Filmmaker Finds The Words

There’s a moment in Stephen Dest​‘s film I Am Shakespeare that sums up the inspiration for a book about film that Dest is — as of last week — under contract to write. It’s partly about social justice and partly about digital filmmaking, and all about moving into the future.

In the scene, Henry Green, the subject of the film, is ​“talking to a doctor about how he once looked,” before he was wounded by a gunshot in 2009. ​“He does this physical gesture, and I remember when I was editing, I wasn’t picking up on it.” Dest said. When he screened the film, ​“audiences under 30 would react to it and no one else did.”

The gesture was a quick, repetitive flick of the thumb. Green, Dest said, was ​“scrolling through his mental phone,” bringing back images from the past, ​“even though he doesn’t have his phone with him.”

“I’m so glad I was stupid enough not to cut it out,” Dest added. ​“It really was telling, in how people reacted to it.”

New Vocabulary

At the beginning of the pandemic, the New Haven-based filmmaker Dest watched as active film work, including his own, dried up across the country. At the same time, ​“I was bombarded with ​‘apply for this grant,’ and ​‘do you want to do this Zoom screening?’ and I just said yes to everything,” Dest said. ​“That was happening for three months, and then it stopped, and this thing” — the pandemic — ​“kept going.”

Dest continued teaching virtually at the University of Connecticut, where he’s professor of film studies, and Neighborhood Music School, where he’s head of the drama department. But the drying up of active film work left him with a more time than usual on his hands. ​“All the rooms in my house are painted,” he joked. The extra time also let him further hone an essential part of his craft as a filmmaker: writing. For starters, he has written two screenplays, one of them an adaptation of a book.

Another writing project, however, is to finish a book of his own. Cognella, an academic publisher, had learned about Dest through is film work and work at UCONN and six months ago reached out to Dest with a proposal. That turned Dest to thinking about just what kind of book about filmmaking he would want to write.

The initial idea was to write a book that would serve as an introduction to film for film students. Dest wasn’t sure he wanted to do that, to write ​“the same 600-page analysis book that my students never read anyway,” he said with a laugh. That got him thinking about what he saw his students gravitated toward: newer films, such as 2013’s Fruitvale Station, that embraced the visual digital media environment that we find ourselves in, a world of cellphone footage and laptop cameras; films that in both form and substance, drew their stories from their communities.

His students’ preferences just happened to dovetail with Dest’s own career as a filmmaker. His first feature film, 2014’s My Brother Jack — a crime story and family drama centered on two brothers in New Haven — ​“was such a passion project,” Dest said. He wrote and directed the film, and ​“I’m so thankful that happened,” he said. But when he was finished, he remembered a feeling of ​“now what?”

The answer to that question was 2017’s I Am Shakespeare, a documentary about the double life of Henry Green, a Newhallville youth who was falling into trouble on the streets even as he was beginning to make a name for himself as a promising actor at Co-Op High with a talent for Shakespeare. That film took Dest and Green on a long road well past the making of the film, a road that the film continues on even after Green’s death in 2018 from complications from his shooting injuries. It has been screened at schools and community centers around the country and is now available on Amazon.

“My time with Henry really opened up a lot of aspects of what I wanted to do as a filmmaker, as a writer, and as a man,” Dest said. With My Brother Jack, the story and the direction of the project came from Dest himself. With I Am Shakespeare, ​“the documentary told us what I was doing.” That meant diving into the communities Green was a part of — and into the issues that surrounded his life.

“It was a crazy journey into the social justice world,” Dest said. It was work that prepared him for the political moment the country finds itself in. Dest said he noticed that announcements of the most recent screenings of the movie included a Black Lives Matter hashtag — which didn’t exist when the film was being made. But the issues themselves, he said, ​“are always out there.”

Dest’s journey with I Am Shakespeare was still ongoing when the Covid-19 pandemic started. The movie ​“was in full school screening, social justice screening mode,” he said. The initial wave of shutdowns meant canceling about a dozen screenings. But that put him in position to write the book he wants to write.

“I want to focus on the digital movement and how that’s made an impact on filmmaking, and how you make these films for much cheaper and have a larger effect,” he said. A generation ago, the sheer technical demands of filmmaking made it a complicated, expensive endeavor. Now, Dest said, ​“you got the 4K camera in your pocket.”

That could mean that some filmmakers can make movies essentially on their own (as say, director David Lynch did with Inland Empire in 2006). But Dest pointed out that filmmaking has always been a collaborative exercise, and digital technology opens up more avenues for collaboration — working not only with actors and film crew, but ​“working with citizens to tell stories.”

Script Flipped

To Dest, the digital revolution has also meant an aesthetic change. A generation ago, ​“even when you were grab-and-go, the whole goal was to make it cinematic,” Dest said — to make the finished product look like the expensive feature films of the past. ​“Then that got flipped.”

Early films and TV that used the shaky cinematography of found footage made audiences dizzy a couple decades ago. But that time has passed; younger filmmakers grew up watching that kind of footage everywhere and want to employ it to artistic ends. ​“They don’t go to the movies as much as we did,” Dest said, ​“but they’re watching more content.” And ​“they don’t hide the fact that the cinematographer is holding a camera. Don’t hide it, embrace it…. Young filmmakers are very comfortable with that.”

“It’s a change,” Dest said. ​“You got to adjust.” He noted that he’s teaching a class at NMS with young students and the fact of their media exposure shows — in a good way. ​“Their ideas and their execution are really spot on. They just have to learn the easy stuff.”

The move from film stock to digital footage, and the new visual vocabulary to accompany it, have been a couple decades in the making. So has the move, Dest said, of independent filmmakers learning how to market and network, to tell people and get the word out about the movies they’ve made. It’s about ​“staying with your film” after it’s done instead of just going on the next one, It remains true that ​“film as we know it is a collaborative business. You need experts,” from cinematographers and film editors to composers and marketers. Dest said. But it’s possible that the pandemic will hasten the changes afoot, and that the film industry will emerge from the pandemic operating differently.

“Audiences are forced to see whatever we put in front of them,” Dest said, and ​“there’s still going to be things blowing up, and guys with oversized muscles, and cars going too fast.” But Dest also recalled how we learned about social unrest during the pandemic, as often as not by seeing it on social media as by attending a protest or reading about it in the news. ​“It opened up this idea that this is how we’re telling stories now.”

And he believes that more films will emerge that respond to the broader social changes afoot. Regarding older kinds of stories that relied on tired tropes about race and gender roles, ​“no one’s going to stand for it anymore. No one wants to see it,” he said. ​“The offerings are going to be better and smarter coming out of this.”

My Brother Jack and I Am Shakespeare are both now available for rent on Amazon and YouTube.