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Santiago Calogero is an award-winning filmmaker, movie director, producer, and director of photography.
As a humanist, I believe that the value and input of a human being is still going to exceed what artificial intelligence can do.
Disney has been pumping out like six, seven Marvel movies every year for the last quite a few years. A lot of the behind the scenes influences, a lot of Chinese events, investors are buying out IPS. I think we're losing that a little bit because of this mass production aspect.
Amazon just did Lord of the Rings again. Once it gets super corporate and institutional, it just starts losing its flair. Filmmaking is gambling. Until that happens, filmmaking will be tied down.
Some argue that modern filmmaking has lost the essence of this classical flair that made films what they are original IP. The conflict is money, right? How does the barrier of capital come down so that the full creativity can flow?
With AI and machine learning, you're able to generate photorealistic images. Now, this would have taken thousands of hours, hundreds maybe, for a really good team. Imagine you can make an entire film for free or cheap, like 1,000,000th of the cost.
Benoit: I think art is the gateway to the greater unknown, and I think it's very powerful. He says stories allow us to humanize one another. Benoit: If something like art can bring us together, then it's a beautiful thing.
What's it really like to make it in the film industry?
Santiago Calogero is an award-winning filmmaker, movie director, producer, and director of photography.
Santiago has worked with the biggest names in Hollywood, including the stars of The Office, 30 Rock, and Glee, and has racked up over 100 million views online.
Expect to learn about the reality behind Hollywood, the truth about the film industry revenue model, the film industry and acquired narcissism, the future of AI and filmmaking, the philosophy behind the greatest movies of all time, and much more.
This episode represents some of Benoit's favorite conversations on the show, where different domains of life intersect beautifully with mental health as a throughline.
Let's get this started.
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Show Notes
Santiago’s Website: https://www.santiagocalogero.com/
Santiago’s IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm7563374/
Santiago’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/santiagocalogero/?hl=en
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Discover More is a show for independent thinkers by independent thinkers, with an emphasis on mental health. Are you looking for practical mental health insights? Let’s get this started.
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Thank you for Discovering More with us!
Welcome to discover more. My name is Benoit Kim, a former policymaker turn psychotherapist. This conversation with an established director will teach you everything you need to know about the little known reality beyond Hollywood.
Santiago Caljero is an awardwinning filmmaker, cinema director, producer, and director of photography. Santiago has worked with the biggest names in Hollywood, including the stars of The Office, Dirty Rock and Glee, and has even racked up over 100 million views online. Expect to learn about the reality behind Hollywood, the truth about the film industry, revenue model, the film industry and acquired narcissism the future of AI and filmmaking, the philosophy behind the greatest movies of all time, and much more.
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Cool FM. Now, please enjoy my conversation with Santiago Kalajaro. Discover More discover More is a show for independent thinkers by independent thinkers.
Santiago, welcome to the show, man. Thank you for having me, Benoit. I'm I'm very excited to to yap and talk.
So what is the reality behind filmmaking and Sundance Film Festival that a lot of people just don't really know about? Well, okay, so I think in general, filmmaking is such a nebulous kind of craft. I think if you ask the average person, how do you make money with films? There's so many different ways. There's streaming, there's direct distribution, there's doing commercials, right? But that doesn't always come off very obviously.
It's a very difficult field to get into. But if you have the tenacity and the ability to stick around through tough times, those are the people that end up lasting. And obviously, you can have a lot of displacements in terms of trajectory.
The career is never a straight line. You hear this from all the greats. And to get a film actually made like a narrative film, it is probably one of the hardest things to do in terms of most people try to do it.
There's probably hundreds of thousands of people that try to do it, and they can't, because it's just really, really difficult to get the money going or to get the projects or to get the actor. There are so many variables. And just to wrap this up, because I know I'm rambling a little bit, a film requires I'm talking about narrative film, but also commercial.
It requires an expertise of almost every discipline, right? You're dealing with wardrobe, you're dealing with direction, you're dealing with lighting, you're dealing with architecture, you're dealing with just poetry, lyricism. You're dealing with writing, I mean, it's like everything. So I think for people that crave a lot and they like the challenge, it can be very rewarding, but you have to go into it willing to tackle all of those things.
In my opinion. Some people would disagree with me, but I think you always need to have a team supporting you. Of course.
But the best directors, the best filmmakers, they're ready to dive in, to learn everything and get their hands dirty. So I want to zoom out to the macro really quickly. Sure.
So, from your experiences over a decade, how do you feel like the landscape of filmmaking has shifted in the current 21st centuries, in the 2023 versus maybe from the early twenty s or even before? How has the landscape shifting? Right. I think this goes for everything. And it's not unique to film, obviously.
Right. Like this sort of rapid expansion of technology in the last 20 years, right. The interval of the last 20 years versus the last 50 years, these intervals of technological advancement are getting even shorter and shorter.
Right. And so I think everyone can relate to that, especially with Chat GPT and AI, right? The last 20 years with the Internet, social media, I mean, everything has completely changed. So everyone feels very familiar with that theme.
And so I think when it comes to filmmaking, it's very difficult to generate revenue in this new landscape because nobody knows. Like investors, right? Like, if you invest in a house or if you buy property, that's a very tried and true method of generating income. But with filmmaking, the whole landscape completely changed.
So now it's like really large corporations. There's really two kinds of films, right? There's really large corporate films that are backed by huge studios because they have the money. Like Marvel.
Like, marvel or yeah, whatever. The big studios, disney, right, which are very institutional. They've got lots of executives, lots of managers, lots of eight.
I mean, it's a machine that's amazing. It's an amazing machine and it produces a lot of amazing things. But then there's a gap, right? Then it's like you have the multimillion dollar projects and then now you have most of it being in this indie realm, which is almost like people scrapping money together from investors.
And those budgets can range from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to a couple of million dollars. But there's this middle range which used to exist in the has started to go away a little bit because of the change in distribution, because it all comes down to distribution. They had DVDs, right? You had theatrical releases, which were a huge revenue generator.
So now that those themes have changed because of VR and because of the pandemic and just because of streaming, right? Like, if you were doing it in the, say, hey, I have this large celebrity, we'll do direct to DVD. We can project the revenue in a much more concrete way. It's never guaranteed, but it's a lot more repeatable and hey, we can do straight to DVD or straight to video and those movies would make a lot of money.
Now it's like you could and some of those just made no money. Like, obviously sometimes it's just a complete flop, but it was a little more forgiving and now it's very much like this is why streaming is so popular. Because streaming, it's like the company pulls all of its resources together.
It's a massive company. They can afford to spend 20 projects, 19 of them fail and one of them is Stranger Things and that goes for any business, right? Like even during the pandemic, large mega large corporations, they were able to survive because they had capital accumulated. Whereas small creators or small business owners, they couldn't really survive because maybe they had two shops and if one goes under, they're out.
Whereas McDonald's, they can have 1000 chains go out and the revenue from their real estate and their other branches is going to cover it. There is a lot there. So my brain is going towards Steve Jobs.
I read his biography, of course, he is one of the greatest innovators ever and one thing he has noticed is the disruptor of film industry, pixel. And you're alluding to a lot of the gatekeepers as the underlying theme in the film industry. And of course, music industries where gatekeepers are less and less prevalent because of the increased individual autonomy of the creators.
