full steam ahead and there was a great lesson in that for me to watch somebody's work ethic. It taught me my work ethic.

(Highlights) DELIA EPHRON

(Highlights) DELIA EPHRON

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Author, Screenwriter and Producer

So the great thing about being a writer is you can take the pain of your life and make something out of it. And you can mix it up with the happier parts and make something even better out of it. I mean, it's kind of all these things end up being gifts when you're older.

DELIA EPHRON

DELIA EPHRON

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Author, Screenwriter and Producer

So the great thing about being a writer is you can take the pain of your life and make something out of it. And you can mix it up with the happier parts and make something even better out of it. I mean, it's kind of all these things end up being gifts when you're older.

ANA CASTILLO

ANA CASTILLO

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Award-winning Xicana Activist, Editor, Poet, Novelist, Artist
Author of My Book of the Dead
One of the things of the things that is dying is our planet. We hear these sirens every single day. We’re being warned daily by experts and concerned people how vast that squandering is going. It’s a case of urgency and it’s astounding and a very sad, a very pathetic comment on modern life that most people are ignoring those signs. As a poet, it seems to me that one of the tasks that the poet takes on, it’s a vocation that’s born with it, it’s this consciousness, this serving as witness.

(Highlights) JOHN MATYŚIAK

(Highlights) JOHN MATYŚIAK

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Director of Photography of Old Henry
Best Cinematographer Award-Winner · LA Asian Pacific Film Festival

What frame, what scene, ultimately what story is going to capture the most emotion to make you feel something? Because those are the films that have always resonated the most with me. Those films that actually make you feel. They stop you and they make you feel and make you think. They really jar you.

JOHN MATYŚIAK

JOHN MATYŚIAK

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Director of Photography of Old Henry
Best Cinematographer Award-Winner · LA Asian Pacific Film Festival

What frame, what scene, ultimately what story is going to capture the most emotion to make you feel something? Because those are the films that have always resonated the most with me. Those films that actually make you feel. They stop you and they make you feel and make you think. They really jar you.

CINDY CHUPACK

CINDY CHUPACK

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Writer · Producer · Director
Sex and the City, Modern Family, Everybody Loves Raymond, Otherhood

It was a long journey because I think I've been writing television now twenty-five years. I never really had the directing bug. I always loved writing and I like being behind the scenes and, in television, writers have so much control anyway to rise up the ranks and run the show and hire the directors, so I mostly had just great collaborations with directors.

(Highlights) IAN SEABROOK

(Highlights) IAN SEABROOK

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Award-Winning Underwater Director of Photography

It’s about leaving the planet in a better condition than it is currently. What you’re witnessing is years of neglect. It’s the humans who have screwed it all up, and the warming of the earth is no different. The oceans are changing. The topography is changing. Mussels are being fried when the tides recede. This is all unnatural. Or maybe it’s natural. I think it’s Mother Nature just being pissed off and saying, “This is what you get.” And so it’s up to everyone to change their ways. Their shopping habits, their eating habits, how much gas they use. All that stuff which people think “that can’t affect anything.” Well, you’re seeing the result of it now