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Born with a Camera in His Mouth by Don Schwartz
Alex Herz prepping for the prom is his most recent photo—since he is only 16!. photo: courtesy A. Herz
ALEX HERZ IS A NORTHERN CALIFORNIA-
based filmmaker who's been making movies since the age of five when he picked up his first camera—a Hanukkah gift given at his request. Although he is sixteen years old, his last two films, "Need Gas" and "The Tree of Gold", along with his previous work, betray a precocious maturity as expressed by the topics of his stories and their production quality.
“Need Gas” is a culture clash story about a driver stranded on a country road with an empty gas tank.
With a cast that includes career actor Bettina Devin, “The Tree of Gold”, a surrealistic story, touches on the mysterious relationship between the luminous and the mundane.
Herz was born in San Francisco, lives in Marin County, and is a Junior at Redwood High School—one of Robin Williams’ alma maters—where he catalyzed and is a teaching assistant at a filmmaking class.
He has two younger siblings. His father does freelance Internet work, and his mother is an attorney.
I sat down with Herz at my Larkspur home in October, 2013.
How is it, starting from as early as you can remember, that you got involved with film?
The earliest memory I have of wanting to do something with film is when I was five. The holidays were coming up, and I saw a commercial for a kid-friendly camcorder called The Digital Blue. It was very intriguing to me that you could buy this thing for however much it was—very little—and just make your own films. So, I asked my mom for it. Lo and behold, for one of the nights of Hanukkah that is what I received. And I just started from there. I made short movies with my friends, and then that’s sort of how things progressed.
So, then what happened?
I went to a variety of [film] camps. I don’t want to say that they accentuated my love for film so much as each of them taught me little bits of things that collectively helped me as a filmmaker. For example I went to Future Filmmaker workshops in Mill Valley, for two years in a row. And that was really helpful. However, I already had a lot of experience in film, and that was for first-time filmmakers. So, I was bored at times when they were going over how to write a script, and how to edit. I already knew these things, and I just wanted to make a film, and have a more in-depth learning curve.
Alex Herz on location in Marin County. photo: courtesy A. Herz
And then I went to a visual arts camp down in Pepperdine College, in Los Angeles. There it was the same sort of deal as the film camps, but it was a little more in-depth. The kids had made some movies before, you know, but they didn’t do as much as me, so I asked my dad to put in a request that I be placed in the older kid group, and I was. I didn’t learn from that camp, but, again, I sort of learned how to do a film project without editing. This was the summer after the sixth grade.
Aside from this, if I look back on my YouTube account, I really started making films frequently in fourth or fifth grade. Every weekend was just another excuse to go make a film with a friend. They were silly, but, you don’t really expect much out of a fourth grader.
What happened after Pepperdine?
Before Pepperdine, when I was in the school year, I decided that I wanted to make a very in-depth, serious film, to the best of my abilities as a sixth grader. So, I wrote a script, it was about 12 pages. It was called ‘The Room’ which just happens to be the name of a movie that’s considered to be the worst movie of all time, so that didn’t really help out a whole lot. (laughs)
It was basically, in a nutshell, a movie about a kid, played by me, who goes into the future and discovers that the world is trashed, and he comes back and preaches that people need to change their way of living. I had my friend Cole play the kid’s best friend, and it was a lot of fun. Every weekend I had my dad help film, it was a two-man crew. And then I edited the film on Final Cut Pro, and it ended up being around 11 minutes. I was really proud of it. I mean, in retrospect, that was when I really discovered that this is something I really, really enjoy—especially when I put a lot of my time and effort into it.
It blossomed from there. I submitted it to the Larkspur Youth Film Festival, and, accidentally, I submitted it to the San Francisco [International] Film Festival as an adult filmmaker, so I did not get into that. But, I did get into the Larkspur, and I won the category for best Green Film—when I was in sixth grade, it was cool. And then I won another pass to the Future Filmmaker Camp. That’s when I realized that I could really make something out of this, turn it into something that was both lucrative and desirable.
So, then, I went to Pepperdine, I came back, and I had a lapse of a couple years where I let it get into my head that filmmaking as an art wasn’t going to be something that was realistic to pursue in the future.