So, A, how is the gatekeepers going with the film industry, with the executives you alluded to? And also, how does film industry perceive innovation? Like a major disruptor, like Steve Jobs and other people like OOH, that's a really interesting connection you made with the music industry. And I'll just start off too I don't want to villainize executives, right? Not saying you were not saying I was right, but it's easy to be like, oh, the executives. But at the end of the day too, they're doing a lot of quality control and we take for granted that they are doing a good job in some senses.
And obviously everyone's going to not do a perfect job, but quality control, there's a lot of films that are really bad that they say, hey, no, so we don't see the really bad stuff and then we just take for granted the stuff that's been done. Well, the point you made about the music industry, I think when you really break down filmmaking and what these sort of fundamental limiters are, it's capital. And I think that is with the music industry, right? Like you could produce an entire album from your garage with a couple of micro you maybe need I'm being generous.
Let's just say 1020, $30,000 worth of recording equipment and a nice facility. The overhead there, it came down considerably back in the day, right? If you were Frank Sinatra or somebody big or the rolling Stones or whatever, you had multimillion dollar recording studios, and now you can do that in your garage with $30,000. That didn't change as much for filmmaking.
Intuitively, you would think, oh, well, cameras are more accessible, and they've gotten better. Everyone has a camera on their phone. Why isn't filmmaking cheaper? Well, because at the end of the day, filmmaking is like building a house or it's like construction.
I mean, it's like you need so many things. It's so physical. Music is so in your head, right? It's physical.
Obviously, you got to play the instruments. But filmmaking, it's like you got to get the location. You got to get the people there.
It's just a lot of physical stuff. So that's kind of what prevents it from having that breakthrough like the music industry did. And that's what's preventing it from being truly democratic.
If I was able to go make a film that right now would cost $5 million, and I could go make that for $50,000, all of a sudden, now you're going to see a marketplace emerge, and you're going to see the next genesis of what it can be emerge. So that's the limiting factor right now. I think I answered most of the question, right? So I want to segue into another question, which is related, where I'll love for you to fact check this.
There's a lot of stereotypes and potentially misconceptions and fallacies around what filmmaking industry is, but one of the most common one is along with music industry and fashion, right? Filmmaking industry is known as the greediest and one of the most difficult fields to survive and sustain you alluded to in the beginning of the conversations. So, A, can you fact check that? And B, what are some of the reasons or attributable contributing factors to make this such a greedy industry outside of the high entry points with the capitals? The greediness part is definitely true in a lot of ways. I think when you look at really big actors, when you look at the it's always management, right? It's like management and actors, they're going to be taking a lot of the revenue, and a lot of people do get into it because the pay can be really crazy for actors.
And at the end of the day, the audience isn't really connecting with the director as much. They are, in some senses, james Cameron, you know these names. Stanley Kubrick, right? You connect with the director.
But at the end of the day, it's Tom Cruise's face that you're seeing that power because you have to build a movie around a celebrity. You can get away with not doing that. But let's be real.
If you get Tom Cruise in your movie, people are going to pay attention, and they're going to go buy it. So they know they have the power. And it's not even necessarily wrong that they have the power.
I mean, they are acting. It's the idea of this is where we can maybe weave geometry into this and some philosophy, right? Do it. If a current runs through a pyramid, if the tip of the pyramid is going to have the highest concentration per square meter, and as the current runs through the pyramid, it gets distributed exponentially more across the surface area.
It's like that for any industry, right? Maybe there's a law firm that's ricking in 90% of the business. The next biggest law firm is Ricking in 8% and then all thousand other law firms are ricking in the next 2%. Right? So I think it's the same thing with filmmaking.
And I think the fact that can be very misleading because people forget that there's that 98% of other people that are not making that kind of money. And that's where things get real nasty. This entire city, Los Angeles, is full of actors, directors, producer.
I mean, everybody wants to be in the film industry. The entire city, like, almost the entire city. I'm overstating a tiny bit, but you know what I mean, right.
You can go to a bar and you talk to ten people, guaranteed, five are going to be in the film industry, maybe more. So that's the thing. It's a dream crushing city.
And that is not a negative thing, though, because that actually keeps it real and that's what makes it good in the sense, yeah, it's ugly. A lot of people fail, a lot of people never even get off the ground. But it's like the art, like that's why the art is good.
That's why cinema has moved forward. Just like to be an astrologist or be an astronaut or be a quantum physicist. The weed out rate is fairly high, but that's what makes it an art form, right? And I'm thinking about this quote from La La Land.
I think Ryan Gosling said this paraphrasing, and he said los Angeles is a city where people pay more attention to the pictures of the city than the city itself. Right. As in, it's all about the glamorized post production versus the actual enjoyment of that moment.
And I want to tie this into mental health because that's what I do. I'm an abstract thinker and a lot of psychologists talk about acquired narcissism. What that means is certain people have genetic markers predispose them to become narcissist.
Personality disorder. A lot of folks in the actors and filmmaking industry, through nurturing, through environmental feedback, they become acquired narcissist. Right.
Because you see this stereotypes, you see these movies. Sure. Everyone's yes.
Men, right? Yes. You want water? Yes. You either the best, especially in K drama, they worship them like gods.
So what is your experience in terms of what I just shared and anything you want to share in terms of the slippery slope, in terms of mental health? Because I think humans need speed bumps. People who slow you down, people to check you and through this checking and this interplay of confrontations. People grow.
And I think at large filmmaking, a lot of major actors lack that. Not to their fault, but just the environment they're in. Yeah.
Okay, so I'll start with Narcissism in terms of actors and how it balloons in the film industry. Obviously, when you're an actor, it's your face. How can you not be obsessed with yourself a little bit if you're making money? And also in the sense that it's a lot less of a traditional industry.
There's a lot of stuff that goes on in the film industry that would not necessarily happen at a hospital or like a law firm. Maybe that's an overstatement. Maybe I'm generalizing a little too much.
But my point is that because the format is so open and it's so all over the it's art, right? It's so random. Like, for example, a movie can be made like a thousand different ways. People think that the title of director, cinematographer, editor, it's like, very clear cut.
It's not clear cut at all. An actor might be also kind of directing a little bit, or he also might be producing. So when you don't have these very defined categories, right, and when it actually benefits the art to not have defined categories, it starts to get really nebulous.
And you can get these runaway train situations where, like, an actor becomes super powerful and they end up directing the movie. For example, if you saw the last I keep talking about Tom Cruise. He's a great actor.
I love one of my favorite actors in Eyeswood Shot, one of my favorite films in Mission Impossible. There's this featurette, and it's hilarious because I don't know if you've seen it, but he rides a motorcycle off of a ramp in Parachutes. I remember that scene, right? So it's just really over the top Hollywood.
I love it. It's amazing. But I was watching the behind the scenes, and Tom Cruise, he did it successfully a couple of times, and the director is like, all right, hey, we're done.
We got it, Tom. And Tom's like, you know, I don't think we got it. And then you're like, what? Are you going to say no to Tom Cruise? And the director is like, okay.
And then they're like, well, I guess we're doing it. Each time they're running the stunt, we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars. I would imagine it's a lot of money each take.
So Tom is like, no, we're doing it again. At a certain point, it's like, who's in charge here? Is Tom in charge? And then you're seeing this too, with actors becoming directors a lot more. Michael B.
Jordan just directed Creed. Right. This was unheard of 30, 40 years ago, but this actually connects into the social media, like sort of echo chamber, where the social capital that you accumulate by putting your face in front of everybody is is starting to have more weight in the boardroom, right? They're saying, hey, you know what? People like Michael B.
