Alex Knudsen has written, directed, edited and acted in two feature films while living out in Los Angeles. He started his own independent film organization, Gantry Productions, and has even made a couple music videos. But he doesn’t live in Beverly Hills, has never been interviewed on a red carpet, and hasn’t had a problem dodging the paparazzi. Knudsen, 36, has been working paycheck to paycheck for the past 13 years in L.A., currently making ends meet as a freelance cinematographer and editor in order to fuel his passion of presenting his visions on screen. This is the life of an independent filmmaker—the one you won’t see on E! News or Us Weekly.
A Beautiful Struggle
Although he hasn’t yet discovered the holy grail of glamour portrayed by the media as the Hollywood lifestyle, Knudsen has come a long way from his days working at Angeno’s Pizza in Maple Grove and wearing a trench coat while chasing a ninja with a briefcase.
The Briefcase was Knudsen’s first scripted movie he made while attending North Hennepin Community College a year after graduating from Osseo Senior High in 1993. It was a labor of love, something Knudsen wanted to do for kicks, literally—his film partner just so happened to have a surplus of ninja gear. “So we were just like, well, let’s make a movie about a ninja … in the woods,” recalls Knudsen. “It was a real thought out story, as you can tell.”
Usually peppered with humor, Knudsen’s early film projects were substituted for high school papers—a rare practice in a time when cameras weren’t as accessible as they are today. Film editing, which is now done digitally, was a much more grueling process. “We had a grocery bag full of 12 VHS tapes we’d bring to this editing room to do reel to reel editing,” Knudsen remembers.
Although Knudsen developed a passion for acting as early as ninth grade, the thought of pursuing a career in it didn’t occur to him until late into college while in the prestigious acting program at the University of Southern California. “Everyone assumes I went to film school at USC, but I didn’t take one film production class my entire life. I went there for acting,” Knudsen says. “It was really all self-taught from an early age—using cameras was just all trial and error.”
Knudsen feels he truly transitioned into becoming an independent filmmaker in 2006 when he sprung Gantry Productions and started working on his first feature—End of the Road. The movie cost only $1,200 to make thanks to a bare-bones film technique Knudsen followed called the Dogme 95 Manifesto, originated by Lars von Trier. “We didn’t use lights, we didn’t use anything,” Knudsen says. “It was just about telling a story. It was just two actors on location. It was a dark psychological drama. I actually loved that; it was a film very close to me. That set me off and gave me a lot of confidence to continue with my own production company.”
The following year, Knudsen started working on Autopilot, a two-hour feature with a cast of established Hollywood actors. Autopilot, a film that stars Knudsen as a man released from a mental institution 16 years after accidentally being responsible for the death of his mother, cost approximately $300,000 to make. That’s still a very modest sum in comparison to other films, but no easy benchmark to reach considering Knudsen was responsible for funding it himself. He used the money he inherited from his grandmother to help honor her as one of his biggest fans. “My grandparents were very supportive and excited about me being a filmmaker,” Knudsen says, “so it’s something I knew they would be proud of.” His dad Gary also funded a part of the show, and Riot Post Production in Santa Monica greatly reduced post-production costs, which made the dream more affordable.
Two and a half years after premiering the film in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, Knudsen finally sold the movie to a distribution company last January. He looks at the fact that his film is now available at Blockbuster and Amazon as a victory, but also as a harsh reality to independent film making. “It’s awesome, but how many people, outside of the people who know me, know about it? Nobody,” he says. “So talk about struggle, it took two and a half years of sending it to film festivals and going to film festivals and asking people to watch my movie.”
But that’s nothing compared to the struggle Knudsen has encountered making a life for himself in L.A. He spent two years working the graveyard shift at a local restaurant waiting tables, while he used his days to send out headshots and audition for acting gigs, only to find countless dead ends. “I could have never ever been prepared for how stressful that was, and how hard it is to pay bills,” he says.
Knudsen finally found a more comfortable job at Riot Post Production studio, where he worked for six years, allowing him to work on his film projects. “I was, in essence, working two full-time jobs because I spent most of my time working on my films and my writing and productions, but I was still working about 50 hours a week at a post-production job,” he says. “And I think that sort of struggle, which most everyone I’ve met out here in 13 years goes through—it’s humbling.”
Knudsen continues down his humbling path, pursuing freelance editing gigs to pay the bills while he pours his soul into building Gantry Productions and two more feature films he has in the works—a 30-minute flick just reached completion and a one-hour special pilot for television, which he wrote, directed and acted in, should be done soon. Some could consider it a struggle, but Knudsen doesn’t need to strain to recognize the beauty in it. “Even though it wasn’t what I expected, it turned out to be much better,” Knudsen says of moving to L.A. to pursue his dream. “It’s the best thing I ever did in my life. It is what I do with my life.”
From Varsity to Pro
Nearly two decades after Knudsen started baffling high school teachers by turning in VHS movies instead of papers, a young man at the tail end of his senior year at Maple Grove Senior High in 2007 was told to go pick up his varsity letters by Crimson football coach Craig Hansen. This confused Joe “J.” Van Auken, who never played a varsity sport. But he had been watching them through a camera lens for the past four years as the “video guy” for Crimson football and basketball. “What nobody had told me was that technically qualified me as team manager,” Van Auken says. “So I ended up buying a letter jacket two days after I graduated because I thought, ‘hey, I got to put them on something.’”
MGSH gave Van Auken more than just flair for his jacket. Although he was a longtime camera junkie, Van Auken had no illusions about a career as a filmmaker. “I just thought you were born Steven Spielberg, and that’s it,” he remembers. That was until a couple high school classes changed his perspective.