You know, my parents are extremely supportive. They told me the whole time you can do this, you’re very talented, you have the skills. But, no one ever told me directly that I couldn’t do it so much as I had it in my mind that the way the world works, filmmaking wasn’t really going to help anybody, and no one really wanted a filmmaker when you can have an engineer, a doctor. I kinda dropped it, but I still made some short films.
Then I was on a plane ride, I don’t remember where from, and my dad handed me an article in the back of ‘The New York Times Magazine’. I don’t remember the name [of the article], but it was by Justin Horner. It was a short article, it was a page, it was like one of those back-of-the-magazine articles. And after reading it I thought, ‘This would make a fantastic short film.’ I told my dad, he agreed with me, and I went home and wrote a screen play. It was like 8 or 9 pages. That was a good chunk of time where you could tell your story without extending it for too long.
Originally it was called ‘Roadside Taco’. The story’s about a man who’s stranded on the side of a road in Oregon. And there’s a bunch of people passing him by, and no one bothers to stop and help. Eventually a family of Mexican immigrants who are up in Oregon to pick apples stops and helps him out. The story is basically about his interactions with them, and how he learns that help can come from very unexpected places. He tries to pay them at one point, and they sneak the money back in the taco they give him.
I went out and shot it. I used SFCasting to get my actors ‘cause I figured that was the best thing to do at that point. I lucked out. They were all really great. They were all very patient—especially with a fourteen year old director. This was the summer after eighth grade.
But, it was hard to pull it all together. I did it in one day. I had my uncle, who’s a producer—he used to work for KRON4—come out and shoot it. My dad was there holding the boom mic, and this man, who’s the lead actresses dad, was holding the reflector shield. You know, it was just like a very make-shift crew. I almost gave up half-way through the day ‘cause we had about an eighth of the movie done at like twelve o’clock, and it was like a hundred degrees. We were out in Nicassio, and it was just brutal.
We decided to just keep going. I realized that it was unrealistic to assume that these four people were gonna have the exact same schedule at another time. I pushed through, and I did it. And, at 7:30, when the sun was going down, we finished. I went home, took a shower, went to sleep, and started editing right away.
Editing always takes me a long time because I’ll edit a majority of the film, and then get bored with it, and then maybe go film something else, and edit that, post it on YouTube. And then I’ll come back to it one day and just think, ‘I gotta finish this.’ And I’ll get into it again. And that’s what happened with ‘Need Gas’. It took me a couple months because of that.
I finished ‘Need Gas’, and I was really, really happy with how it turned out—especially considering I had very little help with anything. Again, my parents were very supportive, so they were willing to provide lunch for the actors, but they told me, ‘you got to do everything else’. So, I did. And that was that.
I submitted it to as many festivals as I could afford or could find. I got into NFFTY—it’s a national film festival for talented youth up in Seattle. And that was just fantastic. My dad and I went one weekend in April, of my freshman year. To see all these other kids joining together to celebrate films and the films they make, it’s a beautiful thing, really.
The age range was 14 to 22, so there were grad students submitting films. I didn’t expect to win, and I didn’t. Nonetheless, it was a phenomenal experience. (I submitted my most recent film to NFFTY.) It got into one in Vermont, that I didn’t go to. It got into the L.A. Film Festival. Larkspur, again.
It was cool, to get into all these festivals, and go meet other kids who made movies, travel around. I have friends who live in L.A., so I went at the beginning of the summer to the L.A. film festival, and saw my film there. That was just amazing. The Mill Valley Film Festival has a youth section, and it was in that, in 2011. That was sort of the end of that run.
I did some digging for more camps because I was tired of going to camps where nobody knew anything, and the instructors assumed that nobody knew anything, and I was forced into that same-ol’ ‘here’s how you write a script, here’s how you edit a movie.’ And I didn’t need that, I needed more of a challenge, I needed more... I didn’t really know what I needed, but I needed something different.
And so I found this summer school called the California State Summer School for the Arts down in Valencia. And this was the summer after my freshman year. So, I submitted to the camp during my freshman year, and I’d been told that this was a long-shot because hundreds of kids submit from California, but I did get in—which was awesome.