Jordan, have him direct it. Fuck it doesn't matter if he's directed a bunch of things before. And I'm not throwing shade to Michael B.
Jordan. If you're an actor for that long, there's a good chance you're probably honestly a good director because you're around it all the time. You mean you're acting.
So I'm not throwing shade to him. I think he did a great job with this latest film, like quarterbacks and coaches, right? A lot of quarterbacks, a lot of coaches were right. They were players, right? So that's happening more and more.
And this actually connects right into the influencer thing. And social media, the social capital of your face and putting yourself out there is starting to snowball and it's becoming even more powerful. So that actually dovetails into the whole cinema thing, too.
Like with Tom Cruise, I mean, again, like, he was kind of directing Wish and Impossible might have not gotten the official title, but you could tell. You look at those behind the scenes footage, he's like, no, I don't like that's. What a director does.
A director says, I don't like this shot. Before, they said the actor would be like, I don't like this. They'd be like, Shut up.
Go to your trailer now. It's not like that. So they're getting more and more power.
And whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I'm not going to say here because personally, I don't know. It might make the art form better, might not, I don't know, but it's happening. So in terms of this very complicated systems and dynamic, as you said, even with mission is possible.
The director is not a known name. He's a well known director. So I think the power redistribution is a very interesting thing.
And of course, Tom Cruise is one of the biggest actors of all time. So with that being said, from your experience, Santiago, is there such thing as an if actor? Like, when you come across whether it's a narrative film, commercial film, indie film, to tie everything together, what are some of the criterias that you've seen over and over again as like an overarching theme that you said, yes, this film has got it capital aside, is there such thing as an if factor? What is like a list of criteria that you've seen that really separates great film from a good film? Okay, well, I think I'm going to give away the farm here. But this is no secret.
And it's fine because it's an interesting thing, right? A lot of people would disagree with me, but I think the best films, at least the films I like the most, they can appeal to the average person and they can also appeal to cinephiles. They've got the meat, the intellectual meat that somebody who's really intelligent can chew on, but they've also got the more tertiary basic layers. That not to throw shade to the average person, but somebody who doesn't make films all the time, or somebody who's not just wants to go to the movie and enjoy something entertaining.
You got to kind of satisfy both. You've got to take somebody who cares nothing about the art form, and you've got to impress them. A big issue in the industry right now, and this dovetails into a lot of other I'm not going to name festivals, but I'll just say it's a big issue.
And filmmakers privately talk about this, but we don't like to publicly talk about it because everyone's very sensitive about calling other people's projects not great. I kind of like it when people knock stuff, even if they knock my project. But at the end of the day, a lot of filmmakers and this goes for musicians too, will make films for filmmakers, and they don't realize that they're alienating.
This is when people roll their eyes, when you say, hey, watch my film, or, hey, let's go watch this indie film. A lot of normal people would be like, okay, but they'll go see Top Gun. They'll go see Avatar, right? And then the filmmaker community is like, oh, Avatar.
Oh, Top Gun. People will like it, but deep down inside, they'll say, this is a Marvel movie, or this is a commercial movie. And so it's almost like this external battle between the consumer and the person making it.
But I've noticed that the most successful directors and my favorite directors, they take the challenge of having to appeal to the average person as a challenge, and they enjoy it. And they say, let me make something that's packaged for the average person, but let me also pack in deep philosophical and intellectual themes. So they're hitting both.
I'll give you an example. Tarantino. Okay, I'm sitting here.
Obviously, I like Tarantino. Every filmmaker in La. Is like I like Tarantino.
It's a very typical thing to like. Okay, granted, but he does a great job because what he does is he tackles genre films and he makes them exciting. But they're also really well made films.
And a lot of filmmakers, whether you like him or not, they respect him, and he's got very controversial things about him. Of course, every filmmaker does. And if you're saying something that means anything, you're going to piss off some people.
But he's a great example of somebody that's treaded the line there. Stanley Kubrick, same thing, 2001, very intellectual, very deep. There's a lot there.
I mean, he predicted the iPad and the iPhone, like, in the 60s. That's the crazy thing about that movie. And I'm not going to go into much of a tangent here, but his films become more relevant as time goes on.
Most films fade, and, oh, that was a cool movie, and you forget about it. A year later, we're still talking about this movie 60, 70 years later. It's almost like, yeah, 60 years later, and it's becoming more relevant.
And you're going, wow, he was. And every year that passes, you're going, wow. I'm understanding even more about it.
It's unreal how prophetic a lot of his work was. I can't say that about a lot of other directors. Even like Back to the Future terminator skynets.
Yes. Those references are coming back. Yeah.
And I feel like great art or piece of art, what qualifies as great is like wine. He seasons well over time. This is true.
I mean, at the end of the day, this is entertainment. And that also gets forgotten, too. It sounds like I'm knocking indie cinema.
I'm not. I love indie cinema. There are so many amazing indie classics.
I just know as artists and even researchers, this extends what I'm talking about, I think, extends into almost every field. Right. But I think it's specifically consumer facing fields.
I think this is a big problem where the experts start making stuff for the experts and they forget who they're making this for. And that's something that I think is really, really important. So that's actually a perfect segue.
I want to go into maybe some investment and capital and some of the insidious impact with Marvel. So I am aware of this. I think I think it's a fact.
Feel free to fact check me where as you've alluded to Marvel and especially Disney has been pumping out like six, seven Marvel movies every year for the last quite a few years at such a rampant and unprecedented speed. And a lot of the behind the scenes influences, a lot of Chinese events, investors are buying out IPS. And a lot of the chunks of these behind the scenes influence with Marvel specifically on Disney.
And of course, that's a very for profit model where let's neglect and forego a little bit of the character developments, subplots all these nuances. That I think really creates a buy in for a lot of the viewers that made Stanley's Marvel comics such lovable for decades and decades. I think we're losing that a little bit because of this mass production aspect.
Any thoughts coming up for you? There so many, so many. I'm so glad you brought this up. Yeah, I think everybody would agree with me.
I think every filmmaker deep down inside goes, they know what's going on. Everything, once it gets super corporate and institutional, it just starts losing its flair. Amazon just did Lord of the Rings again.
We don't need another Lord of the Rings film like the first three films and maybe The Hobbit. It's done. It's done.
We don't need to keep making it. I mean, if you want to have Peter Jackson, who made the originals, that did so so what I think a lot of people are sensing is it turns into kind of a cash grab. Let's be real Lord of the Rings.
It's like, imagine a little kid, a little kid loves Lord of the Rings or something. And I love Lord of the Rings. I love Star Wars, and they grew up on that.
I'm the little kid, okay? Right? And then you say, I'm making a movie. And they go, really? And then you go watch it, and they skit you in the theater. You spend the money.
You sit in the seat and you're going, this is not and so it's almost like taking it I hate to say it, but it is truly like taking advantage of the one and the good feelings that you had as a kid or a young person or as an older person, whatever. When it came out, like the original, like nostalgia. Yeah, I'll be honest.
I don't end up at the theater as much as I used to anymore. And I'm not watching every show that's a recreate. I'm not watching a lot of those.
I'm watching them for market research. But I can tell very quickly. For example, with the Amazon Lord of the Rings series, the elves had, like, short hair.
And it's just like, come on, what are we doing here? Just make something new. But they don't want to do that because the insurance of the property, the IP, is so powerful and it is so lucrative that they are not going to put because like I said earlier, how it's all a gamble, right? Filmmaking is gambling. Nobody wants to admit this, but it's true.
