I first met Tate Young back around 2004 when we were both giving readings at a local indie book store. We both had pseudonyms, we both had shaved heads, and we both produced often shocking writing, so we hit it off immediately.

Three years after that he was helming a literary game show called The 3-Day Novel Contest for which he invited me to be one the “celebrity” judges. The show was amazing. We even did a second season before he went to become a movie director and editor best known for the indie science fiction and fantasy features Haphead, Ghosts with Shit Jobs, and the recent short film Timebox, which he also wrote. And he did all this without going to film school.

I wanted to ask Young to explain how to make great indie films while treating cast and crew with respect, so he spoke with me by web video from his home in Toronto on October 31, 2018. We discussed:

• Being self-taught and going DIY while working your way up the film-creation ranks
• How he entered television directing for a national network with only minimal formal training
• Why, despite thousands of hours of free online video tutorials on filmmaking, he still buys and pores over books on screencraft
• How to keep working in movies while you’re waiting to direct
• Why a good union culture and attitude should make a film set a good place to work
• The most important artistic aspect of creating a beautiful shot that plenty of indie filmmakers don’t understand
• Why no filmmaker should ever say, “We’ll fix it in post,” and
• What, more than sexual harassment, is the biggest ongoing complaint about working in movies in Canada
• The conversation will appear to begin abruptly; Young and I had just been talking about the importance of books.

TateYoung.com

The 3-Day Novel Contest TV Series

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Bruno Delbonnel’s Cinematography on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

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