It’s a four-week, pretty intensive filmmaking school. Basically they scrap everything you already know. It’s very focused on the art of film. It’s almost indescribable what they teach you. But I will say that it completely changed the way I thought about film. What I thought was a good film before the school I went and saw after and I thought, ‘this sucks, there’s no depth to this film at all.’ I developed more of a critical eye. I’d always been one to stray away from cliché, but this really took me away from it completely, and made me rethink everything.
I made four shorts while I was there. One called ‘Broken’, which was a ten-shot project. I had a couple days to do it. I was going on a jog, and I sprained my ankle pretty badly, so I decided to make a film about that. I got my friend Caleb to shoot the film. It was basically about me playing the ukulele alone in my bed, and I crutch my way over to the window and see some people outside talking, and I get very sad and turn around step on my ukulele and break it.
During shooting I actually stepped on my ukulele and broke it in half. So, I figured, ‘what the hell.’ I’d broke it in such a way that the neck snapped off cleanly so that I could fit it back in. It didn’t play, but still looked whole when I put it back together. And so, to end the film, I sit down on my bed, pick up the ukulele, and snap it back together. One of the instructors there, Mike—who I believe is now the head instructor—is known for his harsh critique. But, he actually really liked it which was nice.
The next assignment was a narrative short, anything you wanted. So, I had been kinda into Wes Anderson at that point. And I wanted to make a film based on his style. And I created one called ‘Old Friend’ about friendships and how they eventually grow apart as kids get older. It’s an experience that happened to me a lot. The instructors kept telling us to make a movie about something we know, and this I knew very, very well. So, I starred in that one as well.
It was a three and a-hall minute short, and that one was met with some really good feedback. The only critiques I got from the strictest instructors were, ‘You may want to correct the color a little bit in this shot, you wanna punch in a little bit in this shot, adjust the framing a little bit.’
And, one of the instructors who was a guest artist by the name of Azazel Jacobs—he did ‘Terry’ and ‘The GoodTimesKid’ (sic)—said, ‘The only reason we’re giving you so many technical critiques is just a testament to the piece. We’re just telling you you gotta fix little things visually. It means your story’s so solid, that this could be an absolutely phenomenal work of film.’ That stuck with me. I mean it was really encouraging to hear that. And the other students congratulated me afterwards.
And the last film I did was a thesis film because technically this was a college-based school. This was at Cal Arts (http://calarts.edu/). It could be anything, but it had to represent us as a filmmaker. How I took it was we had to just show that we had learned something at this camp. And, so I did a nonfiction piece about my little brother who has Down syndrome.
I went into the back recording room and spoke for twenty minute about him, as passionately as I could, and took the best two minutes of that—which was not an easy thing, it took awhile, a good couple weeks of all-day editing. And I put it to footage of old home video that I asked my parents to send me of him just doing normal, everyday stuff. I was really happy with it, and, again, I got some good feedback. It was a nice wrap-up to the camp, and I made some really good friendships there. I learned a lot. It was one of the best film experiences I’ve ever had.
I went home, had the same old teenage angsty nobody-understands-me kinda deal, and threw a hissy fit at a restaurant. Stormed out. (laughs) I sent an email to my old instructor. They’d warned us once you go back from CSSSA your life will never be the same. Like, that’s bullshit. Of course. What could change?
But, I realized when you go to camp you’re in such a concentrated atmosphere where everybody really enjoys what they’re doing. And, when you go home it’s very, very different. There were very few filmmakers at the school, at Redwood High School. It was very frustrating to me. My old friends weren’t really doin’ it for me anymore. And it was a hard time. I had quite a few issues with that.
What do you mean you had quite a few issues with that?
Socially. I didn’t really ever want to go out. I didn’t really want to make friends. I did have a girlfriend at that point—she’s still my girlfriend—and she really helped me through it, encouraged my filmmaking path. My parents did their best.
Eventually, through a series of email exchanges with my counselors, and a lot of interactions with my old friends from camp, I came to realize that that experience [at CSSSA] was a one-in-a-million experience, and it’s probably never going to happen again. But, what I learned is going to be with me forever, and the friendships I made are going to be with me forever. So, I learned to take all of that and proceed forward. And I left all the angst and anger behind me, and went on—for the better, I think.
I decided what better way to do that than make a movie. That seemed like it was the answer to everything. The real way to get my emotions out was to do what I love to do.