It is total gambling. You have better odds of probably honestly, honestly, you have probably better odds of going to Vegas and gambling a million dollars, a million dollars, a million dollars than you do making money off of a film. It's the truth.
So many films completely flop unless you have a big studio carrying you. And Netflix isn't profitable yet, right? Amazon was about to go under their whole media. So it is a master gambling play.
But think about it. If you're gambling, you want to you want to find the lowest risk asset. You know, like, if you're buying property, it's like, well, do you want to buy property in Indiana on a farm that you don't know if you're going to be able to sell it? Or are you going to go to where there's a lot of liquidity in New York City? It's a little bloated, but you have liquidity.
If you need to sell that piece of property, you're going to be able to sell it instantly. In Indiana, it might sit on the shelf for two, three years. So it's the same thing with filmmaking, right? It's like the marvel that's, like property in New York City, you're going to be able to have a higher chance.
You might be wrong. You might buy it 2007 and then have the 2009 crash or whatever, right? 2008 crash. So there's always an element of but you know, like, if you're investing, you want something that's more secure.
And those IPS just to an investor and intuitively, wouldn't that make more sense? Hey, let's take a chance. In this filmmaker's idea, when 99% of those ideas fail, or let me put money into a Spider Man movie, which has a 40% chance of failing, what are you going to do? So those market conditions are what? And this is where I think business people and entrepreneurs can really connect to this, right? It's like that's at the end of the day, what's driving the art form? And it's always been this tug between that and the art. And until we break through that, until that becomes and it's kind of happened with the music industry, what I was saying earlier.
Until that happens, filmmaking will be tied down and the true, like, the beauty of what it can be. That's why I don't think film is dead. It's not dead.
In fact, we're just getting started. A lot of people are saying video games are the next element. I have big disagreements with one of my best friends about this.
He's like, oh, films have already been done. Video games, it's all about V. And I'm like, until the art form is released of the chains of being so capitally, such a slave to capital, we're never going to see the full evolution of it.
But it will happen one day. And with AI, it might happen actually a little faster than we even thought, which is a whole other thing. You tapped into my frequency, so I want to get into the rise of technological front ends, like AI, machine learning with film.
So you sort of talked about in passing where some people argue that modern filmmaking has lost the essence of this classical flair that made films what they are original IP. Right? So I want to ask you to elaborate more on this debate. Not contentious per se, but just debate between why filmmaking could be dead or why isn't it dead, per your opinion, and tying that into this loaded question about what do you think this really means in this current 2023 era with this rise of machine learning and AI, like Mid Journey and things like that.
Oh, that's really exciting to talk about, because I think, like any good movie, right, a movie starts off with conflict, and it's a resolution, right? So you put the character in some situation, and he's got to get out, or she's got to get out, right? And so that is with AI and with Mid Journey and with machine learning, we might actually see those barriers come down a lot faster, because, again, I mentioned the conflict. Let me step back a little bit. Like a good movie, there's conflict, right? And what's our conflict when it comes to our discussion right now about the film industry? The conflict is money, right? That's usually the conflict in most people's lives, right? So how do we solve that? How does the barrier of capital come down, and how is it shattered so that the full creativity can flow? Right? So that's our dilemma.
Here. And the filmmaking has been fighting that ever since the beginning. How do I get enough money to make this idea? Most ideas are made because, you know, you have a certain amount of money.
Let's just say it's an indie film, and you're doing it for a million dollars or 400 grand. Which people do you say, I've got 400 grand. I'm going to make a story that works for 400 grand.
It's not about the story I want to make. Right? It's, what can I make for $400,000? And you can trick yourself into thinking, oh, well, that's a creative challenge. And it is.
It is a creative challenge. And really good filmmakers are able to make it work. They're able to go, I have this much money.
I can make this idea. This will work. Right? And that's how you get these amazing movies.
And every film has been made like that, by the way, almost every single one. Once in a while, they give scorsese or they give Cameron just unlimited budget, and he can just do whatever the hell he wants. Or like, I think, Kim Jong Il, I think he kidnapped some filmmakers in Korea back in the day.
And he actually did. He did. And he gave them unlimited resources.
So they were like he was like, Just make whatever. Because he loved their films. And the actresses, he was like, Just go.
Just do whatever. So that happens sometimes, right? Unfettered, just complete creativity. But that usually isn't the case.
So anyway, tying this back into Mid Journey, into AI, with AI and machine learning, you're able to generate and I know I'm preaching to the choir here, you're able to generate these photorealistic images. So if I type in I want a foggy day in 1940s San Francisco or something, it's going to print that and a wide shot at an F two or whatever, right? It's going to print that for me. Now, what was the barrier before? Now, if I can render photorealistic environments by just playing with AI now, for right now, with Mid Journey I'm sure we're all familiar with Mid Journey, you can type in a prompt and you get an image.
You get a still image. Now, you can't do a lot with the still image. It's great for conceptualizing, it's great for understanding where you're going to go.
But what's the next step? Okay, I'm doing a movie that takes place in 1940s China, for example, which we're working on a project for this, and render me this entire landscape with extras, with buildings, with atmosphere, everything, just like you did in Mid Journey, but now render it in 3D so I can upload that into a program right now. I can move around the world. Now, this would have taken thousands of hours, hundreds maybe, for a really good team, right? We're talking millions of dollars of visual effects, maybe a couple hundred thousand.
You get what I'm saying, though? Like, we're talking serious manpower and, like, a full team. Yeah, serious, serious firepower from a right from a physical perspective. But now imagine you're able to generate all that at for free or cheap, like 1,000,000th of the cost.
Now all of a sudden, I can do a film in ancient China or ancient Greece or ancient whatever, and I can actually do that now as, like, a layman and then take it to the next level. Imagine you have your actors. You don't even really need your actors.
Let's just say you have a thousand pictures of Tom Cruise. Let's just say you have a thousand pictures of Sandra Bullock. You run a stable diffusion learning model on their faces.
You get the machine learning algorithm for that, and then now you're plugging it in to scenes that you're creating with AI. And you say, I need Tom Cruise to walk over the and obviously, we're getting better with controlling Mid Journey and controlling these prompt based programs like Stable Diffusion, for example, is so much more powerful than mid journey in a lot of ways because of the variability. So, for example, if I need a character to pose a certain way, I can do that in Stable diffusion.
It's really hard, though, because it's like lines of code and there's, like, interface. It's, like, way more confusing for the average person than mid journey. But we're getting that control because that's the issue right now as I type in a prompt, and it just kind of spits something random out.
But if I know what I want in my brain and I can kind of get close and I can start to direct the AI to create that, then all of a sudden, then we get to a place to where I can take any actor, I can take anybody. I can do machine learning on them, and I can put them in these environments, and I can make an entire film and it will look photorealistic. We're not there yet, but I honestly didn't think that was going to happen for, like, 1020 years.
And to be honest with you, I think we're kind of we're, like, really close. Like, we're like, almost there now. And that's crazy.
That's really exciting. It's also really scary because I want to give actors I don't want to just outsource the actors, but there are going to be situations where that's going to become a big thing once again make this connection with mental health somehow. So BetterHelp is under scrutiny.
I think they had a $3 million lawsuit. Of course, BetterHelp is an online therapy platform that connects you with licensed therapists. And they were caught that they were using some of the data and information against the consumers or the clients'knowledge.
The therapist didn't know. This is a plot from the companies. And of course, $3 million Slap is it's nothing.