The tenth grade Art of Film class not only gave Van Auken an early platform for his work—he shot a public service announcement that ended up placing in a national contest—but it gave him confidence to pursue a career path that seems by many to be farfetched. “Art of Film introduced me to the idea that Hollywood wasn’t some ivory tower that was populated by people you’ve never heard of,” Van Auken remembers. “But it’s a legitimate career path, not an easy one, but it’s something you can pursue.”
But it wasn’t until Van Auken’s senior year of English when his teacher Ms. Pederson made him read Hamlet that he developed a knack for storytelling to go along with his camera skills. “That just changed the whole way I thought about how you tell a story and how you go about portraying a character,” he recalls. “Between those two classes, they changed what was an avid hobby of mine into a realistic life path.”
Four years after graduating from MGSH, Van Auken (22) appears to be well on his way down an exciting path. He’s currently in the process of directing his first feature film, Sanitarium, which is tentatively scheduled to start shooting this spring, and (according to the distribution contract) is due for a run in the theaters in 2012.
Sanitarium is a psychological thriller about a man standing trial for murder in Minnesota who becomes ill with a strain of tuberculosis. Fearing an outbreak in a prison and the danger of keeping him in a public hospital, the protagonist is confined until his trial date in the state’s last functioning sanitarium. “Things start going wrong very quickly,” explains Van Auken, reluctant to give away too many details.
Madison Film Group in New York got on board as one of the major financial supporters of the film, which has a budget in the millions. Van Auken, who couldn’t go any further into cost details, admits getting funding for his movie was not a simple task. “Trying to convince the companies that the project that you’ve got is worthwhile for them, financially, and that as somebody with no background, you can pull it off—that’s the main hurdle,” he explains.
Although Van Auken is still in the process of making a name for himself in the industry, he’s off to promising start. His film 1916, a short war film he directed, wrote and self-funded the $15,000 production costs in 2009, won runner-up at the Take1 film festival in Chicago. Still, Van Auken sees those accomplishments as part of his education, and Sanitarium as the beginning of his professional career. “In my little black Moleskin, I’ve got 20-30 ideas I’d like to get out one day over the course of my career,” he says. “And if I could just keep doing that, fine with me.”
But Van Auken’s heart is still very much into cinematography. He considers himself lucky to have been paying the bills in Chicago for the past four years by taking gigs behind the camera, whether it’s shooting at clubs, weddings, birthdays or other events. “There’s always something to discover, refine or experiment with,” Van Auken says of working with a camera. “The goal is always to do something they haven’t seen before, but tell the story as honesty as possible through the picture. It’s never not fun.”
A Lambent Leap
“Fun” is what first attracted Matt Cici and David Marketon to filmmaking. Marketon, a 2003 Osseo graduate, and Cici’s older brother started making films for high school classes about 10 years ago. That’s what prompted Matt, three years younger and in junior high at the time, to make his film debut. “I was humiliated enough to work on a project with them,” he remembers. “It was kind of ridiculous—one of those videos you make for Spanish class.”
Two years after graduating from high school in 2006, Cici reunited with Marketon, who gushed about an idea he had for a movie. They met, discussed the characters and a basic storyline of Lambent Fuse, a film exploring the choices of several characters that have various mental conditions, such as kleptomania and depression; the storylines of the characters intertwine and are displayed in nonchronilogical order. The original plan was to write the script in an attempt to sell it. But about six months into the project, they became too attached, and Cici decided to direct it.
Experience wasn’t on their side. Both had taken the only two film classes North Hennepin Community College had to offer at the time, and they were familiar with the film and editing equipment they’d rented over the years from Northwest Community Television, but that was about the extent of it. And diving into a first feature film blindfolded doesn’t exactly attract investors. After approaching a number of local corporations in an attempt to gain funding without success, Marketon and Cici made 14-page investor packets with info about the film. “Once we started really providing a resource for people to understand what this project was all about, people started jumping onboard and becoming individual sponsors and donating small things,” Cici says. “We never asked for anyone to give us a million dollars to make the film; it was more like one dollar helps. Five dollars could pay for someone’s meal for the day.”
It took about $10,000 to make the film, with half coming straight out of Cici and Marketon’s pocket. One financial boost came courtesy of the he Hamline University Collaborative Research grant, which Cici won by writing a college paper, and allowed Cici and Marketon to rack up three months of fully-funded research.
On top of scrounging for money, Marketon and Cici say a lack of time was another obstacle. Both went to college full-time and worked full-time, allowing them on average one to two days a week to get together for brainstorming and writing session. “Time is a big (obstacle)—trying to juggle a work schedule, (the film) and school,” Marketon explains. “I’d much rather devote 100 percent time to (the film) but it doesn’t pay the bills.”
After two and a half years of writing and a 15-day blur of shooting, Cici and Marketon are currently in the process of entering Lambent Fuse into independent film festivals in hopes of catching the eye of a distribution company. No matter where their newest creation takes them, Marketon and Cici say they are certain of one thing: this won’t be their last film. “It will make me more prepared for the next one,” Marketon says. “We probably didn’t do everything the right way. You build off that.”
One could argue that Cici and Marketon have built a lot already. The beginning of their filmmaking journey began at Osseo Senior High as nothing more than innocent fun. But something that started as a simple affliction has become more of an addiction—a mental condition worthy of a spot in their new film. “I thought I could actually try to do this more for fun, until later it turned serious,” Cici says. “I think it was in college when I decided I’d rather do something I love for the rest of my life–and maybe not make anything off of it–than go into a field where I can live successfully but not be doing what I love the most.”
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Read more about Maple Grove’s homegrown filmmakers, including more details about their projects, by visiting their websites.
Alex Knudsen: gantryproductions.com
J. Van Auken: on facebook or imdb.com
David Marketon and Matt Cici: lambentfuse.com or stolenarrowfilms.com