I called up my two best friends from CSSSA, Greyson and Caleb, and I said, ‘hey, this winter break, you guys want to come up here and make a movie?’ And they said, ‘yeah, I want to do that.’ So, through a series of Skype sessions with them, we developed a script. It was an original story, we we wanted to make it kind of weird, anything but the normal indie, teenage high school film. We decided we were going to do a film about a teenager who aspires to become a hand model, but really his passion is to play the ukulele. I mean, you know, it was nuts.
It was a lot of fun to make. They came up, we shot it over the course of five days. We used SFCasting for actors again, and really lucked out. We ended up calling it ‘Hands’. The first cut was 17 minutes which was a huge mistake—not to say the film was bad, if you have anything over 11 minutes, or under 50 minutes, most film festivals are just going to say ‘no.’
So, NFFTY said ‘no,’ which really put me off ‘cause I thought it was good enough to get into NFFTY. In the email they said, ‘We liked it, but it was too long.’ Which is weird ‘cause when I went, there was a kid who did a documentary that was 25 minutes, and it just went on and on and on. It was painful to watch. I still think ours shoulda got in. One day I may decide to return to it, but, for now, it’s just sitting on a shelf waiting to be edited.
It’s not that I make the films for the festivals, it’s just that I like to send my work out to festivals because I like the feedback, I like the people I meet, and I like travelling. I just think it’s one of the coolest things in the world, film festivals.
I decided after that to make films during the summer because the school year was so jam-packed with so many other things. I’m still going to make short films with my friends, but the real films where I pour a lot of my energy into, I will write them and craft them, get them ready during the school year, and then all the filming and editing is during the summer. And it’s worked out for me with ‘Need Gas’ and then this newest film, ‘The Tree of Gold’ worked out amazingly as well.
‘The Tree of Gold’ is my most recent film. I was sitting in Spanish class one day, and we were reading a story. It was just your average, intermediate-level Spanish, not too in-depth. We weren’t really thinking about the story so much as the words and how to translate them. I brought the text book home and a couple days later I found myself thinking about the story, and I was wondering, ‘Why am I still thinking about this? It was just a stupid story I read in class. What could be so great about it?’
What was the story?
It had been written by a Spanish author named Ana María Matute, and it’s a short story, about three or four pages. And I pulled it out and read it again in Spanish, for the story. My Spanish is pretty good, so I was able to pick my way through it. And I realized it had a lot of depth to it. It was a really, really beautiful story. I thought about it a lot for about a couple weeks. I decided I was going to make this film.
So, I translated it to the best of my ability, and set to work. I drafted a screenplay that went through many drafts. This was the first time I really focused on the screenplay because I wanted to have the story and how I was going to shoot it really locked down.
I’ve never been one for story boards because I think if I’m shooting my own film that I’ve written—and I’m a very visual person, whenever I read a sentence again, whatever I was thinking at the time just pops back into my head. I don’t need to draw out what I need... (laughing) I don’t think I’ve actually ever drawn a story board. But I always take the story seriously, and I took it very, very seriously.
It went through many drafts. The first draft people were like, ‘I don’t get this. This is way too experimental.’ If five people don’t get it, it doesn’t make sense. I figured, okay, and I picked through it again. It was nine or ten drafts before someone picked it up and read it, said, ‘Wow, this is actually a really good story.’
It was enough for me to think, ‘Okay, go. You can do this now.’ So, I took off, and through Bettina Devin, I got actors—this was the first film I did auditions for. At first I figured I was going to do all this by myself, and as it got closer to summer, and I was struggling to get everyone together, I figured this is not going to be anything close to being anything I want it to be if I do it by myself. So, I enlisted the help of a friend of mine, Ben, who was on the school newspaper with me in my sophomore year. He’s a talented photographer. He’d done some video work, but he’d never done a student film before. He jumped at the opportunity.
I set up all the locations, did all the planning, and finally the day came, and, honestly, those were two fantastic days. The two days we spent filming. While we were filming... with ‘Need Gas’ I felt rushed, and didn’t really have time to stop and breathe and think about the film.
But, while we were filming ‘The Tree of Gold’, there were times where I stopped and looked back, looked at everything around me, and realized, ‘This is a really good thing in production, and I was really excited about every single bit of it—which I think should happen if you’re making something that you enjoy. And I realized this is going to be a very beautiful film, something that I was very proud of.