Of course, all these situations go. But my point is connecting this with this precipice of technology film. In a sense, I feel like this takes away the power from actors because they're the faces or the brands of the movie, where maybe reemphasizes or places a focal point back on the actual art or the film.
Because now you can outsource the actual actors and actresses without using them, just the representations of what they are, who they are. So I bring this up because I feel like with digital therapy rising, as it should, because that increases accessibility for service for a lot of clients and help seekers. At the same time, I think whenever we're faced with certain rapid expansions of a certain new technology, whether it's digital therapy for mental health or in terms of AI and filmmaking, there are intended consequences and there's unintended consequences.
So tying to this vast questions, what do you feel like? Are some of the intended and unintended things you foresee coming? With everything we talked about, maybe it's placing the emphasis out of the actors into the actual film and anything in between. I think we're dealing with that question across the board in every sector. So this is kind of great line of thought to kind of go down.
Okay, so one of the unintended consequences will obviously be displacement. First of all, AI is based off of what we've created, right? It's a pale image of us. So I'm a humanist in that regard.
I think that human beings, we can't really explain yet how we don't know really how powerful we are. We're in this phase right now, and this actually happens. This is actually what I felt 2001.
This is my interpretation of 2001, which is we put all of our faith in AI. We almost feel inferior. AI doesn't need to eat, doesn't need to sleep.
All of our worldly impediments have been solved by AI. It's not affected by it. So in that regard, as a humanist, I believe that the value and input of a human being is still going to exceed what artificial intelligence can do in a lot of ways.
Especially when there's a very famous clip with Miyazaki talking to his proteges. They present him an Aigenerated model of like a zombie moving, and they're excited to show him, and he watches it, and he's sitting there like his old Japanese man. He's just kind of looking at him.
And then you're like you start to realize as he's watching it, you're like, he doesn't like this, right? And then they stop the clip, and then Haya looks at them and he goes, what is this? And he goes, It's a machine learning algorithm. It's AI. We've created AI to make something look disgusting.
And he goes and he goes in this story, he starts talking about this disabled man that he sees every day on the way to work. And basically, the point of what he tries to make is that the AI will never and I don't know if I'm right about this, but this is how he felt. It will never be able to experience or understand human emotion or pain in the way that we will, doesn't know loss.
It can project and it can abstract. That right. And this is where it's debatable.
I mean, I don't know. And that's the true core of where music, art, filmmaking is coming from, is the reason why us, if we're making content and films and art for humans, the human experience that produced that, that desire to want to make, that is something that I think that we need to value, and that is not going away. And that has to do with my humanist approach, which is, I don't think AI is going to replace us.
I think it's going to make a lot of mundane tasks a lot easier and it's going to allow us to be able to do more important things and lean into our critical thought and lean into so I know. That's not exactly an answer of intended consequences and unintended consequences. But I do think that is laying the groundwork for what I feel is going to be the battle.
And I think it's going to be a pretty bloody battle. There's going to be a lot of displacement. A lot of people are going to get ahead of themselves and be like, oh, AI is here by but I think we're going to realize and this is what happens in 2001, is he has to fight the AI.
After you thinking the AI is superior, but at the end of the day, the human wins. Right? But in that fight, eight of the nine crew members, I believe I think it was eight or nine crew members were killed by AI. And it's the same thing with Terminator, the Terminator films, right? It's going to be a ground fight.
Excuse my friend. It's going to be a ground fight. It's going to be a fight to the death, in my opinion.
So there's going to be a lot of unintended consequences that are going to be really ugly. And I don't know what those are, to be honest with you, I don't really know. I think, yeah, obviously, actors being replaced, digitizing certain personalities, digitizing directors, right? You're going to be able to digitize all of Stanley Kubrick's movies and make a movie like Kubrick.
You're going to be able to digitize Tom Cruise and have a performance like Tom Cruise. But at the end of the day, the AI doesn't understand in a fundamental way what we actually went through to produce those experiences. It can only mirror.
I love that because I feel like emotions is such a big thing, this emotionality, this reaction to someone else's emotions and tying this into this nostalgia of hijacking through a capitalistic model. In the Disney or Marvel films we talked about earlier, where I think for a lot of folks, at least for myself, when I go watch a film, it's because it incited a certain nostalgia and I buy into the experience, lived experiences or displayed experiences of the actress and actresses within this plot. I see a piece of myself in them that I say, wow, that's resonating, that's powerful.
I feel it. Right? So I wonder how that even impacts people, knowing that because it's about informed consent, they can't lie to them saying that, oh, we displaced the actors, but they're actually in it. There has to be some legality around that, right? So assuming that they are very upfront about that through legality reasons, right.
I wonder how many consumers lose that interest because they don't feel connected with artificial intelligence or this artificially created film versus without this displayed emotions. And I want to tie this into your philosophy because you talked about intellectual films quite a few times throughout, and you talked about your humanist I'm the same way. And I think emotions and philosophy are very much related because to me, philosophy, it just archives our ability to study other people's before us, their behaviors, their ways of life.
So, like for you, San Diego, speaking of realistic films that portray real emotions because mental health is emotions versus this new uprising of maybe more AI driven films that lack that human connections, how do you think, like philosophy, specific Greek philosophy helps inform your creative approach or how you view filmmaking as an art for you personally? So particularly with philosophy, I think it's all about being succinct. I'm going to kind of go on a couple of tangents here, but if good films, in my opinion, and this is just my opinion, but I think that a great film is very economical. It doesn't take too long to say what it needs to say.
A good screenplay or a good film, every scene is moving something forward. Even if it's a scene where they're just driving down the street and they're not saying anything, somebody might say, oh, well, that's not important. So, no, the character is having a thoughtful moment, and maybe we need that thoughtful moment right now because something happened.
Or maybe they're falling in love. James Cameron talks about how they were going to cut out a scene of them just flying on those winged creatures, and they said, oh, it's too long, James. What is it doing? And he goes, they're falling in love.
They're having a moment where they're actually able to experience this. So going back to the economy of it all right, I think economy of language is really important with philosophy, connecting it to Greek philosophy. I mean, if you look at the Socratic texts or Aristotle's writings or Plato or whatever, right.
It's just very clear, simple. It's kind of the antithesis of almost German philosophy. German, the sort of Hegel and Kant and all these guys, they very much were kind of very hyper complex, very much a linguistic discipline in that regard.
And that's why I think I personally didn't connect with it so much when I was getting into it because the disjunct between German and English and the translational error when you're cutting with such a fine, precise knife through these things, it just gets so lost and so muddled and it's so hard to really understand. It's like, oh, well, does he mean this or does he mean that? Where are we going? It's really hard when it's that technical, technical philosophy. Whereas what I love about the Greek philosophy and how it relates to filmmaking is it's just very clear and it's to the point and it's simple in its own way.
I mean, it's all philosophy is a little complex, obviously, but when you compare it to the technicality of German philosophy and the modern philosophy, it's a lot more simplified when it comes to filmmaking. And this goes back to my point earlier about how it needs to be made for the common person. Good film made for the common person has the it's like a Disney movie that it's good for a kid.
Kids love Disney movies, but the adults are also laughing. Right? That's hard to do. That's really hard to do.
And it freaks people out. That's why they don't do it. Finding Nemo classic.
Great Disney films. Great Pixar films, right? So anyway, Greek philosophy has that simplicity to it. And that simplicity is the core, I think, of what makes really good entertainment.
Maybe an abstract indie film is more like the technical German philosophy. As a philosopher's. Philosopher, you get bored with the Greek stuff.
You go, I need to get into this technical stuff. I need something to chew on. As a guitarist, you get bored of playing power chords and whole notes.
You get bored of two, five, one chord progressions. You get bored of four, four time. So you start getting into three, four time.
You start getting into all these really complex and there's a point where you just start to become less reachable. You know what I mean? You get where we're going with this. It's interesting because it sounds like, of course, this is oversimplifications, but if you look at, like, a 30,000 foot view of German philosophy, it's very self indulgent, self gratifying.
It's about the evolutions of our way of thinking through these hyper complex topics. Whereas Greek philosophers is for the people, right? In a lot of ways, right? Of course, aristotle, Plato, they're for the people. But it, to me, sounds like Santiago.
The common thread between these philosophy that you're into and filmmaking, the grey filmmaking is refined simplicity. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. Right.
Because musically, too, and I come from a background of music as well, with my family and never underestimate a whole note. Some of the most powerful songs have some very basic chord progressions, or maybe they don't. But the idea of embracing that simplicity and I think it freaks people out because it feels like a contradiction.
How can something advanced be so simple, right? That's where it is. That's it. You can get technical, you can get advanced.
I'm not saying you shouldn't. I think you need to go there. You need to experience that, right? But I think when you start looking at the greats, you start coming back to that.
And just one last point I'll add about the Greek philosophy. I did quite a bit of philosophy in school as well. In addition to film, I did a double major.
One of my final papers was on how Aristotle's notion of form and matter. This distinction between a sort of intellectual property, if you will, and the physical matter, right? Like, we're form and matter, right? Like, there's the DNA that has the intelligence that is like, here's how to structure our body. And then there's, like, the meat and the bones and the actual material, right? Well, anyway, the final paper was about how the unified field theory or even quantum physics was essentially getting around to what Aristotle was trying to say 2000 years ago.
That he was basically saying what the cutting edge of physics was just getting to whenever I graduated, right? And that was kind of mind boggling for me. It just kind of happened because I was bumping around like, string theory and quark theory. And then naturally you get to unified field theory and then you start the idea of like, as you get smaller in particle size, things start behaving more dynamically, more randomly, right? And so if you just take that philosophical idea and you go, okay, well, what's the extreme of a smaller and smaller particle size? If they're behaving more random as they get smaller, then isn't the smallest unit of the universe complete randomness? Isn't it complete dynamicness? And then this actually, ironically, dovetails into a lot of religion, right? A lot of religions will kind of get there too.
And then so you're starting to see this common theme between Greek philosophy, religion and science. And that was really intense for me because I was like, wow, they're all kind of saying the same thing. And you hear that with a lot of people that want to be very a religious.
They're like, look, all religions are saying similar things. It's be good to your neighbor. Take care of yourself.
Don't be an asshole. Don't be difficult, don't be mean, right? And again, you go to science and it's like science, the cutting edge of science starts to get there. So, anyway, I know that was a bit of a tangent but the idea of us learning from the ancients and us connecting all of these themes humor me.
This too, or at least I'll just go here real quick. It's worth it. Look at the story of the hero arc, right? They would say that a lot of like, take the Bible, right? The Arc of Jesus.
That is the hero's journey. That is the basis of almost every major film ever. Look at Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, the Matrix.
I mean, I could go on and on. And it is also a similar journey to a lot of other religions as well. Right.
The hero's journey is something that is ancient, and this is where we can tie it into the biblical side of things. A lot of these ideas have been around for thousands of years, and they say no idea is new. Right.
When it comes to filmmaking. And when you start to really make films, start to write scripts, and you start to really realize it, you're like, wow, it kind of already has been done. And you can tweak it and make it unique.
And I'm not saying that there's a lot to dig out, okay? I'm not saying that's all done. But in some senses, the basic themes, the major themes and the major arcs have been kind of carved out. And it's not just in the last hundred years, like thousands of years ago.
So I think there's a lot to learn from the ancients, and they kept it simple, which I love. And I think that's what a lot of religious scholars view, whether it's Quran, the Bible, and the Bible is the oldest original text in the Western culture we call the secret text, because they didn't have Google Drive, they didn't have Google Docs back then. There is no sharing their knowledge.
They're confined by their mobilities. Right. They're traveling with donkeys, and it takes months and years.
So how can this idea of, like, original thoughts, it's a fallacy? Because these thoughts by the Founding Fathers, the pioneers before us, not by hundreds, as you said, but thousands of years with the physical limitations, cultural limitations sure. Transcends time and space, where we still resonate with Stoic philosophy, for example, right. Ryan Holiday.
Prolific author. He still talks about meditations. That was written by thousands of years ago.
Right. And I think it's such a powerful thing. I think that's the humanality or the humanistic lens we're talking about, where I think AI or these machine learning still lack.
And of course, there's also AGI versus AI, which is very different. AGI. Yeah.
Which is basically like touring tests and AGI. Got it. It's beyond just the primed data sets, which is what AIS are.
But that's a different the Turing Test is to see if it's human right down the road. Yeah, but I want to make this connection with what Kanye West said in a recent interview, where, aside from how I feel about that guy, he was asked, I think, by Lex Freeman on his podcast, where what is your ultimate goal in life? He said, I want to be forgotten. And he said, what does that mean? He said, well, if you look at the infrastructure, the roads, the light bulbs, Tesla's scandals aside right from him stealing the idea, et cetera, all the greatest innovators have been forgotten.
But their product or their art, it reverberates for centuries to come. I think that ties back to refined simplicity, where I think all great things outlast just like great stories like Hero's Arc or Hero's Journey outlast. The context that are within that is so yeah, you're right.
I mean, the persistence throughout time, this universality of time, is really interesting when you really think about it. It's like, how do you make something that is going to fit within that? And that's kind of where I think a lot of filmmakers, they don't want to go there because they're afraid of that because they're such big shoes. It's such big shoes to fill, right? I mean, to make something like Michelangelo's David, to make something like the Mona Lisa, not to just quote your European art.
But you know what I mean, this come to mind, and it's really interesting because that is something that I think a lot of filmmakers will just tying it back to film, they'll just kind of be like, hey, I'm not going to do that. That's too big. So I'm just not going to do that.
But I think the most recent modern filmmaker that actually was able to pull that off, stanley Kubrick kind of did that. He was like Shakespeare. You know how they say Shakespeare kind of wrote all the stories, right? They're like, he kind of just covered all of it.
That's why his films that's why if I had to name one filmmaker that really just nailed it, it was him. I mean, he made I forgot it was like nine or eight or nine films. Every single film of his, whether you like it or not, every single film of his withstands the test of time in a very intense way.
And he also very much this is why people I think it's not very obvious at first, but once you start writing films, and once you start looking at films, you start to realize you're like, this guy did all the stories already. Filmmaking had already kind of hit it. He had technologically reached this perfect point where, like the it was still like some black and white they had color, right? But it was still finding its way by the filmmaking had kind of had all the technological advancements it was really going to have, minus some CGI, right? I'll give you an example.
Look at the shining. Now, The Shining is a great horror film, right? Everybody knows The Shining. It's ubiquitous, universally loved.
But have you ever thought about why The Shining is so amazing? I'll tell you why. I'm not going to put the spot here, but it's a family drama. So what is the metaphor for what they're in a snowden house.
Well, what is that a metaphor for snowden? Psychotic dad. Yeah, psychotic dad. But it's the idea of a family unit.