I did some pickup shots the third day, some narration the fourth, and ‘voilà’, I had footage. I did my best to edit a draft by the end of the summer. It took me a little bit into the school year, but I finally got it done, at least for now. I’m very, very proud of it. I don’t know how many films I’m going to be able to say that about, but just a little effort that I put into everything really paid off. It’s one of those films that there’s certain points where I’m seeing on screen, and I’m thinking, ‘That’s exactly what was in my head when I was writing this down on paper.’
I just went nuts, and sent it to as many festivals as I could. Money was not an issue. I submitted it to Sundance, the Briton Independent Film Festival, NFFTY again, the San Francisco [International] Film Festival—as many as I could think of. So, that’s where I am now. I won’t know about them ‘til January or February.
Are you working on your film for next summer?
I’m throwing some ideas around. I’m always thinking about what my next big film is going to be—whether I go out and shoot a short film with my friends, or an idea just pops in my head, or read something. But, we’ll see. I’ve drafted a couple ideas, but nothing too in-depth yet.
Last year I brought the idea of a film class at Redwood up to my English teacher. He agreed, and I created promotional video in order to attract students. Fortunately we got enough signups, and I’m assistant teaching the class with the English teacher who is an art teacher this year.
You’ve got another year and a-half of high school. What are you thinking about post-high school?
I don’t know. (laughs) That’s the big question these days. I’ve heard so many different things. It’s honestly overwhelming. On one hand it’s, ‘Go to film school. It’s the best decision you’ll ever make.’ On the other hand, ‘It’s the worst decision you’ll ever make.’ There’s everything in between. (pause)
For me, ideally, since I know so much about the production and the art side of film—I’m a very well-rounded student. I’m good in other subjects as well—I might want to learn in college about the business side of film. Because if I’m going to pursue this for the rest of my life, I think that’s a smart decision. Northwestern has a radio, television, and film major where you can learn all about media, how it’s produced, why it’s produced, for whom it is produced. I think if I have all those in my tool belt by the time I graduate college, I will be ready to start my life as a filmmaker.
If you were in a different culture than ours, a different set of values, a different perception of you; and that culture supported you to pursue whatever particular passion you have, and money were no object, what would you be doing?
After high school?
No, now.
I’d be making a movie, or I’d be writing a movie, or watching a movie, or editing a movie. If money were no object, and there was nothing required or expected of me, that is what I would spend all of my time doing. If I wasn’t making a movie, I’d be researching a topic related to a movie idea I had, or reading something to better clarify a movie I’d just seen. Anything in and around film would take up the majority of my time. I would for sure (laughs) make a lot more films than I make now.
Is there anything you want to say around your philosophy of film?
There are a couple things I follow really strictly. I think a film should have some relation to something you know, or else there’s nothing authentic to it whatsoever. A film should be as little as possible at first, and then you add on to it—you’ve got the bare-bones of the story, the bare-bones of the character—at least in the pre-production stage.
And then you start adding from there as opposed to just throwing everything on the page and then trying to detract; because if you put the essence of something down on a page, it’s gonna be good, in my opinion. If you have a really solid story, and you start building off that story—think of it like a building, the story’s the foundation, and the building itself is the film—it’s gonna be a damn-good building.
I think film is an important thing. I’m not a cinephile, I don’t watch a lot of film, but it’s one of the best mediums we have for sharing an idea, or a concept, a movement, a sound. It’s the best tool we have to leave a lasting impact on the person, really make them think.
And, finally, I think there’s two types of films: Films that you walk out of the theater feeling good about yourself, a greater connection to yourself, it’s very human-centered. And there’s the type of film where you walk out of the theater feeling a greater connection to something, out there, regardless of what it is. And I think the second type of film, is the type of film that should be made, and the first type of film is made way too often.
You walk out of an exploding summer-blockbuster, feel adrenaline, but there’s no greater connection, whereas you walk out of a Hitchcock movie, a Kubrick film, there’s something just inexplicable about it. You go home and you lie awake at night and you’re wondering what it was about that film that was so awe-inspiring, and just so good. I think that’s the type of film that should be made more often, and those are the types of films I would like to make in the future.