It's like an overdramatized extreme version of what the family unit goes through. And the reason why that movie is so incredible is because. He took a topic that relates to every human being on planet Earth, which is you and your family.
Everyone knows that. Everyone in their family. I don't care who you are, you've had arguments with your family and it's uncomfortable, right? There have been times where someone slammed a door, right? It just happens.
Like, let's be real. We're human beings, right? But he does a thing where he kind of gets you. He says, Come into the theater.
We're going to watch a horror movie. And then about two and a half hours in or 2 hours in, you realize, oh my God, he made this about me. And it hits you personally.
And you're like, fuck. And then you're like, he did it. He made the quintessential family drama.
He did it already. Oh, no, now I can't do that. But he did this with a lot of movies, like a lot of topics.
Like, he did it with like, Full Metal Jacket or more movies. He hit all the beats. Like, if you had to talk about a topic and you said war, and you said, what are the most important beats that you need to hit to fully describe war? He hit all the beats.
What are the beats you need to hit to understand family dramas? He hit all the beats. What do you do now? You know what I mean? And then Lolita, for example, what are all the beats you can hit with a romance tale where he took a very extreme version. Think about this.
Think about it's. About a guy who isn't, right? Like just for the audience, right? Lolita is about a film about an older man who fancies a teenage girl. And he shouldn't be because it's obviously pedophilia, right? So it's a very controversial film.
But in the 50s, men had all the power, right? So if you had to metaphorically or symbolically represent the dynamic between male and female in the 50s, it was like the man was like the father and the wife, even though they were the same age, was kind of like the daughter because she didn't have as much power and she had to cut, right? And very much the female could be seen as a young woman, right? The old man and the young woman. I mean, that was the kind of the philosophical description of like a typical dynamic. And so you don't think it's about that.
And then you're like, oh, it's actually a symbolic representation, an extreme version of the basic fundamental dynamics between married couples or romance in the 50s. That changes with time, of course, but it's crazy. And he always gets you, though.
You don't know it's about that. You don't know that's what he's doing. And then it's like about an hour into the movie, if you catch on, if you watch it a lot, you realize that's what he did.
And you're like, oh my God, he did it already. Like the conflict the desire to escape from that conflict, but you're stuck, in this case, extremified of being stuck in this isolated, snow mountain resort. Wow.
I never actually thought about that. Yeah, it's the quintessential family drama. It's just made extreme.
And he packages it as a fun horror film. I just want to go see a horror film with my friends. And then he realized, so that's the philosophical meat of it.
You're like, oh, my God, this is deep and artistically, like, well beyond what I expected. And that's why I think he's such a genius. A reference comes to my mind with the drama netflix, his show you, right.
Where the main actor, Penn, who plays Joe, he was talking about this on Conan's podcast. Conan needs a friends, and he talks about or they were talking about why you is one of the few Netflix series that gets better as the season moves on like a fine ace Wine, which hits all the criteria for great show or great filmmaking in these distributions or streaming era. He talks about if you look at Joe, the main psychotic person with psychopathy sociopath who commits, like, serial murder.
These are spoilers. If you haven't seen it by now, then too late. But he talks about where every single person can relate to the serial killer.
Yes, because he has this monologue, because 90% of the shows are his monologue, and they go through this contemplation, oh, do I want to do this? Oh, I'm doing this out of love. And I think you breaks this hero's journey arc really well, because it's not hero's journey anymore. It's very complex.
Sure. It's dynamic. Humans are multidimensional.
Of course humans are very complex, which is the biggest struggle in mental health, where people often have this very fixed expectations that life is linear. If I do this, then this happens. How can I love someone and hate someone at the same time? You can.
How can I be happy and grieving at the same time? You can. Because humans are complex. Sure.
And I feel like it's a reason why you does really well. According to and I agree with them, where so many people bought into this sadistic, horrible person that nobody shall like, and then it's really about them, kind of, but they relate. Because you thought about stalking someone.
You thought about out of pure rage and despair, really hurting the one you used to love, but now you despise after heartbreak. But we don't do that because we're limited by moralities laws. Yet in a filmmaking, I think this is a reason why filmmaking isn't dead, because it's still a powerful avenue like food and music.
It transcends context, and it could create a buy in for everyone. That's really interesting. I didn't think about that with you.
Not you, but the show you. The show you pun intended. Yeah, no, but that's really interesting because you're right.
It is about everyone. And that's so obvious because the show is called you. But when you depart from a relationship or a friend or something like that right.
And it's a violent thing. Yeah. You might not talk to them, but in the show it's personified as a murder, maybe, or maybe it's right.
So that is exactly maybe we can attribute that to or maybe that can be the reason for its success, is that it hits you and you realize that as you kind of go through it. That's amazing. I never thought about that.
Wow. That's the best part too. I love it when you're talking about it.
That's what I love about films too. It's like you can talk about it with your friends and then suddenly somebody brings up a point like that and then you look at it completely differently. I personally get goosebumps sometimes because I'm just like, whoa.
And when you've seen it, you've spent time with these characters, all of a sudden that means a lot more. Yeah, that's deep. I think filmmaking really does help us enlighten ourselves.
I think it's really important for us to understand other people's experiences. And I think in that sense, there's a lot of good that the craft can do because of that. It can really bring you to those realizations.
When you see in The Shining, when they're walking up the stairs and Jack Nicholson is trying to hit her with the bat, all of a sudden you're like, oh, people have gone through that around me. I've seen people my friend's parents had a divorce or maybe my parents had a fight or something. And it's never as bad as no one's, like killing each other.
Maybe in some situations there are they are, right? I mean, I don't know what people have experienced, but you can relate to that. And then you learn and you go, oh, there's another great scene too. Well, that same scene where he goes, I'm working.
I'm focused on my work and you're bothering me. And it's like, how many times have we heard that? I mean, let's be real. If somebody is even with your girlfriend or something like that, or maybe or your girlfriend says that to you, right, and they're like, hey, you're bothering me.
I need to work if I'm going to be doing this. How can you do these dynamics? They just feel so personal. You suddenly realize something about yourself and you go, whoa.
And then you maybe stop doing something, or you might you're a little more conscious because you go, oh, that's ugly. And when the mirror is put in front of you, when you don't even expect it, that's always when it gets in there. You're not expecting it to be about you.
Your guard is down. And then when you see that and you experience it, you're like then it really cuts in. Whereas if somebody tries to tell you soberly, just like, hey, this is what you should do, you're doing this wrong.
Shut up. So I think that's also really amazing feature films and stuff like that. Yeah, that movie is very deep.
Very deep. And I think this is fitting to what you just said, the hearts and soul. And because I do believe that art imitates life, and life also imitates art in many senses, which is, I think, the ethos of today's conversations for you, Santiago, as a pretty prolific I mean, you're still I'm getting there.
You're getting there, right? We're trying to make stuff happen. Yeah, but stuff happen. You've done some cool things in your life and a lot of experiences in filmmaking.
Sure. What do you think filmmaking as a whole has taught you about life that you often think about and you still even implement, and in a very practical, living sense? Because I do feel like the purpose of philosophy is to improve the quality of your life, whatever that means. But tying that into this artistic lens we're in this context we're in right now, what has filmmaking taught you about life? I've got a fun answer for you.
I think let's go back to the spiritual side of it a little bit. Right. We've connected art, philosophy, religion.
You've connected it all, I feel like technology, spiritually. What is enlightenment to some people? I think we can generally understand enlightenment as a form of awareness. Right.
It's like deep awareness, if you're enlightened or I'm not saying I'm enlightened. I'm just saying we're all on our path towards enlightenment, both on an individual level and as a society, as a species. Right.
We're always oriented towards that. And obviously there are some pullbacks sometimes in that process throughout history, which it's not a straight line. It's going to zigzag.
But anyway, filmmaking for me has caused me to be very curious about other people's lives. And that can be a little weird. But, hey, to everybody that's judging me right now, we're on Instagram all day.
Not all day, but we're on social media a lot, and that's something that has consumed our lives. And we didn't have a choice, by the way. Right.
It just happened. And that's kind of where movies started, right? It's looking into other people's lives. If you wanted to understand what it was like to be a royal in the 18 hundreds, England, or the 17 hundreds, you watch Barry Linden if you wanted to, you get where I'm going with this.
So in that regard, those experiences of watching a film allow us to understand our fellow human a lot better. Now, with social media, that just opened the gate, right before you had to watch a film or you had to know somebody. Now you can watch a film, you can know somebody, you can maybe play a video game, and you have social media.
So the input of understanding our fellow human being and animals, I guess, everybody is just rapidly expanding. So some people think I'm weird for this, but I actually love. If you look at my Instagram, I follow just, like, a lot of accounts.
Unusually, I've like 7000. I follow a lot. And again, it's like, why would you do that? Are you nosy? No, it's because if I'm going to be preparing material, you have to write what you know, right? They say that, right? Like every filmmaker, they'll say that.
Write what you know. If you're a lawyer, write a lawyer drama. If you collect the trash, write something that involved, because you know that.
But now we have technology, we have social media, where everyone's just putting all this information away for free. You had to go do research. You had to go to the library and read book.
You still have to do that. But now I can absorb the lives of thousands of people and personalities, and I can absorb it all. And now my scope of not only my understanding of fellow human beings and creatures, I understand them more now, so I have more empathy, and it has brought me to a place to where I can just understand them more, but also it allows me to write more stories, and it allows me to have more accuracy.
And I think that's really important if you're a filmmaker. Jerry Seinfeld actually came. I love Jerry.
He came out and said this recently, or he didn't really come out, but he was talking about this. He goes every time he's at his friend's house, he's always observing. He's looking around, and he go, well, why would you do that? He said, because I'm always thinking about ideas.
I'm always thinking about story ideas. When a friend calls me with a manic episode or when I see something going on in the street, or I watch something happening on social media, or I'm like, what is the story there? And it helps me understand that person. And then you can go down a rabbit hole, and it can be very time consuming.
But the point is that at the end of the day, I walk away with a better understanding of everybody and who they are and who we're living with. And also, this is the last thing I really want to touch on, the international thing that's happening right now. You look at what's happening with K dramas, you look at what's happening with just all the international cinema.
You look at what happened at the Oscars. Our civilizations are colliding, right? Everyone. Asia, Africa, Europe, South America.
I mean, it's all we're in this time period right now where just like Moore's Law and just like the technological exponential situation that we're dealing with in terms of advancement, culturally, we're integrating so deeply. So we have to almost go out of our way to understand our fellow human beings because we don't have a choice anymore. You could live isolated, right? But in a thousand years, are you going to be able to really live isolated in your own little community? Right.
No, you can't. Even now, if you're living in La or New York or wherever, it's very diverse. You have to understand other cultures.
You have to understand everybody. And that's something that filmmaking has brought me closer to and something that I think that is it's the most powerful part of the medium, is it provides a path towards a more enlightened society. And that's not to put it on a pedestal.
All art does that. And I just think that's the most grand, kind of larger picture evolution of where it all goes. So anyway yeah, I think art is the gateway to the greater unknown, and I think it's very powerful and yeah, no, that was I never thought to make this connection, but last thing I want to say is I think that's the reason why news and the headliner culture is so toxic.
Because you're getting exposed to these atrocities and tragedies, mass shootings, domestic violence, et cetera, without the contextualized background of who the people are. And because I think stories allow us to humanize one another. Right.
Which I think is the underlying theme you're alluding to here. Yeah, I do agree with you. I do feel like we do need to sit down, and this polarity and this America American political climate landscape is, I think, attributable to this lack of conversation.
Sure. And that's why I love mental health, because mental health is this idea that you are not alone. You may feel alone utterly sometimes in this consuming darkness, depressions, anxiety, whatever, but often than not, none of us walk this path of life alone.
And there's many of us with the same species who go through similar but different things. And I think that gives us a little more hope that, yes, suffering is part of life, whether you believe in nihilistic philosophy or not. I do feel like that creates us comforts, and I think it diminishes the unknown because at least we're walking together, because life is this unknowable thing.
Like God is unknowable. Right. That's beautiful.
I mean, that's a great way to put it. And we're all in this journey together, and if something like art can bring us together or filmmaking can bring us together and help us understand each other, which is what you just said, then it's a beautiful thing. I got to do my job as a podcaster, too.
It's great. Yeah. With that being said, San Diego, my head is about to explode just from the amount of knowledge you that's what I want you offloaded.
But, yeah, this is my recarbent moment. I want to roll out the recarbet for you. Where can people check out your portfolio? Your amazing, amazing projects? Sure.
Your amazing arts that you create. Sure. Your instagram.
Anything in between? Sure. So you can follow me on Instagram. That's probably the easiest way to see stuff.
I also have a website, so it's at Santiago Calajero. That's S-A-N-T-I-A-G-O-C-A-L-O-G-E-R-O. It's a long one.
It's a long one. Get it from Benoit. I'll give it to you.
And then my website is just my name. So yeah, a lot of my art's there. And if anybody wants to make a movie, let me know.
We're working on a couple of projects right now. We just did a film with maybe I shouldn't talk about it, but we just did a film that's going to be released soon that we should actually shot in Cape Town. And we shot it all on 16 Millimeter film, which is just so cool.
And it's a very multicultural story. And the last thing I'll say is that's kind of where we want to be with all my partners and obviously all of our collaborations. It's telling the stories that are going to be help this goal that we talked about.
Because again, everything's changing and all these new markets are emerging and it's getting pretty exciting. Anyway. Yeah, doing cool shit with your friends is pretty cool.
That's a great way to live life. Yeah. So I really appreciate your thoughtfulness and the wealth of knowledge and expertise you shared.
I definitely learned a lot from you. Likewise. I spend days to unpack what we said.
But I do feel like whether it's filmmaking, AI, technology, philosophy, or mental health, it's just additional avenue to view life through. Because the hierarchy of ignorance, the more you know, the more you know nothing. At the same time, I do feel like this curiosity, this way of living keeps life infinitely interesting because life is filled of hardships.
Yeah. Well, thank you for having me, Benoit. And it was a pleasure.
Yeah. And to all the viewers, if you're watching this on YouTube, we will include all of Santiago's information in the show notes in the link below. As always.
And I do know that attention in 2023 is the rarest and the hardest commodity everyone's fighting for even long form podcasts like myself. So I really infinitely have gratitude and I really appreciate you for coming back week after week. The podcast is near a four year journey, especially with this podcast studio built out.
So I want to do this in perpetuity. So if you enjoyed anything, derived any value from today's episode, I ask you to share this with one friend. Not two, but one friend.
That's the best way to grow my show and to keep inviting amazing, fascinating people like Santiago. And as always, if you have enjoyed this, I hope that you derive something to discover more about your own life. And as always, until next time, in the next week's train of Discover More.